Top 3 Priorities for Business Growth

In a rollercoaster economy it’s vital to work out where your market engagement activities work best and to make them work even harder for you.

I’m not just speaking to CEOs and business owners here; if you work inside an organisation and you’re seeing budgets being cut, projects paused, headcount frozen and bonuses slashed, this includes you.

Market engagement matters no matter the economic cycle, but right now what matters most is figuring out which tactics work best for you.

I’m going to dive into the why and how of that now.

First, it’s important to understand which environment you are operating in:

1. Your business is being cautious, scaling back, there is fear and investments are on pause.
2. Your business is doubling down on its strategies, seeking out opportunities to raise its profile, scaling up and empowering teams, actively looking for more deals, strengthening relationships, leveraging high value platforms to share insights and collaborating with others to create products and services that solve key problems right now.

Which one are you?

Focus on Commercial Outcomes and Value

Once you figure out your environment you can work out how you’re going to tackle your market presence. This will help you present value to your key stakeholders in terms of ROI – because commercial outcomes are king.

Have a look at previous and planned marketing and market engagement activity and run a ruler over how well they have worked.

Examples include awards, trade shows and conferences, social media, PR, advertising, SEO, podcasts, newsletters, EDMs, promotions, sponsorships and launches etc.

Let’s look at awards. Given the huge amount of work involved, how much businesses have you won as a result of winning awards?

Compare this to the value you might have gained from networking at awards events or hosting a table with your key customers.

Put the same lens over sponsoring and having a stand at conferences versus speaking or attending with a premium ticket and networking.

?You will likely find the latter in both cases is not only more effective for generating business, it’s significantly more cost effective.

?Look at cost to risk ratio

This is about understanding where you can reduce risk and maximise your returns.

For example, look at low cost activities such as newsletters.

Newsletters are free, efficient, highly targeted and can be extremely effective for keeping stakeholders in the loop on key projects, thought leadership and business initiatives.

For my business, my subscriber-only and LinkedIn newsletters are the most effective tools for engaging with clients, the people we want to work with and those who are interested in what we do. They also generate 95% of new business activities.

I have 15,000 LinkedIn connections and this activity alone, led to 1,400 people subscribing in one day and more signing up since.

The more valuable your content, the more people you will draw in.

If you work for an organisation, you might consider having a project specific newsletter and using it as a means of engaging with your stakeholders or even your team.

This vital communications helps people understand what you’re doing and why it matters.

Prove it

Once you know the most effective marketing activities, you need to prove their worth.

Almost nothing matters more in the budgeting process than aligning your value proposition with ROI.

Decision makers don’t care about podcast interviews, social media impressions or even media coverage. They care about revenue and pathways to revenue.

With all the analytics tools available today, proving the worth of your marketing activities has never been easier.

Work with sales teams to get hard figures, look at investments and align them with results.

Last year we helped a client with a key project and achieved a 10,000% ROI.

For another (smaller) client, by focusing on LinkedIn outreach, engagement and content, they were consistently getting 3 warm leads a week. That was more than they could handle so they had to hire another salesperson.

This is the type of data you need at your fingertips so you can demonstrate you are driving growth, revenue and commercial outcomes for your business. You’ll also make it really tough for them to cut your project, bonus or budget.

Finally, in May we’re getting together a small group of people who are keen to understand how AI presents risks and opportunities for brand and reputation. If you’d like to be included in this discussion, just sing out.

Nina

#leadership #management #sales #digitalmarketing #marketing