7 Secrets for Strategic Business Growth
“What are the secrets to growing my business and increasing my revenues strategically?”
It is one of the most common questions that I’m asked most by start-up and emerging entrepreneurs. The key here is strategically. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of possible ways to build your business and increase your sales. I’ve designed this manifesto to give you
business growth strategies that leave you and your business as the go-to industry leader.
The one goal that must remain top-of-mind as we are deciding the best path forward for our business is long-term branding. Any business can have spouts of revenue from a marketing campaign, but our goal is to build a business that can survive the test of time.
With that in mind, the answer is also not the same for every entrepreneur or start-up business owner. So lets look at the top 7 strategies we’ve found to produce the biggest return-oninvestment in long-term brand equity for emerging businesses today.
1 | Use Social Media
Blog regularly (with both audio and video), interview and feature other experts in your field. Post to social media daily. This will allow you to increase the visibility of your blog and website. A minimum of one post per day is recommended across at least 3 social platforms. Keep in mind; the purpose of social media is NOT to sell. It is to build relationships, and allow people to get to know the personality of you and your brand. Your goal is to keep your brand top of mind for customers you connect with on social media. Posting regularly helps to do that, but providing value is the most important way to do it. Create articles and posts that you can link to on your social media. Videos are the top viewed content online today. This is across any channel so you want to make sure you are posting videos to the various social media channels you are active on.
To make it easy for you to begin writing and posting articles and blogs we’ve created these title templates for you to use:
• 9 Secrets to X in your industry
• 13 Brands Changing the Face of X-Industry Forever
• 11 Mistakes People or Businesses make when X (writing a book,losing weight, investing in stocks, buying a home, etc.)
• 7 Top Trends We’re Seeing in X Industry Today
• 5 Best Apps for X Industry
One of our favorite strategies for building your brand online is interviewing other experts in compatible fields. If you work in sales, for example, perhaps you interview a HR expert, or an expert in building a board of directors, or a customer service expert. These are all topics
that your customer would be interested in but that you don’t personally have expertise in. By aligning yourself with other experts who do have expertise in these areas it makes you appear to be a well-rounded thought-leader, expert, and overall business professional.
Your prospect is often more interested in doing business with those they know have focused expertise, yet a more complete background and understanding.
2 | Become An Industry Thought Leader
Write a book to become the go-to expert and though-leader in your field. Then get it to retail chains globally. At Motivational Press, our authors are securing more speaking engagements and at higher fees because they have published a book. They are securing higher level and higher paid coaching and consulting clients because they walk into the meeting with their best-selling, signed book in hand to present to their future client. They are expanding their audience globally by selling foreign translation rights to countries like Russia, Korea, Japan, China and others. And they are using the book to secure interviews in major media like The Today Show, Good Morning
America, Fox Business News, CBS Radio, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, and more. Simply put, without a book to your credit, those interviews are nearly impossible to secure—and an e-book, without a print version, just can’t open those doors!
The best way to begin writing your book is to come up with the top 10-15 big picture items that are most important to you in your business or in your area of expertise. These could be strategies you use, systems you’ve developed, or just overall concepts that are important to your success. Those 10-15 items become your chapter titles for the book when you begin your outline and manuscript. Many of our authors write full-length manuscripts in as little as an hour a day for ninety days.
3 | Deliver Speaking Engagements and Keynote Presentations on Your Product or Service
Public speaking is one of the best ways to build your brand and establish your credibility. Start locally, then go after the trade conferences in your industry. One of the best ways to do this is to reach out to your local rotary or chamber of commerce. This will put you in front
of key decision makers in your target market. We believe in teaching the audience everything you do, how you do it, and why you do it. This provides tremendous value to the attendees, and positions you as the expert who knows what you’re doing. Many speakers are scared to be this transparent and complete with the audience because they think, If I tell them how I do what I do, they’ll do it themselves. We’ve found that once you tell them everything you do and how you do it, they hire you more often than if you only give them insight into half of what
you do and leave them hanging for the rest. By giving them the complete picture, they know you know your stuff, so they’ll hire you to do it for them.
4 | Create Statistics in your Industry
Conduct Surveys of your target market by making the survey questions quantitative, so you can create statistics that will aid in your sales and marketing. You can do so easily by seningd them out to our contacts via social media. SurveyMonkey even has a service that allows you to pay them to find a random group of your target market to survey. We recommend targeting a minimum of 100 responses to get significant enough data for a statistic in your industry. Here are some sample questions you can use to get quantitative data:
• On a scale of 0-10, rate how overwhelmed you feel at work?
• How do you feel your leadership training is at your company?
(Excellent, Very Good, Good, Average or Poor)
• How prepared do you feel your child is for college?
(Ready to Go, Almost there, Needs Help, Nowhere Near Ready)
• What percent of your employees would you say have clarity
on your company’s purpose? (0-100%)
You’ll see that all of our sample questions allow us to identify a clear number of responses in each category. We can say 80% of respondents feel their children are no where near ready for college, or corporate leaders feel that 78% of their employees don’t have clarity on their
company culture (take the average of the percentages provided by respondents). These figures could help us tremendously in our marketing presentations and sales calls.
5 | Get Published in Industry Magazines,Journals and Online Media
Write and submit articles for consideration by the editors at top industry trades. Media outlets are constantly in need of content. If you can provide them with high-value content that they can post on their website or in their magazine, they will often accept content from outside writers. First, consider the top trade magazines or industry publications that your target audience read on a consistent basis. Next, what are the top problems or challenges facing the target market today? Write the article that covers one of those top challenges. If you were a corporate trainer or business speaker and wanted to go after Human Resources Publications, you might talk about the challenges with hiring millennials in today’s market. Once you’ve written the article, you should contact the editor of the publication (often accessible via the publication’s website) and submit the concept to them. Remember, many broader publications want exclusivity, whereas the
industry specific publications will accept non-exclusive articles. You may want to write a handful of articles that you can fit to the appropriate publications you want to work with.
6 | Engage Your Website Visitors with Free Downloads
Provide free educational materials. You should have a free download, course, video series, workbook, instruction guide, or tutorial that people can download from your website. If people are interested in your product or service area, offering a free download can be
a great way to engage a prospect.
Remember, people will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. This means you will find a higher number of opt-ins with a pain associated free-offer rather than pleasure. For example, 5 reasons you still aren’t losing the weight, 7 biggest mistakes you’re making in your business today, 3 biggest reasons sales people don’t close the deal.
Advanced Strategy: I recommend that my clients deliver the pain associated report (referenced above) immediately upon the customer submitting their opt-in information (name and email) then follow up over the next 7 days with a positive based report broken down into 7 chunks. For example, 7 steps to losing weight this week, 7 secrets to close more sales, or 7 tools to financial freedom. Each day you’d send them one-step, one secret or one tool, and at the bottom of the email you can provide one line about how they can get more information with your web address. You can also offer them a free strategy session or information meeting with a link to your scheduler or request form. And now on to my 7th strategy.
7 | The More You Give Back, the More Your Business Grows
Give back to your community. People are always surprised when I tell them I gain significant business from my philanthropic activities. The more you give back to non-profit organizations who have a compatible target audience or donor base to your customer, the more visibility you gain in that audience. We are constantly looking for ways to have our clients give back to their community. Whether it be via free reports or free webinars or free web courses. Giving your online community valuable resources helps them tremendously. At Motivational Press we give prospective authors the ability to join a 10 week no-obligation, free Write Your Book course so they can get to know us, the value we provide, and the way we work. This process has significantly increased our conversions and the level of investment our customers make
on their first purchase. We look at what people are paying for in our industry and we go out of our way to provide it for free. For us, every author pays for writing coaching, public relations, and marketing, so we incorporate it as complimentary components of every deal we do.
Remember, nothing helps your branding more than providing top-notch service, attention to detail, under-promising and over-delivering on your product or service’s results, and keeping track of those client or customer testimonials and reviews. Never forget, in business
as with most things in life, an overnight success takes 5-10 years. World-class brands are built in longer than that. Always keep an eye on the trends in your industry and constantly be looking for ways to innovate new systems and strategies for better serving your customer.
