x
x
One thing is certain: a proper business strategy gets you closer to achieving your company’s objectives. These in turn have to be aligned with the company’s vision and mission. In other words, every single element must be perfectly aligned, just like the gears of a watch.
Therefore, the strategy has to be intelligently thought out and based on relevant information. In fact, a solid strategy will ease your decisions as well as your day-to-day work. If you recently entered the market with your new company, the following tips help taking the first steps to develop a successful strategy. If, on the other hand, you already have years of experience, the following points help you rethink and improve your current strategy:
At first, having clear business objectives is one way to facilitate the development of a strategy. A proven technique to set such objectives is SMART. Any goal you set needs to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound. Let’s take a practical example: ‘I want to increase the traffic on my website by 20% within 3 months using a maximum budget of EUR 10,000.-‘. It might take some effort to implement the SMART criteria, but setting clear goals is an essential part of a strategy that works.
If you keep an eye on your business objectives, it will be easier to maintain the focus of your strategy and even compare the results with what you set out to achieve.
Secondly, know your strengths and weaknesses. A simple brainstorming exercise could do the trick: SWOT is a classic business planning technique to develop a strategy analysing the factors strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This way, both the positive and negative aspects can be taken into account when planning your actions.
The third key element is specifying the target group. To be able to create a realistic portrait of the customer you are addressing or plan to address, inter alia the following questions should be considered: How does this person buy? Where and why? What do they usually purchase? Any information is useful in understanding a target person or group. Simple factors such as geographic area, socio-economic status or culture are sometimes underestimated, but still relevant to the way an individual acts – and buys.
The fourth and equally important point when developing a proper strategy is to observe the competition. Don’t forget, you are not alone. Create a list of your main competitors, their products, their prices, and their marketing techniques. As mentioned before, it is important to know what distinguishes you from the rest of the industry so that you can always point out your unique selling propositions (USP) and further develop your company.
Generally, any strategy needs time to bear fruit and companies usually set theirs up for medium or long-term periods. However, our economy is subject to constant change. To keep your strategy relevant, it is necessary to frequently review trends. The question is: How?
Market research solutions as well as campaign and marketing trend analysis can help determine if the actions taken are working. While outsourcing these services may be an option, there are other convenient methods to keep the constant control over the process yourself – wherever you are, whenever you want.
For example, the use of advanced and at the same time userfriendly tools to monitor the media offer you a great potential. TV, radio, and web TV monitoring systems are the perfect solution for gaining valuable insights about your company’s visibility, what is going on in the industry or what your competitors are up to, in real time.
But not only what is being broadcast delivers great insights, innovative monitoring solutions also show you how the content is being received by the audience. So called sentiment analysis is capable of analysing the tonality of words in mentions about your company, brand, or any other topic of your interest – an in-depth understanding of what is being said in the media.
At eMedia Monitor we believe that data-driven decisions are a key aspect of business success. That’s why we offer you the most innovative technology to stay up to date with what’s being said in the media about the topics that matter to you. In addition, we have launched our new ad campaign monitoring solution to monitor advertising campaigns in real time. To take a closer look yourself and find out how to benefit from these solutions, you can book your free demo anytime:
You might also be interested in:
The advantage of knowledge: What you are missing out on if you don‘t monitor the media
[[ podcast-audiocontent-monitoring could not be found. ]]
