Take A Fresh Perspective

Seeing the gaps in your business

Taking a fresh perspective should not be reserved for tough economic times only. To give your business a competitive edge, you do not always have to be relentlessly chasing new opportunities. Sometimes you need to review your plans and change them if necessary. You need to think of better ways of achieving your business goals. Forget the over used phrase ‘if it is not broken don’t fix it.’ Irrespective of how great your business is doing, every now and then you need to stand back and assume you are doing it all wrong and think how you are going to do it totally different. Ask yourself the question; what would I do differently from what I am doing right now? Reflect on the valuable lesson you have learned in the past. This will enable you to see the gaps in your business.

Pulling away from the pack

There are a number of ways of making your customer aware of what you do, but the key is to build awareness that appeal to your target customer base and to stand out from the crowd. Look for instant fix that are inexpensive relative to your current marketing and advertising strategies and immediately implement them. To make a real measurable impact, you must approach problems differently. You need to consider things you have not taken into account in the past. This requires you to venture outside your comfort zone and take some carefully calculated risks and only in this way will you pull away from the pack.

Doing it differently

 Brainstorm and conduct a swot analysis, and from the results you will derive from this exercise, the information will help you to analyze your business and create marketing opportunities which are new, different, and unique. The greatest strength you will achieve from successful completion of this exercise is that when you have completed it, you will have a written tool against which you can plan to maximize the strengths in your marketing plan, address the inherent weakness in how you are marketing to your clients or customers, seize upon opportunities which you may not have previously recognized, and formally identified threats—which may not have been apparent to you. In looking at the strengths of your business, you’ll notice that most of the strengths will also have components which must be addressed as weaknesses, because each strength will probably have a corresponding weakness. Let’s assume that you are opening a small retail food store. If your business proposition is strength for you—you will have the ability to operate the food store, you will also have a corresponding weakness in that there are many different food stores in the marketplace, and you must recognize that for each strength you must have a plan to address every weakness. The importance of brainstorming and swot analysis cannot be overemphasized, because it forces you to look at many different aspects of your business in a different way. No matter what business you operate, most challenges you will face will be exposed through brainstorming and swot analysis.

Justice Mandhla is the author of Boost your sales and attract new customers and he spends a great deal of his full-time writing days researching and writing about marketing and advertising strategies.

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