The push to start new businesses continues. In Q1 2017, the number of seed and angel deals increased by 1.4 per cent compared to Q1 2016.
While small businesses are the heart and soul of jobs growth, it's just as important that established businesses focus on growing - less startup, more scaleup; less entrepreneur, more intrapreneur.
So how can large organisations grow?
To sustain growth, there must be a continuous pipeline of growth initiatives that represent new sources of profit for your brand. What distinguishes companies that carry on growing is their ability to create these new initiatives along short, medium and long-term horizons (a framework featured in The Alchemy of Growth).
Here are four pillars to consider as you take stock of your growth strategy.
Brand growth comes from distinctiveness and memory. Building memories and an understanding of your brand is essential so that at a potential purchase moment, buyers think of you over a competitor brand. How to get there:
Short term: Treat your brand like everyday is launch day and be in market. Revisit your marketing strategy to ensure all efforts are focused on awareness and acquisition. Not loyalty programs.
Medium term: Develop reach initiatives to drive further awareness of your brand. Sponsorship, display ads, outdoor, TV/video advertising and more, are effective at raising awareness.
Long term: Use your distinctive brand assets - jingles, logos, colours, taglines, and so on, in all communications for as long as possible. Over time they will become strongly associated with your brand and act as a mental cue in a purchase occasion.
Channel growth comes from improving access of your products and services to your customers and employees, changing behaviour and selling effectively. How to get there:
Short term: Audit your current channels and begin building the right infrastructure of physical and digital touchpoints.
Medium term: Improve your distribution channels to increase the effectiveness of your sales team. The more that non-value-added work can be removed, the more your salesforce is empowered to provide a personalised service experience.
Long term: Develop a single customer view to build pricing and product models. To ensure feasibility, continue to refine your product, price, and distribution methods.
Customer Experience growth comes from acknowledging a focus on the “moments of truth” that deliver customer-first experiences.
How to get there:
Short term: Audit the user experience of existing products or channels by looking at analytics data from past visitor sessions or from capturing user sentiment. Uncover experience issues and begin to define ways to improve conversion and ensure customer satisfaction.
Medium term: Create a contact strategy to identify gaps and communication opportunities in order to develop and innovate the customer experience. Having a consistent approach attracts and converts prospects but also maintains a greater number of customers for the long term.
Long term: Build products with a customer-first perspective using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. This allows the business to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Connections growth comes from connecting consumer insights (via data and analytics) to deliver new or improved products and services.
How to get there:
Short term: Audit your data and analytics to uncover insights about your customers, then determine the metric that matters for your business.
Medium term: Begin using your data to deliver marketing effectiveness. Test, learn, and refine innovations and ideas in market.
Long term: Develop a single customer view to build pricing and product models. To ensure feasibility, continue to refine your product, price, and distribution methods. The world is changing all around us all the time. To continue to thrive as a business in the next years and beyond, large organisations must look ahead, understand the trends and forces that will shape their business in the future and move swiftly to prepare for what’s to come.
As our customers exhibit growing desire to be recognised for their preferences and passion points, ...
In the third and final episode of our 3-part CMO50 video series exploring modern marketing and why it’s become a matter of trust, we’re delighted to be joined by Telstra’s former CMO and now digital services and sales executive, Jeremy Nicholas, and Adobe VP Marketing Asia-Pacific and Japan, Duncan Egan.
Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.
Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?
As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.
