As business consultants and marketing specialists, we’ve helped scores of clients find their niche and promote their services successfully. Through our Roadmap to Business Clarity workshops, we help you hone your business process and develop a custom strategy with actionable next steps to growing your business in a two-hour session.
In our consultations with businesses in backbone industries ranging from technology and engineering to construction and real estate, we consistently include these three recommendations:
- Listen to your customers. Your customers are providing valuable data insights with every online review, social media tag, or comment they post. They’re telling you what they like and dislike most about your services and leaving clues as to how you can better serve and engage them. Are you taking advantage of it?
According to Hootsuite, social listening is tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand, then analyzing them for insights to discover opportunities to act.
In a similar vein, HubSpot refers to reputation management as the process of monitoring how consumers perceive your business and taking strategic action when necessary to improve your brand’s image.
By using social listening and reputation management tools to track mentions and general sentiment towards your brand digitally, you can get first-hand feedback from your customers that is crucial to improving your products or services and providing a better overall experience. Alongside free insights into the minds of your customers, these processes can also be a useful way of monitoring and collecting relevant market research on your direct competitors.
Remember, though, that all of the listening in the world doesn’t do any good if you don’t review the feedback, you receive and adjust your tactics accordingly.
- Create an enhanced perception of value. Say this with us: increasing perception of value does not mean you need to raise your prices. In fact, for some customers raising your price might decrease their perception of value because they feel like they are being charged more for the same static services. Rather, enhancing the perception of value means helping your customers understand all that they are getting for the cost they pay.
This might be highlighting the quality of your services, the variety of services, or your company’s specific specialty focus. The goal is to remind customers of all the bells and whistles that come with the excellent services you provide. Coordinated marketing through social media campaigns, email campaigns, and a refresh of all digital messaging and outward facing brand touchpoints can help your customers become more familiar with the full suite of services you provide to them, including behind the scenes work or special features and perks that they may be unaware of.
- Shift focus to your most profitable offerings. Ok, ready for some hard to swallow pills? It does not make sense for your bottom line to spin your wheels offering services that are not profitable for your company. “But we’ve always offered this service,” you might be saying.
Just because a service has been offered in the past doesn’t necessarily mean growth in the future. Consider examining whether it has ever historically been profitable for your company. If it’s not worth continuing that service, you can help current clients by finding a suitable partner vendor to connect them with (or subcontract to) to maintain goodwill and preserve the working relationship.
As suggested by a business consultant for American Express, “By limiting the types of services [you] offer and projects [you] accept, [you are] more productive and produce higher-quality work. Another way to narrow your business focus is to subcontract. Rather than turn away business, maximize your capacity by subcontracting pieces whenever possible. More projects equal more revenue, while subcontracting equals lower expenses.”
How can you evaluate which services are best for your business to pursue? Factors to consider include profit margins based on pricing and how long the work will take to complete, whether the work is one of your core offerings, and what the sales cycle or project timeline is like.
Ideally, we suggest finding your high profit offerings that are requested most frequently and focusing your energy and efforts into prioritizing those services in your marketing and internal infrastructure.
Interested in digging deeper into your process and strategy for recommendations on how to grow your business? Get in touch to schedule a consultation.
