Last Updated on March 29, 2021 by Guest
Your business strategy determines the strength of your business.
Without knowing how to create an effective business strategy for your company, you risk burning all your resources for limited results.
With it, however, your business will gain vision, goals, and the means to achieve them.
Since figuring out a business strategy is always a challenge, we’ve included some items that every one of them needs to have in this article.
The Goal
Your goal should lie at the core of your business strategy.
Although asking yourself what you aim to achieve might seem overwhelming at first, you have to have a clear vision of where you want your business to go in order to succeed.
In that sense, setting goals is like a roadmap: it helps focus your attention on the steps you need to take to achieve the desired outcomes.
Your goals must be achievable, specific, and measurable, so you can re-evaluate them as the situation demands and track your progress over time.
For example, you can phrase your initial goal statement like this:
This company’s goal is to increase our net profit margin by 15% by the end of 2022. We will achieve this by closing 50000 sales.
Defining your goals like this is a crucial part of your business strategy because it gives you direction, spells out what you aim to accomplish, and gives you the tools to measure your success.
The ICP
The Ideal Customer Profile is invaluable for understanding who your target audience is and how to engage them.
An ICP is a detailed data-driven overview of your target audience’s relevant characteristics, and it describes which marketing tactics and leads you should use to win them over.
ICPs help you determine who you’re building your product or service for.
A profile like this helps you understand their goals and roles and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
To create your ICP, you need to take the following steps:
- List your best customers.
- Research their common attributes (size of operations, industry, growth rate, country of origins, etc.).
- Outline the opportunities and challenges they face.
- Document your findings.
According to a report by Evergage, 80% of marketers have seen a measurable increase in business from personalized campaigns.
If they know whether their ICPs are sales reps or digital marketing executives, they know what kind of personalized campaigns they should use.
Understanding the specific characteristics of your ideal customers is crucial for focusing your marketing efforts.
After you’ve defined your ICP, you have insight on who you’re building your product for, what they are interested in, and which sort of marketing strategy you’re going to get them.
The Deadline
Deadlines are critically important for achieving both long-term goals and short-term objectives.
They motivate you to complete goals every day, week, and month.
Well-defined deadlines encourage a smooth workflow and help keep complex projects with multiple stages on track.
When you’re crafting your business strategy, think of deadlines as critical measuring tools for getting things done.
They are specific metrics by which you can measure if a process was successful or not. This strengthens accountability in your team and keeps team members from deviating from goals.
On the other side of the spectrum, the costs of not having precise deadlines can be devastating for your business.
Missing deadlines almost always results in additional, unpredicted costs and a loss of productivity.
Additionally, your business won’t achieve its overarching goals in time.
That’s why defining deadlines and timeframes for specific tasks and stages is essential for achieving the goals you’ve laid out in your business strategy.
After you’ve defined them, they should be clearly communicated to all your employees.
The Financial Viability of Your Business Strategy
One of your primary responsibilities when writing a business strategy is to disclose its financial viability.
In other words, you have to determine the expenses that come with executing your business strategy and the profit projections if you succeed.
Having the financial aspect figured out allows you to track how much money you are spending exactly and helps you set realistic expectations.
Keep in mind that assessing your business strategy’s financial viability is not guesswork but a data-informed calculation.
When you set projections for expenses, break them down into weekly and monthly sections on a practical level. These sections should include both fixed and variable costs.
This allows you more control in tracking your spending and enables you to plan for situations when you have greater expenses than usual.
Since strategies often take time to produce measurable results, break profits expectations into bi-weekly and monthly sections.
A key part of your financial viability analysis is the break-even projection, which shows at which point your expenses start paying off and you’re in the green.
If you’re unfamiliar with calculating your business strategy’s financial aspects, have your accounting team review it with you.
The Backup Plan
Your business is always more at risk if you don’t have a backup plan.
A backup plan is an alternative strategy in case something prevents you from implementing your original one.
It doesn’t have to be completely different, but it must offer a fresh approach to achieving your goals. It’s helpful to view the backup plan as a lifeboat for your business.
If the strategy you laid out is not delivering the results you projected, switch to Plan B.
The backup strategy consists of identifying the problem, gathering new data, and following through with contingency protocols.
It’s important to remember that the backup plan’s purpose is to achieve the outlined goals differently but using what you’ve learned from the original business strategy.
Its most important attribute is that it must be quick to deploy as a solution to a problem.
For example, the worldwide Covid pandemic has disrupted countless businesses and their sales strategies. However, companies with contingencies in place, such as a detailed eCommerce strategy, stayed in business and even got new customers.
Another important consideration for the remote work era is the protection of your data.
Not complying to regulations and failing to implement security measures can make you face heavy fines.
That is not to mention the risk of having all your important data hijacked and your business brought to a standstill.
Even if you thoroughly plan your strategy, there will always be things outside your control, and having a backup plan can make all the difference.
Conclusion
Business success is never coincidental. The success of a company always reflects the quality of the planning.
In this post, we have discussed some of the most critical elements of a strong business strategy.
Even though creating a long-term strategy requires a lot of time and experience, you can start strong by addressing these points first. To succeed, it is vitally important that you master them.
Our Guest Contributor:
Ashley Wilson is a digital nomad and writer for hire, specializing in business and tech topics. In her self-care time, she practices yoga via Youtube. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys trying out new food. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.