Want to enhance your business strategy to drive further business growth and increase ROI? Don't worry! Here are 5 expert tips to take your small business to the next level.
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| Business Strategy |
How to Enhance Your Business Strategy: 5 Expert Tips to Boost your Business to the Next Level
Are you finding it an uphill battle to increase your enterprise value? Do you feel like your company’s future is at stake?
We feel you.
In a world where business teams are stressed out to the max, time-starved, and jittery from drinking 25 cups of coffee, a quick-and-dirty template of a business strategy is like a panacea. It seems like the solution to all our problems.
But it only introduces much more.
A business strategy devoid of any research or planning can lead to hasty decisions that make the enterprise value take a nose-dive. Similarly, hiring a Chief Yoga Officer just because “the template said it was good for employee morale” or on faulty assumptions can be costly.
So, what should you do? How can you enhance your business strategy to drive further business growth and increase ROI?
Let’s find out!
What Exactly Is a Business Strategy?
Before we climb on the Fix-It Train, let’s break down what business strategy is. To put it simply, a business strategy is a set of goals, plans, and actions that outline the ways in which a business can compete and secure a competitive edge in a particular market.
A business strategy is the backbone of your business and the roadmap to business success, higher customer retention, lower employee churn, and more significant ROI. So, even a slight breakdown in this strategy can cause a loss in business value and drive customer churn.
Why Is the Business Strategy so Important?
As mentioned above, a business strategy is essential because it allows you to map out your destination and the steps you’ll need to take to reach it. By having a business strategy and a clear vision of the heights you want to climb, you won’t be fumbling like a blind fish in water full of hungry business sharks.
But if you’re still not convinced, here are some reasons why a business strategy is so important for your business:
- It allows you to discover your exact business objectives, which can help you determine the exact resources you need, the people you need to hire, and what you need to do to reach your goal.
- It helps you narrow down weaknesses and strengths, which can allow you to improve on them, leading to an increase in business value.
- It can increase efficiency and effectiveness, which can speed up business activities. For example, if you know you’ll be hiring independent contractors to write code for you, then finding relevant and legal pay stub creators beforehand could be beneficial.
- It can help you gain a competitive advantage, which can allow you to gain a larger market share and catapult your business into the limelight, increasing click-through rates and customer retention.
5 Tips to Enhance Your Business Strategy
Too many people aren’t aware of or simply don’t know the activities that will provide the best results, and this is true for both upper management and the employees. So, they simply opt not to waste time on “dreaming up business scenarios” and focus on reality.
In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, more than 85 percent of leadership teams spend less than an hour each month on business strategy, and 50 percent don’t even spend an iota of their time on strategy at all.
And of those who do spend some time planning business strategies, more than 67 percent of them fail to execute those strategies, and around 61 percent struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and implementation.
So, what should you do? Here are some tips to enhance your business strategy:
1. Develop an Actionable Strategy
In order to make the most out of your business strategy, you should first make it actionable. This means that your business strategy must:
- Have a trackable monthly or weekly action plan (including goals and objectives for that specific period).
- Utilize predictive KPIs to check weekly or monthly business strategy performance.
- Feature cascading goals that affect every business department and allow employees to understand how their best efforts can yield higher business returns.
- Promote a productive workplace culture.
- Ensure weekly or bi-monthly check-ins with various departments in the business.
- Be implemented on an annual scale.
By creating an actionable strategy, you will be able to promote processes that increase team productivity and effectiveness and increase your ROI and public exposure, which will catapult click-through rates and customer retention.
2. Conduct a Competitive Analysis
If your current business strategy is failing you, conduct a competitive analysis. Check out who’s doing what you do but better and who’s selling what you do, but even better. Why is their business model working? What are they doing that you aren’t?
Your competitors will act as your lens—one that allows you to read the actual writing on the wall rather than just look at it. Comparing your business to your competitors will allow you to determine your strengths and weaknesses and focus on them.
3. Consider Using a Customer Management System
Customers are the blood of your business. If you stop receiving this essential life nutrient, then frankly, your business will die. Similarly, if you don’t provide your customers with adequate attention, you’ll lose them as well.
So, to satisfy your customers and enrich their experiences with your business, you should use customer management systems like Salesforce that will allow you to answer customer queries while tracking marketing campaigns, collaborating and sharing files, and closing more deals.
4. Reduce Business Risks
Risks are an inevitable aspect of running a business, and it’s quite impossible to control everything, but you can limit external and internal threats to your business by:
- Hiring significant staff
- Protecting your data
- Limiting any loans
- Diversifying your products and services
- Buying insurance
- Limiting high-risk customers
- Setting aside financial reserves for times of crisis.
You should include all the above-mentioned measures in your business strategy to reduce customer churn, increase revenue, ROI, and click-through rates, as well as employee retention and positive customer feedback.
5. Leverage Social Media
Another way to develop an excellent business strategy is creating profiles on all major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Not only will these profiles allow you to better market your products and services but also interact more personably and transparently with customers.
Through your social media accounts, you could build rapport and trust between your company and your customers which could help you increase ROI and customer retention, which could help scale the business.
The Bottom Line
A business strategy is like preparing for a paper. If you don’t prepare or create notes beforehand, you’ll only receive a lousy grade and end up where you didn’t want to in the first place. And in the business world, a lousy grade is synonymous with a company shut-down.
So, to make your business scale, increase customer retention, decrease employee churn, and catapult your ROI, use the tips mentioned earlier to come up with a decent business strategy that is actually going to turn your fantasies into reality and your ideas into action.