#SME360Analysis: How The Best Businesses Position Themselves For Success In The New Year
A new year is one of the best times for businesses to position for success because it’s the time to assess what’s worked for the business in the past year, make plans to make more money, take more time off, and grow the brand’s influence in the market next year. As a business owner, if you want to achieve set milestones this year, you’ll be taking time away from the inner workings of your business over the next eight weeks to make those plans.
We want to see your business thrive this new year and so to help you on your journey, here are crucial steps for you to emulate from how the best businesses position themselves for success in a new year:
1.Take Your Brand Positioning More Seriously.
Brand positioning is vital to your business’s success this new year because it refers to the precise place where your business sits in your market or industry. It’s the summary of the stories that your customers tell about your business, the message that you put out and how you do what you do differently. The price you set, the services you offer and how you show up in the market all come together to give you your positioning.
Positioning isn’t just based on your business; it’s based on your business in relation to the rest of the market, in relation to other businesses. It is the opportunity to focus on what you can do to position your business relative to other businesses actively and do that; you do have to be paying attention. You’ve got to look at what other people are doing so you can do things differently.
This new year, if you’re tempted to start something new or add to your offerings, take a step back and ask yourself whether your intentions will reinforce your brand or dilute your focus. You need to know whether your new idea is a distraction or not, to know whether it’s going to confuse your customers and disrupt what’s already working when it comes to your brand. Until you know exactly what your business positioning is, you can’t know for sure whether you’ll confuse customers with a new offering and slow the growth of your business in the new year.
So with every decision, you make about the next year, make sure you’re reinforcing those answers, and then doubling down on your positioning.
2.Get Support From Diverse Sources.
All successful entrepreneurs know that the key to success lies more in human capital than financial resources. The best businesses position themselves for success by surrounding their brands with talented people who can contribute something different and of value to their companies.
There is the temptation to seek out people who are going at the same pace or in the same industry as you but this new year, work hard to resist this temptation. The problem with this is that you’ll only end up kind of doubling down on strategies that are just what you’re already doing. You don’t want to all have the same influencers. You don’t want to all be reading the same blogs or listening to the same podcasts. Move in the circles of people who are getting information and ideas and inspiration from different sources. Or at the very least, operating their business very differently from yours.
Even if you are shy or hide behind the excuse of “I don’t have time”, networking is vital for an entrepreneur, especially in the early stages. Create an agenda of the main events you want to attend in the year, and try not to miss them. Also consider cultivating past relationships and connecting with former colleagues, friends, and peers.
Seek out people who are moving at a faster pace than you. This way, you will find out what’s working in other industries and other business models, and you’re going to be able to get creative about what to do with that knowledge in your own business.
3. Keep Your Top Priority In View At All Times.
Now, one of the biggest benefits of planning, whether it’s for the month, the quarter, or the year, is that it becomes easier to spot your top priorities. These priorities will show themselves as specific goals. So if you look, at your next year’s plans or your next quarter’s plans, you’ll see some specific goals, hopefully, that you’ve set for yourself. The more specific, the easier it will be to know what’s important for you and your team to be focused on.
Goal setting is a great way to clarify your focus and keep your priority in view. And for the most successful businesses among us, goals also present an opportunity to push their comfort zone lines and take calculated risks to reposition themselves for success each new year. The more you are willing to stretch and challenge yourself, the more you will gain over the long term. Creating a plan for this growth in the form of long- and short-term goals, a business plan or even single targeted tasks can help your business reach new success levels.
Underlie your specific goals in line with the things that are really important to your business’s growth at any given time. Make sure to focus on making offers to new people who join your community and then making money off of that specific goal of growing your audience.
4. Keep Your Marketing Plans Distinct From Your Sales Plans For The New Year.
To position your business for success in this new year, you need to make sure that you have campaigns in place that serve two different, though related, purposes. One campaign should be for building awareness of your business and your brand (marketing plan), and the other should be wholly for converting sales (sales plan). Is the goal of your new tactic or strategy to build awareness about your brand? To grow your base? To build your audience? Or is it to convert people who know about you into buyers? Which is it?
Suppose you’re overlapping building awareness with converting sales. In that case, you’re probably not building as much awareness as you’d like to be doing, and you’re probably converting sales less than you would like to be doing, and no small business owner wants to be in that situation. Separating your marketing plans from your sales plans means that whatever blog post, podcast episode or emails you’re sending, you will know what the main goal is as well as when you hit that mark.
Building your audience gets people excited. It gets people engaged, it gets people sharing, commenting, and liking, but it doesn’t generally get people buying. When you want to shift gears and focus on sales, you really have to be focused on giving people a clear call to action. You’re not just posting pictures of the work you create, but you’re asking them to buy. Make that call to action really clear, and then back that call up with natural urgency.
5. Plan How to Step Back While Letting Your Business Grow.
I know many people are going to put delegation and team-building on their new year business plans, but it’s not enough to just hire people to ease your workload. You have to offload responsibility and quit obstructing your brand’s progress as well. What I mean is responsibility for important business indicators, the things that really make your businesses work.
This is not just about the individual tasks that need to get done. It’s also about delegating a higher level of responsibility. Responsibility for something that is key to the way the business runs. Now, when you plan for that type of team management, you’re not just offloading tasks. You’re also stopping yourself from being the bottleneck for decision-making and strategy in your business.
You’re creating a team that knows how to create value for your organisation and giving them space and responsibility to do that, even without your direction. That then allows you to step back and still watch your business grow. Plan for time off is such a way that your business continues to grow in your absence. Make this time that the company is growing without your physical presence.
Being able to delegate that level of responsibility and let your talented team members take charge of your business’s important metrics is one of the best ways to position your business for groundbreaking success this new year.
Conclusion
Ultimately, innovation is essential for any organization so review your processes, products or services and identify the main areas for improvement if you haven’t done this already. Make it your goal to find innovative solutions for areas that posed the toughest challenge to your business last year.
Don’t be afraid to take risks and do new things. Small changes to your marketing, sales or promotion strategy can drastically alter the direction of your business, position it for success this new year and give it the boost it needs to thrive.
