Effective marketing is a key driver of success for most businesses. Without the right marketing tools, it can feel as though you’re talking to an invisible audience. When you finally do find a winning formula to help you capture your audience, it’s easy to become complacent. On the contrary, you should be continually looking for opportunities to grow and expand.
If you want to successfully expand, it may be time to think about what you can do to make your products or services more appealing to new audiences. Understanding the people you’re trying to attract by doing market research is a good place to start. In doing so, you’ll also be able to identify their problems, allowing you to solve them and win their business in the future.
Solve Problems Creatively
New research by Hubspot has shown that making customers more successful is key to business growth. One effective way of making them successful would be to identify their problems and see what creative solutions you can provide so that they get maximum value from your products or services. For example, if you were a brand like Bosch and attempting to expand your reach to professional chefs, you may want to design an oven that could cook food in record time as a way of making them more successful.
Next, if your business can master the art of solving problems in design-oriented ways, it could be easier to expand your market. A way to do this would be by using design thinking, which is a methodology that focuses on solutions. Your business website would be a good place to apply design thinking as a means of solving prospective customer’s problems without knowing the question first.
For example, if you had a car sales business and wanted to expand your reach to young professionals, you would need to conduct research to understand what their core needs are. In the event that you discovered that they’re interested in purchasing primarily used cars, including those cars in a banner across the top of the site could help them find the car of their dreams faster, without having to do any digging. In doing so, you’re creating solution-based designs which could result in better outcomes for you and your customers.
Creating quality and valuable content on both your website and social platforms is another way to solve problems creatively. By positioning yourself as an expert in your industry, you’re more likely to gain trust and sell your products and services to new people. Click To Tweet A practical example would be writing blog posts on nutrition and healthy living if you sell organic wholefoods. If these posts are well optimized, prospects may come across them through search engines, sign up for your newsletter if they find your content valuable, and eventually buy your products when you begin marketing to them.
Ensure Effective Leadership
At the center of any business that is able to scale or expand are innovative products and services. However, before a business makes shifts in its products and how they’re marketing, there is usually a current and culturally-aware leader who initiates such changes. Having said that, you should have leaders who have cultural and emotional intelligence on your marketing team if you want to expand.
When evaluating your marketing team, look for qualities such as individuals who are socially aware, knowledgeable, and action-driven. It is also crucial that leaders instill such characteristics in other team members. In doing so, you may see a better output and results from the marketing team as a whole.
The Global Leadership Forecast 2018 explored ways in which leadership has changed over the past 10 years. Their findings identified the need to develop leadership potential earlier on in careers by developing the employees who worked below senior levels. Consider implementing such practices in your organization, as it could help you develop creative, as well as unconventional, leaders who have what it takes to scale up your marketing efforts.
Be Adaptable
Change is inevitable, and this is especially applicable when it comes to running a business. In an ever-evolving world, being able to adapt to the changing needs of customers is critical to business growth. Without strategic adaptability, tapping into new markets could prove challenging.
A business being more adaptable is about being able to update your services to meet the unique needs of your target customer base. It is also about keeping your customers engaged by staying up to date with industry trends and navigating your marketing efforts in that direction. If, for instance, your business provides headphones and wireless, updating your product range may be a good decision to make.
Some companies struggle with adaptability because they become stuck in conventional and familiar ways. In doing so, it’s easy to fail to see what customers need, and consequently lose out on prospective ones. However, by embracing flexibility and being open to continuously improve your strategy, you may find it easier to grow with present customers and capture the attention of new ones.
Improve Your Branding
Branding is a critical component of successfully expanding your market reach and grabbing the attention of new customers. Entrepreneur defines branding as the marketing practice of creating an image that differentiates one product or entity from another. Based on this definition, branding could encompass anything from creating a peculiar logo to creating well-crafted messaging.
If you want to strengthen your brand, start by revisiting your core values and ensuring they’re spread throughout all of your marketing messaging. This is important because when customers are drawn to a brand, it is usually the core values that they’re connecting with. Nike is a good example of a brand that does this effectively as their core values, which include innovation, inspiration, and authenticity, can be seen in the stories they tell through their ads. Great examples are them using the courageous athlete Colin Kaepernick as the face of their 30th anniversary “Just Do It’ campaign in 2018.
Another way to improve your brand would be by telling more captivating stories. Brand stories are an engaging way to communicate your core values as a business and evoke an emotional connection. Telling the right stories will make your brand authentic, and that is something customers like. Click To Tweet Ultimately, authenticity could be the difference between a customer being fully engaged with your brand and being swept up by the competition. Luxury Marketing is a result-driven strategy to communicate your brand stories to your targets.
Expanding your market reach requires a significant amount of strategic thinking as well as effective execution. However, by keeping your target market’s needs at the center of your strategy, using the right team, and remaining true to your mission as a business, you should eventually see your efforts yielding tangible results.
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