We regularly get companies approaching us, asking to grow their businesses, which is great. However, a lot of them don’t realise just what’s involved and the lengths they’ll need to go to.
In this article, I’ll use an example of a company (can’t be named) who we recently helped to grow their business by 4x turnover. Yes, you read right, 4x. No easy feat, but it’s achievable and anyone or any company can do it.
At this point, you’re probably a little bit skeptical (as you should be) and don’t believe it’s possible. With a few select strategies and a willing CEO, we were able to do magnificent things with this company and still do today.
Growing your business today doesn’t mean doing all of the old traditional things you’ve done in the past – it means thinking out of the box and testing different methodologies to see what works.
In order to do this, you need a strategy that hasn’t been tried in your niche before and probably won’t be for some time.
You see, your competitors will never try something until they know it works. This is where you’re going to be different and true domination is possible, if you open your mind to new ideas.
By constantly creating new products and services while you test along the way, it will get you valuable inside information of what works and what doesn’t.
Create your own niche
Whatever product or service you offer, you need to operate at the fringe and produce a totally new one that isn’t offered in the marketplace at the moment.
This can be done by putting a new spin on an existing product
- have you tried it in a different colour or shape?
- would it make any difference if it was smaller, lighter, faster or more efficient?
Brainstorm gaps that haven’t been filled
- go through customer service queries, are there problems that can be solved?
- does a product have limited capabilities and could this be expanded on?
Develop your product or services
There are a lot of companies out there that have never changed their base products and have a strong and loyal client base.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the norm anymore. With the invention of the internet, your clients now have the ability to compare and read reviews of all the products and services both you and your competitors have to offer.
This wasn’t a massive problem in the past, however, it is today and you need to come up with a viable way of being relevant for your clients.
Developing new products and services not only keeps your staff on their toes, you’re also offering something new into the marketplace for your clients to purchase.
You don’t necessarily need to produce something from scratch. You can actually modify existing products and improve upon them.
It’s also a good idea to offer complimentary items for your clients to purchase. For example, Starbucks started out selling various types of coffee.
It wasn’t long until they were also selling pastries, sandwiches and cookies, etc. as a complimentary product to go alongside their already thriving coffee business.
Not only does this give their clients more choice at the counter, it also improves Starbucks’ bottom line, as with each additional item purchased other than coffee, turnover increases which, in turn, increases profit.
They use the very best ingredients and make sure their products are well-packaged.
This means they are able to increase the selling price just a little, since it would be too much trouble for the client to purchase a coffee from Starbucks and then buy their sandwich somewhere else.
No doubt there are a few people that might do this (you can probably count them on one hand).
Their pastry offerings are always changing based on customer feedback and the amount each item sells per store.
There’s no reason why you can’t do the same with your offering. Just remember to offer a complimentary product or service and get feedback for your clients (This is called a feedback loop).
Provide value and solutions
Marketing is all about problem-solving and presenting solutions for those problems. Each of our clients has a problem; it’s your job to solve it with a product or service.
If your products or service aren’t providing solutions to problems, then you need to change your offering. If you don’t, there’s just no way you can dominate your marketplace.
Instead of highlighting features you must highlight the benefits. Actually paint a picture for your client.
This can be done by:
- Showing before and after pictures
- A video of your product or service actually solving a problem
- Writing a Q and A on your website or product page, outlining all of the common objections. You must answer each one. When your clients are reading your content, they’ll be having an internal conversation – you need to jump into that conversation and answer the questions they’re asking.
Ensure you have the right call to action (CTA) on each page of your website. Giving all this great info is fine but what you actually want them to do is press the buy button or get in touch with you via email or phone!
Communicate with your market
If you’re not sure what problems your clients’ face – ask them! This can be done by phone or email at a convenient time to your client (this is a lot easier with an existing client base).
Have you got a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system? If not, you can get one here. They are relatively cheap and most offer a trial period. If you want to dominate in your marketplace, you need to constantly communicate with your client base.
Too many businesses focus on getting new business instead of focusing on their existing clientele.
It’s much easier to sell to someone who has already purchased from you unless it was a one-off product. However, you would have thought that big purchases were harder to re-sell to, wouldn’t you? Not so.
Car sales showrooms strategically keep all of their clients on a database and regularly post or email new cars that they have in stock.
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Buying a car is a huge purchase and one that people do every few years. By keeping in touch, the showroom is front and centre in the client’s mind the next time they are looking to change their car. There’s no reason why you can’t do the same.
You can use survey tools to get information from new and existing clients:
Survey Monkey
Smart Survey
Google Forms
Establish credible talent
Your clients would like to know who they are dealing with. People buy more from people than companies (especially if there’s a back-story).
Where possible, show a list of your staff and write about their journey (kind of what is seen on Linkedin but a shorter version). If clients are dealing with a local company, they generally click on the “About Us” page to see who they are dealing with and whether they’re the right fit.
This is where you have a list of all your employees and a small bio underneath their picture.
It is a great way to get your clients to like, know and trust your business before they even have any interaction with you. Other than digital marketing companies and hairdressers, very few companies do this.
- Take a few pics of your staff and get them to write a short bio
- Get your webmaster to upload these to your website in the “About Us” section of your website
- Keep this updated! I recommend using a website that you can edit yourself. WordPress is our choice of platform but you can choose any you like. It just means you’re not waiting or having to pay a webmaster to do this for you.
Get your staff to write content
This isn’t an easy one to do, but if you do, it’s the icing on the cake for total domination. I guarantee your competitors aren’t doing this yet, but I recommend you get on this, pronto!
- If you have staff in different departments of your business, get them to write blog posts on topics related to their department.
- If you’re using WordPress, you can give them writer access (they would be a contributor). A Contributor – has no publishing or uploading capability, but can write and edit their own posts until they are published.
- Once the content has been proof-read, then you need to add pictures and edit the text so it’s easy to read.
- If everything is OK with the post, you then need to publish it.
- Share on social media (we advise you to use Buffer).
- Share via newsletter to existing clients.
- Once the post has been shared and posted on social media, then you need to “rebuffer”. This means your content is being re-posted at a different time and day.
As long as you continually add content to your blog, you’re already on the path of dominating your marketplace.
This is part of your inbound marketing strategy. It’s simple but extremely effective. Especially if you’re the only one in your niche doing this.
If your staff aren’t quite ready to take the leap into becoming a professional writer, get them to brainstorm different aspects of their job and what your clients might find helpful or useful and then simply get the content written.
Train Your Employees
Untrained Employees = Unhappy Employees
If you want to dominate your marketplace, your employees need to be along for the ride. Invite them to come with you!
This can only be done by investing in their future, which means training them in the very latest technology, skills and know-how. Employees who aren’t supported actually feel neglected.
At XenMedia we encourage our clients to place their employees on a training course at least every 3 months (every quarter).
Not only do they feel a sense of worth, they actually feel like they are part of your business. This is really important!
Untrained Workers Have Low Productivity.
Everyone who works within your business must be running to their full potential. To dominate, your business needs to run like a well-oiled machine.
This can only be done by maximising the skills of everyone within the organisation. Train them well and they’ll pay you back in spades.
Offer a tripwire
You’re probably wondering what a tripwire is? A tripwire is an offer that is either free (by means of a trial) or a product/service at a low initial price, so we can hook the client into purchasing either a subscription or more of your product/service.
For example, Aldi and Lidl use tripwires every week. They have a limited number of everyday items like drills, garden furniture, kitchen appliances, etc. on offer. They are really good quality and are sold at discount.
So what’s their purpose and how do they benefit?
- Get new customers through the door interested in the offer.
- New customers are likely to purchase other items where the company has a good profit margin.
- New customers will refer and recommend the store to their friends and family.
- Since this event happens weekly, they are training their customers to look out for new offers.
- When walking through the store, their customers have to pass goods where the profit margins are quite high. For example the bakery, sweets & cakes section.
How can you use this technique?
Figure out what product or service is quite popular and lower the price so there’s a clear incentive for your customer to grab a bargain.
If you have a means of getting their personal details like email and telephone number, you can then market your premium goods where there’s a higher margin.
We implemented this to gain new customers for our client and to create a buzz. It worked so well, they have adopted the same Aldi and Lidl strategy of having a major offer in the first week of each month.
The effectiveness is maximised by teaching your clients to look out for new offers at the same point every day, week or month. That way it becomes second nature.
If you hadn’t worked this out, this is how both Aldi & Lidl managed to increase market share so much in such a short space of time.
They used these very enticing trip wires to hook new clients, got them to try their other products and then trained them to look out for them by offering a weekly special.
Competitive analysis
Competitor analysis is accessing and comparing your strengths and weaknesses with your competitors. We used this to:
- See what our client’s competitors were doing well and mimic them (not copy, that wouldn’t be fair).
- See what things they weren’t doing (possible gap in the market).
- Review their pricing to see if they were engaging in aggressive pricing strategies. If they weren’t, this then gave our client a licence to do so.
- See where their competitors were advertising (simply type their telephone number in caps into Google. This gives you all of the places where they advertise online).
Conclusion
We employed all of these strategies right from the get-go and, to be fair, our client’s competitors never even saw them coming.
Fact: The most effective strategy we introduced was the tripwire. In the UK this is still a very underused strategy which means there’s plenty of scope for you to use this in your business.
Now, you don’t have to try all of these 8 strategies all at once. Go for whichever one you fancy (it’s completely up to you).
We did them all at once and managed to grab a huge proportion of market share while increasing our clients turnover within 60 days.
Feel free to get in touch if you would like us to have a look at your marketplace and see if there’s a way for us to mimic what we did with this client 🙂
8 Ways To Dominate Your Marketplace In 60 Days – https://t.co/f4vnTOQN0w #StrategicMarketing #makeyourownlane #growyourbizwithxen #smallbiz
— XenmediaMarketing (@XenmediaM) February 20, 2017