A business strategy is an effective plan to reach your business goals by defining the tactics you will apply to work towards it. Creating a business strategy is a time-consuming task as you need to work on strategies that are in line with your business goals. While that is said, every business has different goals and visions. Applying the same strategy for all businesses is not a practical solution. There is no one shoe that fits all the businesses; hence you need to study your business thoroughly to understand and implement strategies that would work best for the business.
Here are a few examples of different business strategies that would help you formulate the appropriate strategy for your own business or the one you are working for.
1. Cross-Sell Products:
Some companies focus on selling multiple products to the same customers. This works well for product-based firms. If a customer shops more products from you then their cart value increases. With each customer increasing their cart size even a little, your business will significantly gain enough profits without acquiring new customers.
2. Improving Customer Retention:
This is implied, getting new consumers can be tricky but retaining the existing one is generally far easier. Your strategy should be to focus on identifying the key tactics that will help in retaining your customers. Focus on getting customer feedbacks and address your customer’s concerns. People tend to stick with a company only if they get a quick response from the service team.
3. Innovate Product or Service:
If your company is technology-based, then you need to distinguish yourself by creating ground-breaking products. This is the only way you can stay ahead of the competition and attract customers towards your products. A classic example of this is the cellphone industry where every month you find different brands launching new devices with maximum features and competitive prices to grasp the market. Companies that are in this field cannot survive if their innovation is not up to the mark. The research team needs to be strongly placed, for the company to succeed, as such markets are extremely volatile and competitive.
4. Improve Customer Service:
This strategy applies to every business. Being customer-driven is what your company needs, to make it successful in the long run. Quality customer service goes a long way and helps in retaining your existing customers. Also, focusing on customer issues will give you good inputs to further improve your existing products. Focus on online support such as chatbox in the website itself along with an effective call center. Record the conversations of the service representative with the customer to understand the satisfaction level of your customer and to improve the quality of customer service.
5. Launch New Products to Grow Sales:
If your existing products are not earning you enough profits, then you need to change your strategy. Invest in research and development so you can innovate new products that would be successful in terms of gaining profitability. As your brand value increases and customers trust your products, selling new products to them would not be that tricky.
6. Showcasing Product Superiority:
This is a common strategy which many companies apply and this will work for almost every business. When two similar products are available on the market, then customers need an edge to select your product over yours. Your marketing strategy can help to showcase that your product is superior to others.
7. Acquiring Young Companies to Grab the Market:
Some companies are buying out their competitors by merging with young companies. This is a common strategy that many large companies use to get a grasp of the market and kill all the competition. Such Fortune 500 companies also show their presidency in the market where they did to compete previously by acquiring new companies which will help them retain the users of the product or service.
8. Technological Advancement:
If you have a technological advantage over your competitors, then you can use that for marketing in order to achieve better sales. Improved technology means better productivity and an edge over your competitors is good enough to dominate the market if you strategize your marketing smartly. To give your company the technological advancement, you will have to hire employees with unique skills dedicated to give your company technological advantage or acquire a smaller company so you can gain access to their technology and use it for your business advancement.
For startups, hiring many employees can become expensive, hence technology such as algorithms and Artificial intelligence implementation can help in finishing many tasks effectively that cuts the need to hire excessive staff. If you own a startup, then use such technological advancements for the advantage of your business. Learn more about artificial intelligence if you want to work for a startup as most startups are implementing such a model in their business.
9. Pricing Strategies:
Your business can succeed only if you have a strategy to attract the target audience, so they choose your products over your competitors. As discussed above, you can do this by using technological advantage but if that is not feasible then you will need a fresh approach to bring in new customers. An easy and effective strategy to do this in most businesses is pricing their products lower than the competition. Low prices do not mean you compromise on the quality or else your customer retention will go down. In order to keep your prices low, you will have to focus on selling a much higher volume of products as the profit margins will be low.
Another pricing strategy that a few companies implement is by pricing the product in a range that ordinary customers cannot afford. If that is the case then your profit margin per product will be quite high hence you can afford to sell low product volume, still, you will make good profits. Remember, when you charge such high prices, your product needs to maintain exclusivity.
10. Increasing Sustainability:
You can launch your business aiming to increase business sustainability. This will help in saving costs as the main objective of your business would be to reduce energy costs and the company’s footprint by implementing a recycling program. You can spread on this message to your customers as people have become cautious about their carbon footprint and they would prefer choosing a company that is environmentally friendly to make a difference.
Any business strategy you formulate should be communicated to every department of your company so that all your employees work in sync towards achieving the company’s goals.