As the saying goes, there’s no time like the present. When the end of the year rolls around, the...
As the saying goes, there’s no time like the present. As the new year begins, the best way to prepare for business growth in 2018 is to complete a review of the current strategies that have brought about success. Being proactive about your business’s short and long-term goals is essential to creating a blueprint for the new year that will lead to development and increased revenue.
If you are a business owner seeking to grow your business, you will need to cultivate a marketing program that includes strategic planning, an annual budget update and definitive, measurable objectives. This way, you will have a detailed game plan to share with the entire company, which will ensure that every employee is working towards the same goal.
Our team has put together the top three strategies to grow your business in 2018. Throughout January, we will be releasing each of our three strategies to help you as you begin to plan for this year.
Strategy #1: Create a Profile of Your Best Clients
Our first suggested strategy for business growth is to create a profile—or buyer persona—of your target audience that will allow you to attract, qualify and sell to these potential customers based on personalization.
Every successful marketing strategy revolves around a semi-fictional understanding of your ideal customer. In the new year, you will want to escape the sea of marketing and advertising sameness, differentiating your business from all of the rest. By taking charge of your business’s strategies, you ultimately have the power to decide the criteria of your top clients.
When creating the buyer persona, ask yourself these questions:
- What industries are represented in your base?
- How did you acquire them? (i.e. Personal referrals, social networking, trade groups, etc.)
- What are your most profitable accounts?
- Do you provide a high ROI delivering the account’s needed products/services?
By asking the right questions, you can determine which characteristics define your best customers. Furthermore, you can recognize which customers may not, in fact, be worthy prospects. By employing personalization to your marketing strategies, you can customize your website, sales techniques and social channels to reflect a group’s specific needs. And, according to a report from Venture Beat, between 70-94% of marketers have found personalization to be the key to marketing success.
Armed with these target buyer persona or personas, your marketing team can go about creating content that will engage those prospective clients. Depending on the lifecycle stage of your buyer, you will want to produce and deliver the content differently. Ultimately, personalizing your marketing content will advance many elements that lead to increased sales, such as your website’s click-through rates and keyword optimization.
With your top client profiles in place, check back next week for our second top-rated strategy for success in 2018.
