Business Growth Tip: Adopt a Business Strategy that Works for Your Company

Your business is in a space that’s filled with numerous others like it. You want to gain the edge over those other companies, establish competitive advantage, and own your turf. You want your brand to be the first on the mind of potential clients when they think about the type of product or service you offer.

If you’re going to make this happen, you need to work with the right business strategy.

But what’s a business strategy, and how do you apply one in running your venture?

When we speak of strategy in regular talk, we’re usually alluding to some kind of planning. Maybe we even have a picture of military officers drawing charts that illustrate their intended course of attack in a war. Or it could be the image of people playing chess and thinking about the next steps they’ll take to thwart their opponents’ moves and gain the upper hand.

When we create and apply a business strategy for our enterprise, we’re making detailed, systematic moves to ensure that it succeeds.

What are the possible ways you could operate with your company to steer it to hitting the targets you’ve set for it? It’s in answering this question that you’ll begin to consider possible business strategies. And if you haven’t been following any particular paths to achieving your enterprise goals, this article should present you with a few good options that could work for you.

Business Strategies You Could Use

Here are a number of ways to tackle the task of taking your business to the place you desire for it.

1. Pricing Strategy

Sometimes, you want to make your product’s price the big draw for potential customers who will be choosing between it and alternatives from rival brands.

In doing this, you should be careful to not drop your prices so low that you’re unable to cover your costs and take a reasonable profit. Of course, you’ll also be looking to peg them at levels that’ll be within the reach of your buyers.

The truth is, it can be pretty difficult to keep the balance between these two ends. For one thing, adopting a strategy that’s predicated mainly on wooing clients with lower prices may throw your business into a race to the bottom with your competitors. In this situation, customers may be smiling at how inexpensive their purchases are getting; but sellers- including you –will be sacrificing more than they gain from this.

If you are able to walk the tight rope, you’ll possibly raise your sales and boost revenues.

2. Product Differentiation

Instead of going into battle against competitors with pricing as a weapon, you could focus on building and selling them a unique product. If you offer them something that’s not matched by other vendors in your industry or niche, you might be able to charge for your services without looking over your shoulders.

For example, if you own a restaurant which primarily cooks local dishes, you might make your food stand out from what other restaurants offer by using ingredients or cooking styles to achieve an unusual but savory versions of popular dishes. You may even introduce a novel approach to customer service, which makes your business identifiable and appreciated by your clients.

3. Bespoke Products

In an age of hyper-individualistic consumerism, the bespoke product model has become a popular approach to selling certain kinds of goods and services to specific target markets.

In this case, businesses take orders from clients who provide specifications defining the kind of product they want. The role of the business here is to literally make the customer’s dream (or imagination) come alive. When they’ve created the bespoke product, they hand it in to whoever it is that’s ordered it, and get paid for doing so.

As you’d expect, prices charged for bespoke services tend to be somewhat higher than mass produced output. But it turns out that a lot of people are willing to pay extra for them. This is especially true for ostentatious products such as tailor-made clothing from premium designer labels and wristwatches from high end producers which have their owners’ names etched onto them.

However, a lot of bespoke products are made for consumers from almost every income class. It’s something you could try out if your buyers are open to it.

4. Diversification

Sometimes, broadening your range of offerings might be a great way to grow sales. This might work if you’ve recorded a considerable degree of success with your existing product(s). But diversification may just be a tactic through which you transition from one niche to another.

Here’s an example of product diversification. Let’s say you run a web design company, and it’s doing rather well. You’re considering expanding into other lines of business. You may go for digital marketing, because you’ve got people with a considerably good expertise in that area, or because you think it’s a logical follow up needed by customers who already have a website.

In practice, you may adopt a combination of some of these strategies. For instance, you could diversify your bespoke offerings. There are other strategies you could explore as well: opening up a new niche, joining forces with another company, or segmenting your market and attending to customers of different demographics. It’s up to you to choose which ones might be most suitable for you.

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ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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