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How to Successfully Market a Niche Business

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | How to Successfully Market a Niche BusinessMarketing any business is a tricky process. There are many different elements to consider, from the target audience to the allocated budget. Then there are all the different advertising channels available, where you have to try and figure out which ones work best for a business.

It’s difficult, right? Well, throw a specialised niche into the mix, and the challenge becomes even more severe.

Or is it?

While working in a particular niche will limit the options available, there’s still plenty of potential to craft a killer marketing plan. It just depends on how you approach the task. To help you out, here are a few tips on how to successfully market a niche business.

Know the audience

As with any business, any marketing plan begins with getting to grips with the audience it is targeting. You need to understand why customers decide to shop at your niche business. You also have to figure out what might be turning them away, and if there are any potential opportunities available that are currently untapped.

Remember: this is more than just the basics like gender, age range, and income. You must gain a deep understanding of their behaviour patterns and preferences.

Use the right content

Once you understand the audience, you’ll already have a firm grasp on what type of content will work to bring them in.

For instance, if you were promoting a law firm, flashy graphics and funny videos are not exactly suitable. The audience you are targeting is one that seeks a company that exudes professionalism and expertise. Posting cat memes is only going to reflect badly on the law firm.

Get the content right, engage with the audience, and start reaping the rewards.

Don’t avoid local customers

When you’re marketing a niche, it can be easy to try and cast a net wide in an attempt to capture every potential customer. This is a possibility depending on just how specialised the niche is, of course, but you shouldn’t lose focus on an important aspect: the local audience

In fact, certain specialised businesses depend on their local customer base. To use an example, a reputed accountant, Liverpool based firm is Alliance Accounting. Despite their reputation and expertise, their main targets are clients that are in Liverpool and Sydney. The reason is simple: people from other areas of Australia are less likely to travel across the country for an accountant.

Listen to feedback

If you’ve created a business from scratch, you might have a tendency to ignore any feedback that goes against your grand vision.

Never do that.

It is fine for you to feel proud and be protective of your company. However, any business needs to listen to its customers. If they have a valid point, require assistance, or are simply there to complain, respond to them. If you do it in a respectful, self-assured manner, this will reflect well on your business and may even turn complainers into loyal customers.

Feedback will also help you to shape your marketing plan. After all, your marketing strategy should be one that’s open to change. Continually refine your approach, and you will be able to reach a more considerable number of targeted customers.

4 Ways to Optimize Your Team for Success

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | 4 Ways to Optimize Your Team for SuccessIn today’s modern world, words like “leadership” and “optimization” can feel a bit like cheap buzz words that are thrown around casually at business seminars.

Whilst there are definitely some companies that use these buzzwords to try to seem modern, being one of those companies and one of those managers that understands they don’t cut it anymore is a skill that will propel your business to the next level.

Working for Change

When we think of optimizing a team, invariably those team or personality questionnaires get thrown around, then glanced over by someone in HR only to be thrown in a drawer and never looked at again.

If you’re serious about being the change you want to see, it’s time to do some serious thinking about how you can lead your team to success by being the leader they need, not the manager they have.

Here are four things you can implement for optimizing your team for success

Lead With a Coaching Mindset

There has been a LOT of talk in the last few years about leadership coaching and the need for good leaders in organizations. Coaching in the workplace has become something that great organizations encourage as they know they can get more out of their leaders, and in turn, more out of the wider workforce.

Implement some of the coaching techniques into your day and see the difference it will make to your team.

Ensure Systems and Processes Are Up to Date

Nothing will frustrate a team more than having processes and systems that just don’t work. Take a transport management system as an example; teams need to ensure that everything is running smoothly and that they aren’t slowed down by a clog in the system or angry customers ringing up needing an update.

A good system allows clients to log in at any time, and employees to bring up information at the drop of a hat.

Give Them the Tools to Do the Job

Along with a system that doesn’t work, equipment that doesn’t work properly is a huge bane on team output. For example, if your video editor needs a high-performance laptop with a killer graphics card to do their job, listen to them and work to find a solution.

Employees will be happier when they can work to their full potential without technological hindrance.

Play to Strengths, Not Weaknesses

Employees from all sorts of backgrounds can be a huge benefit to your company. This is especially true for neurodiverse employees. Conditions such as ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and other forms of neurodiversity can be a huge benefit to your company, but only if you are willing to play to strengths and not weaknesses. GCHQ in England understand this and specifically recruit dyslexic employees for their ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking.

Richard Branson of Virgin is a hugely famous entrepreneur who is also severely dyslexic. He set up the charity Made By Dyslexia to showcase some incredible stories and share the strengths of this diverse way of thinking.

4 Things You Should be Looking for When Picking a Contract Management Solution

StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article | 4 Things You Should be Looking for When Picking a Contract Management SolutionBad contract management costs companies in many different ways, and it exposes them to unnecessary risks. This is why contract management is essential to the long-term success of your business. Fortunately, there are many contract management systems on the market to choose from. The challenge is finding the right one for your business’ needs. Here are four things you should be looking for when picking a contract management solution.

Ease of Use

Many firms are reluctant to adopt a contract management system because of the time, money, and effort involved. When picking an option, you aren’t just spending money on a software application and its support, you also have to train people how to use it. This is why ease of use is one of the top factors to consider when researching contract management systems.

Lifecycle Management

Before you start shopping for contract management software, it is important that you understand what contract lifecycle management is and how important it is. It isn’t enough to have a decent data repository. You need a system that manages contracts from initial negotiation to completion. This ensures that salespeople present contracts from approved templates, have any changes to the standard contract approved, and save the final version in an accessible database.

The ideal contract management system ties into your task management system and email servers. This allows your legal department to know what contracts need to be reviewed as soon as possible and how much work is in their queue. Salespeople can also look up the state of the contract, and the system may send a final version of the contract to the customer for approval or just their own records. The best contract management systems notify management when contracts are up for renewal or may no longer be legally valid.

The ideal contract management system is customisable, allowing you to integrate it with your finance, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning system. Then your customer support staff can view a customer contract when someone calls in with a complaint, and approved contracts automatically feed into your financial planning systems.

Collaboration and Sharing Capabilities

A good contract management system should allow you to create, assign, manage, collaborate, and execute in minutes instead of days. For example, a good tool would allow a salesperson to upload a draft contract to the repository and have it available for legal review within moments. Team members should be able to share relevant documents and discuss them in real-time, and approval should arrive within minutes of legal signing it off.

Risk Management

You should also make sure that the contract management tool you choose has risk management capabilities. For example, the tool may notify you when contracts expire so that you don’t continue to work without a valid legal agreement in place. Or it may warn you when there are risks associated with various contracts. Not all contract management systems have legal analytics built-in but knowing when contracts are now null and void due to changes in the law allows you to work on mitigating that risk or renegotiating the contracts.

Email and spreadsheets aren’t good enough for managing your contracts. Choose a contract management system that streamlines your administrative processes, manages risk, and provides the legal protection you expect from your contractual agreements.

Benefits of Help Desk for Your Business

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Benefits of Help Desk for Your BusinessMany companies do not realize the benefits of IT help desk software until they are in a reactive mode trying to fix issues with hardware and software that continue to compound.

Imagine that you are an employee who has just spent hours working on a report when suddenly, your computer crashes. All your work is gone, and you are unable to get your computer to operate. In this technological era, most daily work functions depend on an internet connection and electronic appliances. When troubles arise, employees are dependent on the IT experts of the company to get their system back up and running. Implementing IT help desk software and best practices allows end-users to request and receive assistance as quickly as possible. Help desk software automates and streamlines IT support so that your support staff can efficiently handle tickets.

Improve Employee Productivity and Satisfaction

Employees rely on IT support staff to troubleshoot and mitigate technical issues. Employees can quickly open up a ticket using help desk software instead of spending time tracking down IT staff. This reduces employee downtime, and work can resume. Employees tend to become disgruntled when there are problems that result in wasted effort. Knowing that there is a team dedicated to preventing such problems will reduce frustrations. When frustrations are low and satisfaction is high, the company is in a better position.

Automated Support Ticket Management

Some companies use email to report technical issues. However, as the quantity of tickets increases, it becomes harder to manage and prioritize critical issues. Help desks organize, prioritize, and distribute tickets efficiently for the IT help desk staff.

Automated ticket management can improve your IT team’s performance and help them stay on top of all incoming tickets. It will distribute tickets based on location or type of issue. If many issues are originating from users located in the same area, a team member can be assigned all of those tickets. This reduces traveling back and forth from one person to another.

Another way ticket management can maximize efficiency is to delegate all similar tickets to one person. That team member will be able to work faster since they are in charge of one specific task.

IT Documentation and Analytics

A very useful benefit of help desks is the retention of all the different tickets, as well as the implemented solutions. Recurring problems can be dealt with promptly even if it is a new team member who is working on it.

Another benefit is being able to analyze the data and history that the system is saving. Many help desk software can generate reports so you can easily detect trends or bugs in the system. This information offers crucial insight into any holes within your company’s IT infrastructure. For example, if many employees are repeatedly reporting the same problem, then you know that you need to spend resources to correct it.

One Resource for All Answers

Tracking via help desk allows IT staff to manage and maintain resources for the whole company. This will build the company’s knowledge base and free up IT staff to troubleshoot more serious issues.

Once common issues are identified, staff can compile solutions that employees can easily follow on their own. This provides a single tool for the entire company to utilize when they need help, but assistance is unavailable immediately.

Another way to use help desk is to quickly provide office-wide announcements as soon as an issue is known to be happening all across the system. For instance, if a specific application is having problems, the IT team can broadcast to everyone that a solution is in the works. This will reduce confusion, as well as the number of tickets in the help desk system.

Help desks can be valuable to your company and its employees. It provides a way for the support team and employees to communicate with each other and to work together to bring the company onto the path of success.

How to Protect Your Organization From the Amazon of Your Industry

StrategyDriven Risk Management Article | How to Protect Your Organization From the Amazon of Your IndustryThe trend towards consolidation in industry has become a threat to any business whose leadership has a desire to maintain its own identity and strategic path. If you think you, your company, or your industry is immune, I urge you to look at the telltale signs.

If you are one of those business owners or leaders who have invested many years of your life building a brand, then you most likely have a vision for that brand for the future that exists beyond your involvement. Sure, you could decide to sell the business or have it acquired by another organization, but the control of the decision should be yours.

So what do you do if you’d like the company to stand alone moving forward?

The Hidden Threat That Many Do Not See

Many signs of corporate consolidation are apparent; we read about them in journals and online every single day. XYZ corporation announces the acquisition of ABC LLC, etc. Mergers and acquisitions have been around forever, but there is a new legal form of conquest that is allowing organizations to steal market share from well-established businesses. Does it exist (yet) in your niche?

The menace of which I speak is the digital marketing organizations that are springing up in most industries, offering services on a pay-per-lead basis. If you are an established business, you likely have encountered one or more (or your marketing department has), and perhaps you have even paid for their services. These organizations spend their resources online, gaining a marketing edge, and then sell you (or your competition) the data on the leads. It seems like a win-win relationship at first.

But consider this. Isn’t this type of behavior, by you and your competition, outsourced marketing? No big deal, right? They spend money to generate consumer information, and then you buy it. Outsourcing frees you up to focus on things other than creating new business opportunities. It’s a true parasite-host relationship, where your organization serves as the host, and the digital marketing organization serves as a benevolent parasite.

Over time, the parasite will get large and robust. It will more than likely service many companies, not just your own. When they hit a point of market saturation, who do you think will be the most prominent brand known to the consumer? You? A competitor? No! It will be the digital marketing company that has been growing its reach across digital channels.

I believe that at this point, the digital marketing organization will have the leverage, and it is then that the parasite begins to consume the host. They raise the price on your cost per lead. If you refuse to pay, they merely sell the information to a competitor. Or worse, they quit selling information exclusively; instead, they sell the same information to multiple organizations. Once they are large enough in the eyes of consumers, they have the leverage to do this.

Would you like some real-world examples of this? Look no further than Zillow in real estate or Homeadvisor in the home services sector. These marketing-only organizations started simply with a website, but now each is the biggest name in its field. Zillow is now buying homes and working directly with home sellers. Can it be much longer before they have a buyer service available?

How To Avoid The Digital Marketing Parasite

If you own, lead, or manage an organization, acknowledge that the primary task of any business is the generation of new customers. You cannot outsource marketing, or it will put your company in a position to finance the organization that will one day put you out of business.

Take care of the parasite when it is a pest. Ensure that you run a learning organization that evolves its marketing strategy to utilize the same channels and processes that the parasite would use to unhinge you.

The parasite exists in every location and every field. Do not make the mistake of outsourcing business generation responsibilities. Instead grow your digital marketing solutions so that your company can thrive and grow into the future.


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Joe ManausaJoe Manausa is CEO of Joe Manausa Real Estate in Tallahassee, Florida and author of The Business of Getting Business: The Digital Marketing Guide for Small Businesses.  After observing industry giants move to a digital-first marketing approach, Joe made the transition within his own company, which resulted in over $10 million of revenue from the business’s website.  For more information, please visit lidpublishing.com or https://www.digitalmarketingforbusinessbook.com/.