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3 Steps To Develop Your Marketing Strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing Strategy|3 Steps To Develop Your Marketing StrategyEvery business owner knows they need to have a marketing strategy to succeed. By having a high-quality one, you’ll:

  • Gain more visibility
  • See more sales
  • Improve your revenue

Figuring out how to develop your marketing strategy can be complicated, however. There are quite a few steps involved, some of which can be easy to overlook. By focusing on a few particular areas, you can make sure your marketing strategy is as comprehensive as possible.

How To Develop Your Marketing Strategy: 3 Vital Steps

1. Do Your Research

Research is a significant part of developing your marketing strategy. Researching your market is the most obvious way of doing this, although that’s far from the only thing you’ll need to focus on. The likes of keyword research for search engine optimization is also vital.

The more information you have at-hand when developing your marketing strategy, the more comprehensive and in-depth it’ll be. It should also make sure you can achieve the results you want while targeting the right audience.
Knowing your audience is an integral part of this. While this could be the most time-intensive part of the process, it’ll make your marketing strategy more successful. You’ll see better results because of it.

2. State Your Goals

You’ll need to have business goals for your company to succeed. You’ll also need to have marketing goals that feed into this. By knowing what your goals are, you can develop a marketing strategy that’s likely to achieve them. It also keeps you and your employees on track and on the same page.

They’re also a way to measure the success of your campaign once it’s finished. You should be realistic when you’re setting these goals. That involves focusing on goals that are achievable and have a direct impact on your company.

Taking a SMART approach with your goal setting is recommended, as it ensures your goals are actionable, results-based, show you how to improve, and can be measured.

3. Use The 7 P’s

Using the seven P’s of marketing can be one of the more effective ways of developing your marketing strategy. The seven P’s of marketing are:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Promotion
    Place
  • People
  • Process
  • Physical Evidence

You should use these as a guide for your marketing strategy and make sure it includes each of the P’s. By doing so, it’ll get your products in front of potential customers in the right way. Having the right combination of these – and highlighting them in the right way – you can make sure your marketing strategy is as comprehensive as possible.

How To Develop Your Marketing Strategy: Wrapping Up

Once you know how to develop your marketing strategy, you shouldn’t have a problem creating a comprehensive guide for your advertising. With that, you shouldn’t have a problem generating visibility and attention among your target market.

In time, that’ll lead to more customers and revenues. While you’ll still need to put the work into adapting your strategy to your specific target demographic, it’ll be easier than you think once you’ve done the above steps.

Warning: Entrepreneurship Is Hazardous To Health

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Entrepreneurship|Warning: Entrepreneurship Is Hazardous To HealthThese days, the culture heavily promotes the idea of becoming an entrepreneur. Society needs “game-changing” individuals who solve the problems we collectively face, supercharge the economy, and transform technologies into products.

And while it might all seem extremely glamorous, there’s a dark side. To actually achieve the things that many entrepreneurs do, they have to make extreme sacrifices, including their own health.

For instance, research suggests that entrepreneurs work around 63 percent longer than the average employee. So, if a worker has a 42.5-hour weekly contract, that means that the boss at their startup is putting in 70 hours per week.

The Health-Related Risks Of Entrepreneurship

So what risks are entrepreneurs exposing themselves to by working these insane hours and shouldering the pressures of an entire organization?

Well, studies that compare company leaders to the general population don’t paint a pretty picture. Entrepreneurs, for instance, have 200 percent of the addiction risk of regular workers, are 100 percent more likely to experience depression, and more than 500 percent more likely to have ADHD.

Given how prevalent these conditions are throughout the general population, they are almost ubiquitous among company leaders. The vast majority have health secrets that would probably shock their employees to the core.

Heart disease appears to be the biggest issue of them all. People working the longest hours appear to be at the greatest risk of developing heart problems when working long hours over an extended period of their lives.

What Can Entrepreneurs Do To Take Care Of Themselves?

All of this talk about entrepreneurs having health problems is rather gloomy, though. After all, business leaders are people who shake up the world and improve the lives of regular people. If their lives are being cut short just because of the work they are doing, that seems like a shame.

The trick here is for entrepreneurs to abandon traditional Western lifestyles and embrace something far more innovative. While keeping your Ventolin nearby, in case of asthma attack, is something you’ll need to carry on doing, eating pizzas and burning the midnight oil isn’t.

Entrepreneurs need to think of their lifestyle as a tool to make their bodies more robust. In reality, there is no reason why they should have higher disease risk than the rest of the population, as long as they adjust how they live to reflect the work choices that they make.

Here are some rules:

  • Maintain your circadian rhythm. Avoid the temptation to work deep into the night or get up at some ridiculous time in the morning, just because Mark Wahlberg does.
  • Avoid processed foods. Eat a diet of fruit, vegetables, whole grains and beans. If you don’t have time to prepare this type of food, get someone to do it for you. Alternatively, buy unprocessed instant foods. There are plenty available.
  • Prioritize sleep. The world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, is on record saying that he prioritizes sleep, getting around 8 hours a night.
  • Take time out at the weekend. Don’t work 24/7. Instead, give yourself the luxury of having one day off per week where you don’t think about work at all.
  • Wake up at the same time every day. Get your body into the habit of waking up with the sunrise.
  • Avoid traveling through multiple time zones. Business travel can really wreck your body’s ability to self-regulate. If you can’t avoid it, try to go to bed and wake up using the time back home, not the time in the new location.

Of course, when you’re a stressed-out entrepreneur, lifestyle tends to take a backseat. However, you’ll find that when you really start to prioritize what you eat, it changes what you can achieve. The healthier you feel, the more likely you are to reach your goals.

Remember, a late night here or there isn’t going to make much of a difference to your health. Our bodies can recover from a couple of bad sleeps in a row. However, problems start to emerge when you lack sleep for days, or you eat pizza every night for a week. Once you go down that path, it is often only a matter of time before your body gives out and you start experiencing many of the health issues discussed above.

Managing stress is also important. Ultimately, you need to remind yourself that being an entrepreneur is all about play. You’re exploring the world, looking to create business systems that generate value. If they don’t, then you can always move onto the next thing. It’s not the end of the world.

The Importance of Management in The Construction Industry

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Construction Industry|The Importance of Management in The Construction IndustryWhen it comes to completing a challenging project, good management is hard to overstate. The construction industry is no exception; proper management is so crucial that it can be the difference between project success and failure – or even life and death. Here are the critical ways that proper management can help minimize complications and improve the outcome of any project.

Good management is essential for the construction industry

Good management is a vital feature of any successful business. It is perhaps even more critical in the construction industry, for example, in a civil engineering firm Illinois has to offer. Without good leadership and strong communication, teams will struggle to get anything done effectively. Poor planning can also lead to wasted resources and increased project cost overruns.

Sources of risk within the construction industry

The primary source of risks within the construction industry is the construction process itself, and good management is essential to reduce them. The construction process is complex, with many moving parts and multiple stakeholders. It’s challenging to coordinate all the different pieces that must come together for a project to be completed successfully, which is why it’s so important for managers to have a clear understanding of their role in this process. They need to know how they can best support their teams and communicate with one another so that risks are minimized as much as possible.

Safety on construction sites

In the construction industry, there are thousands of accidents every year. Indeed, some accidents are not caused by anyone’s negligence or poor management, but many are.

Good management will ensure that your employees know what they’re supposed to do and how they should do it to keep themselves and others safe on the job site. It also helps them understand how important safety is for everyone involved with your company—not just for their own sake but also because it’s good business sense: if people aren’t happy with how safe things are at work, they won’t want to come back again!

The implications of poor management in construction projects

Poor management can lead to delays, budget overruns, and safety issues. These consequences can damage your reputation as an employer. Poor quality and poor safety are two outcomes of poor management. In addition, if you have unhappy customers who don’t receive what they paid for, then there is no reason why they should continue doing business with you. Disgruntled employees may also seek employment elsewhere.

How can good management improve a complex project?

There are many ways that good management can improve a complex project. Good leadership can enhance communication between team members, which can help with project completion. It can also increase the quality of products and the workplace, improving physical space and the people who work there. A good manager will make sure that employees are happy at work, which will keep them from feeling like they have to leave their jobs to be satisfied with what they do every day. Finally, good management ensures that each person on the team has an opportunity for growth and development through training opportunities provided by their employer.

5 Ways to Tailor SEO for Your Manufacturing Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Manufacturing Business SEO|5 Ways to Tailor SEO for Your Manufacturing BusinessAs a business owner, you may or may not know about search engine optimization. But it can help when you tailor SEO to rank higher in Google results for increased business potential.

Create Structured Data FAQs for Your Business

Structured data helps Google create rich snippets to display in SERPs for organic traffic. Organic traffic is visitors to your site from unpaid sources, such as searching on Google. Rich snippets are extra work. But they offer advantages related to your search results. They provide a user with supplementary information, and they help your content stand out. For example, suppose your manufacturing company is obscure, such as making gummy molds. You could include FAQs in your post meta data related to what they are, who uses them, and the benefits.

Include as Much Local Info as Possible

Local SEO isn’t anything new. But it has been somewhat neglected for a long time. From a business perspective, this is a missed opportunity. Including local SEO helps Google drive more traffic to your business based on local searching. For instance, if someone were to Google “gummy molds near me,” they would see results based on location and distance. If you don’t tell Google where your business is, it cannot include you in the results. The easiest way to configure local SEO is to register with Google My Business and fill in all details.

Hire Professionals to Tailor SEO

You can’t do all the SEO yourself, especially when it comes to backlink off-page SEO strategies. Backlinks aren’t 100% necessary for good SEO. But they can be a massive help. When your site is linked from a reputable and relevant source, it tells Google you are trusted and boosts your SEO score. But placing links yourself isn’t advised. One method is to pay an agency to build link juice for you. SEO agencies can produce relevant content that contains your link and place those articles on various websites across the internet, boosting traffic and SEO.


Attach a Blog to Your Manufacturing Company Site

Of course, you have some control over content related to your business. One of the easiest ways to generate more traffic and boost your SEO score is to attach a blog to your company website. Of course, a company website alone doesn’t work for you. But when you develop a blog, you increase the chances of more traffic because you are distributing content relevant to your sector or niche. In this example, gummy mold manufacture. Therefore, you could write posts about making sweets or anything else that a mold can be used for.

Check All the Boxes of Standard SEO Practices

The subject of SEO is vast and becomes complex as you drill down. But on the surface, you can achieve excellent results with meat and potatoes standard SEO. Standard SEO relates to the basics that are the core of anything you publish online. These include on-page SEO such as focus keywords, proper use of headings, bullets, and images, and post meta descriptions. Further, you should tailor posts based on adequate keyword research and write them naturally for your intended audience. Basic SEO is anything but. And will impact your traffic significantly.

Summary

All SEO should be designed around your business or niche for the best results. You can begin local and on-page SEO. But you can go further with rich snippets from structured data.

How To Hit The Ground Running With Your Start-Up’s Finances

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Start-up Finances|How To Hit The Ground Running With Your Start-Up’s FinancesNo matter how good your idea might be or how dedicated you are as an entrepreneur, without strong financial management your start-up will never be able to reach its full potential. With so much to deal with when running a start-up, managing the finances can easily fall to the wayside. Letting this happen can spell disaster, so understanding how to hit the ground running with your start-up’s finances is an essential key to long term business success.

1. Create a Clear Plan

No matter how good your intentions are, without a clear vision of your strategy, you will be working in the dark. Therefore, one of the first steps you should take when you are setting up a new business is to create a strong financial plan. In this financial plan, you will need to outline all the funding you are in need of and the sources from which you intend to procure it. You will need to show your intended overhead and projected incomings. The more detailed you can be with this plan the better, as it will help you to stay on track in the long run.

It is useful to not view a financial plan as something that is fixed. This is because the more experience you have with your business the better able you will be to understand your real financial situation. Consequently, updating and amending your financial plan will help to ensure its relevance and usefulness, as your business progresses and your knowledge increases.

2. Have a Healthy Cash Flow

It can be all too easy for start-ups to fall into the trap of having all of their capital tied up in investments early on. This can lead to real problems such as being unable to maintain expected operations. If you find yourself facing issues with your cash flow then you should look into invoice financing. Before you go down this path it is a good idea to do some research into what is invoice financing to ensure you are getting the best solution for your needs.

3. Build Strong Networks

Building strong networks might sound like a strange piece of advice in the context of start-up financial management but it can be invaluable. Having strong relationships with your suppliers and clients can help you to stay prosperous when you are experiencing more difficult times.

4. Have a Good Record Keeper

Whether you are seeking outside investment or not, there is a lot of paperwork and records associated with running a start-up. When you are setting up your business it is important that you get underway with your record keeping. Creating clear systems for your business’ financial record keeping from the beginning can help you avoid delays and potential difficulty down the line.

5. Keep Your Overhead Lean

When it comes to running a start-up that is competitive you will need to be working at maximum efficiency, and the same goes for your finances. You should try to keep your overheads as lean as possible to ensure you are operating effectively. Of course, you will need to pay for the necessities to keep your staff and business healthy, but it is vital you don’t splurge on what is not absolutely necessary.