By now, you know it by heart: a business can not exist without sales, and business strategy is the lifeblood of any company because it gets the business the deals it needs to survive financially speaking.’ This is a fundamental truth of the business world today, but did you know that having the right business strategy can help your business sell more?
This is so that your company can build a sustainable competitive advantage and generate the sales necessary to survive in your industry both now and in the future. The business strategy aligns your company’s objectives, mission, and goals with its business processes. You will learn all about these strategies in this article.
Sell your customers benefits that will improve their lives, not products or services.
Whether you like to hear it or not, customers will buy the product or service your business sells if they perceive that it offers them benefits that will change, improve, or transform their lives. It makes sense: your customers work hard for their money and would not buy a product or service that created more problems for them or introduced more pain into their lives.
Why would they? After all, nobody wants more pain and misery in their lives, especially not your customers. Suppose you’re going to sell products and services to your customers. In that case, you need to list the benefits that the people in your target market are looking for and incorporate the solutions that will offer those benefits in the products and services your company makes. That is the only way your company will survive in the short and long term.
Know your customer
It may seem obvious, but many businesses fail because their management team and the owner need to know their customers’ likes, dislikes, or buying personalities. You can ensure that your company is not one of these companies by creating a buyer persona or a psychological profile of the average person in your target market.
You create this persona by defining their age (people of different age groups buy other products and services), and their gender (men purchase various products and services than women do). If they have kids (families have different buying needs and preferences mainly because of the wants and needs of their kids.
Moreover, you also need to remember that your buyer persona will be different for a family with a baby, versus a family with teenagers), their annual income (obviously people who make more buy more expensive – and usually higher quality – products and services because they can afford to spend more), and their educational attainment (people with more education buy different products and services than people with less education for obvious reasons).
Read more: Best Businesses In the USA.
Identify and define the problem that the product or service is solving clearly.
You need to do this because no one will buy your company’s products or services if they don’t clearly understand the benefits they will deliver or the problems the products or services will solve for them.
You should do some primary and secondary market research to identify these problems if they are not completely obvious to you. Customers will only give you one chance to make a good impression, so make it count! For the record, primary research is field research.
You go to where your customers are and have them fill out surveys asking them the benefits they want from your company’s products or services and the problems they wish your company’s products or services to solve. Secondary research occurs when you read the study published by people and organizations who have gone out and done primary research.
This research category is frowned upon in business because it is not considered accurate, precise, or relevant to business owners. Additionally, the research and information these publications contain may need to be updated. You don’t need obsolete research to base the design and function of your products and services on because doing so will put your business out of business!
Develop your competitive advantage.
It should be clear to you as a business owner that the products and services your company makes and sells create the competitive advantage your business needs to survive in the short and long term. If this is not obvious to you, you need to do something else for a living because you will never make it as a business owner.
The competitive advantage is why your customers will want to buy the products and services they need from your company and not from your competitor in the first place. Therefore, the competitive advantage has to be specific and offer customers certain results and benefits they value.
For example, suppose you own a computer business. In that case, you could come up with a word processor program that is easier for people to use than MS Word, which always has professional templates which are easy to customize, and will always impress their customers. Such a word processor program would be sure to outsell MS Word.
Content and social media exist for you to connect to those in your target market.
While you may love to read Facebook for the exciting posts your friends post and the news articles which have an interesting slant regarding world problems, you can use Facebook to connect to people in your target market whom you would never be able to reach using traditional marketing.
The best part of Facebook is that most business advertising is free! So why not use it? Facebook (and other social media platforms) were made for content sharing, and that is what marketing in the digital era is all about. So you could create a killer marketing strategy for creating unique, awe-inspiring content on various social media platforms and have a leg up over the competition by that alone!
The best part about social media platforms is that you can link your website and blog to them – this will draw customers and website traffic like never before!
Summary
So now that you know some of the business strategies in terms of marketing and general business processes and design that work, you would be a fool to refrain from using them in your corporate strategy today!
