5 Areas of Focus to Kick-Start Your Business. Opportunity Is Everywhere.
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
As marketers, we look for new opportunities to support our customers, prospects, targeted industries and internally, our sales team. Below are five key areas for you to revisit this time of year. You may discover new opportunity that impacts your business in the short- and long-term.
Your customers
Your customer will change, actually they have already changed. Think about how this pandemic and the environment has impacted their business. Consider what they must be experiencing. Call your customers. Check in on your customers. Get to know your customer, again. This is time well spent for long term business. Not sure how to reach out? Let them know you are concerned about their well-being, and that you care about their business. And then sit back and listen to their responses. To help you get started ask:
What they are seeing from their customers?
How might their marketplace shift?
How will their customers buy?
Also, research and stay current with industry news.
Discover the Opportunity.
What’s in your bag?
How do your products and services fit into new, and future, way of life? Think about local schools. Elementary and high school teachers are developing new projects for their students. Perhaps the kids have a project to create a special design. Can your business offer services to help the students design, order and print the project?
How will doctors’ offices ensure that people are six feet away? Offer a package to a hospital or doctor’s office that includes banner signs, floor signage, flyers, face masks and more. We’ll be social distancing for a long time. How can your company support the community in the near and longer term?
Discover the Opportunity.
Partner. Partner. Partner.
This is a perfect time to meet with your current partners. Just like talking to your customers, you should engage with these associates the same way and ask the same questions. Perhaps now is the time to revisit that co-sponsored program that will benefit not only your two companies but really improve your customer’s business. The same approach works at the local level, within a sales territory.
This is also a good time to start discussions with potential partners. Again, by collaborating you may find that there is a perfect offering utilizing your company’s wide format services and another’s textile capabilities. The schools, hospitals and doctors’ offices may be in need of these offerings.
Discover the Opportunity.
Keep your friends close, your competitors closer.
Now is the time to evaluate your top 3-5 competitors. How are they positioned in your market? What are they doing better or worse than you? Have they altered their marketing with new tactics, new partnerships? Are they taking market share?
Analyze this information. Determine what you will do with this information. Create a strategy and most important, implement the plan.
Discover the Opportunity.
Where has the money gone?
Your customers may have budget through Q2, June 30th. Q3 and Q4 budgets will be limited. This is the one area that really isn’t changing. Budgets get cut the second half of the year. You know this, you’ve experienced this. Use your skill to reach out to your clients to look for new ways to support their business today and in the future.
This is your strength. You have recommended creative programs to get new business. To get the attention of a client. What has worked? What is working now? Build on that.
Discover the Opportunity.
The new opportunities are endless. Study and then meet with your local municipalities, movie theater owners, manufacture operations managers and health club administrators. How can you help them not only survive, but prosper? This is what you have always done. Now is the time to regroup and focus on your business opportunities.
I’d love to hear the opportunities you have discovered. Take care.