Business Ideas & Updates

As always, ‘failing to plan, is planning to fail’. In today’s rapidly changing, increasingly competitive commercial environment, there has never been a better time to revisit your business plan and get back on top.

Business success in 2012, as it has been in years gone by, is all about having a solid understanding of your customers, your industry and your competition. Only today, faced with uncertain financial times and global competition, it’s crucial to analyse, assess and plan your way forward… its business planning, and it is the only way to succeed.

Business planning provides a proven framework to collect crucial information about your customers, your industry and competition. But it’s not something that can be done once then forgotten. To be successful you need to regularly look at your customers’ needs – to understand why they connect with your business and how they want products and services delivered. Then you need to look at current industry pressures and maintain an eye on your competition.

Global and Economic Pressures

There’s no doubt that the global financial crisis has had a long-term impact on business and consumers. Customers are attuned to purchasing goods and services at bargain basement prices, and many businesses are happy to deliver on these terms, just to survive.

This situation is further compounded by the Internet, which provides the power to research and compare similar products and services from around the world online – and buy from alternative markets as well.

The Power of a Business Plan

You may feel that in the face of the current economy and with the threat of global competition, your customers have the upper hand. However there is a way to fight back. Business planning provides a methodical process to define your customers’ needs, your product placement and marketing approach. A comprehensive business plan will analyse:

• Your customers
• Your industry
• Your competition

Having analysed these three integral factors, you’ll have a greater understanding of the global industry, be aware of your competition and be ready to reconnect with customer purchasing preferences. Then you can develop and deliver an appropriate strategy to win your customers’ loyalty and keep it.

Know Your Customer

Many business owners believe they know their customers and can’t understand why they’re faced with losing market share and declining repeat business. Customer research, collected by an objective professional as part of a business plan, will provide you with accurate information about what your customers want in today’s environment.

Armed with a clear knowledge, your marketing team can tweak your product then get to work on promoting the brand in a concise, compelling and effective way.

Understand Your Industry

The current strength of the Australian dollar has made imported products less expensive and placed increased pressure on many domestic industry sectors. To survive in this economy, you need an objective assessment of your industry that includes:

• The size, potential and structure of your industry
• Political forces
• Emerging market trends
• Imminent changes to industry

Stay Ahead of Your Competition

Uniqueness is key when it comes to retaining a strong presence in a tight market, yet most customers will believe your business is one of many to offer the same products or services. That makes it essential to differentiate your brand – and to communicate your product’s uniqueness in a way that will prompt your customers to buy.

By understanding your competition and your customers you can do this. Additionally, you’ll be better placed to identify possible threats, opportunities and strategies your competitors may choose to implement. 

There is so much information on this topic.  A great article by Bryan Yeager demystifies much on this topic.

“Personalization” continues to be a prominent topic in a number of different circles: marketing, publishing, eCommerce, social networking, and search. It’s no wonder why: personalization helps boost response rates and profitability in cross-media campaigns, helps marketers drive conversion on their Websites & landing pages, and much more.

Wikipedia provides a very broad definition of personalization, which I do like: “using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals.” Specific to the groups that I am referring to, I believe that personalization can be more precisely defined as leveraging data to deliver relevant content to specific individuals.

That’s still pretty broad; what kind of data? what kind of content? what channels are being used? With this many constituencies looking to use personalization in their own ways to meet specific goals, those answers can range extensively. Furthermore, when these groups end up talking to each other about personalization, it can cause confusion and miscommunication. To clear the air, so-to-speak, I wanted to shed some light on the different ways personalization is being employed by these different groups.

Cross-media Direct Marketing: You’re likely familiar with the personalization model for cross-media campaigns: a digitally-printed direct mail piece (or e-mail) with variable text and graphic elements and a personalized URL, which links to a personalized microsite with variable text and graphic elements, often highlighting the recipient’s name in some way. Personal and demographic data is primarily used to drive the personalization in these applications. Depending on the client/campaign, additional data may be used for more granular, relevant content.
Digital Marketing: Personalization is popular with digital marketers. E-mail is a popular spot for personalization: according to a 2011 study by marketing technology provider Alterian, 72% of marketing professionals surveyed reported using personalization for their e-mail campaigns. E-mail marketing complexity ranges from mass blasts to segmentation to real-time individualization, typically using customer data and purchase history data to make recommendations. Another prominent personalization tactic for marketers is retargeting, which involves serving ads to a specific user after they have left a Website in efforts to raise brand awareness, recapture their attention, and drive people back to their Website.

eCommerce: Business-to-consumer eCommerce was and still is a center of innovation in Web personalization, driven by Amazon.com and other eTailers looking to provide a custom-tailored experience for each individual user in hopes of getting them to buy more. For these sites, personalization often comes in the form of a recommendation engine, which tracks your browsing habits, shopping cart, wish list, reviews, purchase history, and other facets to deliver personalized recommendations on what the system thinks you would like. It should be noted that digital marketing goes hand-in-hand with eCommerce; real-time individualized e-mail marketing is common for eCommerce companies, and retargeting helps bring back shoppers that left the conversion funnel.

Publishing: For print publishing, personalization often means mass customization, specifically in the print-on-demand model for books, where eCommerce orders trigger specific books to be printed, often in one-off fashion. Services like MagCloud and Time Inc’s Mine Magazine endeavor represent personalization efforts for magazines. On the Web and in digital media, personalization is geared more toward delivering relevant content based on an individual’s specific interests or preferences. Sometimes meeting this objective requires readers to input specific information about their tastes; other times, information like a Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader account may be analyzed to assess your interests and deliver content based on who you’re friends with, who you follow, or what news you already read. A great example of this method is exhibited through Zite, a “personalized digital magazine” mobile app.

Social Networking: Social networks are rife with different types of individuals’ data, making them ideal for personalization. Social networks typically employ personalization to deliver relevant content feeds from a user’s friends or connections on a network, as well as to deliver highly-targeted display advertising. For content delivery, networks may use algorithms to interpret connections, interactions, and profile information among users and deliver content based on what it believes is most relevant to each user. For advertising, networks typically act a facilitator between advertisers and users, presenting key profile characteristics of users that advertisers can choose to target. Facebook generated over $3.5 billion in revenue through this type of advertising.

Search: Search engines have always utilized algorithms to determine the display results of a user’s query, but these algorithms have recently started to take user information, such as profile or location data, into consideration before displaying results. Just recently, Google stepped up its game in this area, launching “Search, plus Your World“, which integrates a user’s Google+ data into everyday search queries. Advertising is a critical component to search, and generated over $35 billion in revenue worldwide for Google in 2011. Up until now, most search ads have been delivered based on the content of users’ search queries, but location information and even personal information are starting to be used to deliver more targeted search ads to users.

At its core, all that is needed to enable personalization is data, content, and a mechanism to have one drive the other. As has been covered, applying personalization for different use cases has a substantial impact on the type of data being used, the content that is being tied to that data, and the types of delivery mechanisms that enable that personalization. Understanding these differences and requirements for each application can help different stakeholders communicate more effectively when pursuing personalization, as well as open the door to new opportunities

http://thedigitalnirvana.com/2012/01/understanding-different-applications-for-personalization/

• customer enquiries
• split runs in newspapers
• sales monitoring
• monitoring retail store traffic
• surveys

Utilise these low-cost ways to get back in touch with your important clients and really understand what’s important to them today.

This first important step will get you business on its way to remaining competitive, whereby you can maintain your customer contact and also give them more what they want without the guess work. This could lead to making small changes in your service and or product to meet their needs accordingly or find a brand-new market opportunity.

Take the lead today and if this sounds a little complicated, don’t worry. Your Unity Management consultant can help you design a marketing plan and set up an integrated sales program that will measure the results, and assist in data analysis. They can also show you ways to actually improve the conversion rate from initial enquiry to your ads, through to a sale, so as to further increase the return on your advertising investment. Start today and get the edge.