How to Develop a Winning Strategy in a FastER-Changing World and Accelerate Growth
READ THIS TO HELP YOUR BUSINESS MAKE MORE MONEY AND SURVIVE
1. To understand what to do first to grow your business.
2. To understand why great strategy cascades from market analysis NOT by spending more money on Social Media and Google ads.
3. To understand how the efficiency and effectiveness of your Marketing Communications are dependent upon your understanding of who you are targeting, then using themes, messages and images that resonate with them, to encourage them to engage, contact and buy.
4. The secret to success is strategic marketing, is knowing who you should target, and how, and who is winning and why.
We’ll help you understand how to optimize your strategy, comms, and sales.
HOW OUR ALTERNATIVE ‘5XR APPROACH’ SUCCEEDED
Using this method, we secured 4 of the top 5 oil trading companies in 3 months, grew Barclays Pension business 120% and then 170% over 2 years. More recently we took a jewellery business in an intensely competitive and fragmented market and grew its revenues 10X over a 2-year period and grew a bike restoration business 70% in 3 months!
This works!
LET’S DIVE RIGHT IN, BECAUSE THE WORLD IS CHANGING FASTER THAN WE’VE EVER KNOWN.
The only certainty is uncertainty. However, the speed of pace change is quickening faster than ever before, so it’s time to adapt what you do, think differently, in the words of Nike; let’s just do it.
70% of consumers increased online purchases due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United Kingdom from March 2020 to February 2021.
As a consequence of lockdown, customers are thinking faster, making decisions more quickly about your brand and changing their approach. In 2022, to grow your business faster than the competition, you need to change your approach too!
What’s changed?
• Your customers think differently, so you must think and act differently too
• Barriers to entry are lower, so expect more competition
• Your competitors know more about you and your customers than you think, so you need to understand how they compete, where they are going and how you can mitigate what they are doing
• Then differentiate your own business against your competitors using themes, messages and images that resonate, engage and empower potential audiences to contact you and buy
• Spending on social media has doubled since pre lockdown, so getting standout is more difficult. Be memorable and measure everything. If you can measure it, you can control it. Many believe the high fee-based agency model of Google and social media ads is no longer effective, especially for those with lower budgets
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? DEFINITELY WORTH A MENTION
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SCO (Search Channel Optimization) can improve awareness without the significant additional cost of paid media, they can produce more consistent results without spikes and get greater reach at lower cost.
Benefits of SEO:
1. Lower cost: Search traffic is free, unlike paying for Ads
2. Organic search traffic is more consistent (and with potentially higher response rates) without the spikes of ads (once you get high ranking)
3. You have the potential to reach larger audiences
A BIG OPPORTUNITY
Financiers used to say ‘‘invest when the guns are blazing, and sell when the trumpets are sounding’’.
They believe all change is an opportunity to make money.
Today is an unprecedented opportunity to improve your competitiveness, increase your leads and conversion rates, sell more, and get more repeat business, but first it’s time to invest in your strategic marketing.
THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY, BUT YOUR WINNING STRATEGY OF 3 YEARS AGO WON’T WORK NOW.
We’ve experienced the biggest changes in purchasing habits in the history of this planet, a direct result of lockdown and your strategic marketing must reflect this
GO WHERE THE PUCK IS GOING
You need to understand where consumers’ needs are going, in marketing speak; we ‘go where the puck is going’ (to quote Wayne Gretzky, who scored more ice hockey goals than anyone in Canadian Ice hockey history). But what does that mean?
We go where the best fit opportunities for your business will be. But opportunities open and close all the time, so you need to keep track of customer needs, the changing market dynamics including uncontrollable factors like regulation, technology and sustainability, and of course competitor activity.
We grew a pension business by £300m by identifying a piece of regulation before anyone else. You can do this too!
Start with your existing and then your potential customers, what do they think of you (versus the competition) and what could you do better?
According to David Yarrow the famous photographer, the digitally native younger generations (Generation Z=10-25yrs) make decisions about his art in 28 milliseconds, (contrast that with Baby Boomers (Age 58-67), anecdotally at 30 seconds. Generation Z are hard wired to make decisions more quickly and they think very differently too.
My daughter can scan all of my wife’s phone display in a fraction of a second, identify a single email amongst 20 that tells her what she’s getting for her birthday, it’s frightening!
Do you really know how your customers think? ‘You can swim with the fish but you will never be a fish.’ (Jacques Cousteau).
Younger generations are more anxious (1 in 8 children were off school in the UK in January 22). They don’t just buy big brands, they are their own brands (just think about that for a second), they want something different! So, you need to differentiate more than ever before, and continually keep differentiating. Your strategy and your proposition must be continuously evaluated, developed, and improved.
Younger consumers place increasing importance on environmentalism, ethics, and the credibility and aspirations of business owners, and its infectious as they have the biggest impact up on the next older group (the Millennials).
Let’s put this into perspective, my 21-year-old son invested in Gamestock to protect it against a short selling Melvin Capital (perceived as big business putting one over a brand the youngsters identified with). He was happy to lose a significant amount of his hard-earned money to stand up for the principles of a generation. You need to understand your target customers if you are going to sell to them.
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT AD SPEND AND MARKETING FUNNELS
We’ve all been encouraged by agencies to spend more on advertising based upon a Marketing funnel approach, but to quote Steve Bartlett (founded Social Chain) ‘the agency model is dead’.
A better and more agile approach is to create strategy based upon continual analysis of markets and customer needs (insight), then target the right customers for your business, the ones who are best fit for your proposition now and in the future. Great products sell themselves because they fit the needs of the target group better than the competition.
CREATE A TAILORED STRATEGY AND THEN STAND OUT COMMUNICATIONS
Once these best fit segments (groups of similar needs) are identified and prioritised, your communications can be tailored, with powerful themes, messages and images that resonate, engage, and empower existing and potential customers to act, you want them to contact you, press CTA (Call to Action) buttons, to make enquiries and to purchase.
Spending money on advertising and measuring through AB testing, without detailed prior insight is just spending money on a broken journey, it’s like throwing darts in the dark.
There’s a lot more to great strategic marketing, like when and how to develop products and markets and in what order, understanding competitor positioning and then evaluating the best opportunities, so contact us for further help.
We’re experts at this so get in touch, there is a structured way to do this. Freewheeling opportunism is the not the secret of success.
In the meantime, our 5XR Approach Model will give you a great start!
THE 5XR APPROACH MODEL
Stage 1: Your winning strategy cascades from continuous analysis into the landscape, audience, and markets.
Stage 2: Develop a Tailored Focused strategy
The outcome of the analysis provides the strategic direction, who to target and how.
Stage 3: Develop Stand out Communications
Create standout themes, messages and images that encourage potential customers to contact you. We help brand your business, build awareness, to increase leads and hits on your site. If you can measure it, you can improve it and control it.
’’The winning strategy cascades from continual market and competitor analysis, and should precede he development of standout communications.’’ John Macleod, 5XR
Stage 4: Sales Conversion
We encourage potential customers to contact you, then improve conversion rates with detailed analytics and UX /CX specialists to analyse the customer journey and optimise your website and communications. We aim to get more new business and then to get repeat business.
There’s a lot more to selling online and offline than most people realise, so get in touch to find out more or read our blog on selling skills (read here).
Stage 5: Iteration
In rapidly changing times, it’s imperative to continuously repeat the Approach, iterate each of the 5 steps to scale and accelerate your business growth.
‘‘5XR believe the winners will be more agile, will change their strategy and their proposition (products and services) more frequently. They will benchmark and improve everything they do based upon analytics and UX (User experience feedback to improve customer experiences), they will more quickly target the right customers with a proposition that fits their customers’ needs much better than the competition and will scale their businesses quicker.’’
Does it work?
At Carolin Stone Jewellery we increased sales by over 400% in each of the last 2 years by carrying out detailed market audits and identifying a new market space. At Hypership we increased sales by over 100% adding value in many areas including strategy and sales, and at Barclays we increased sales by 120% and 170% over consecutive years in their self invested pension business using exactly this approach.
AUTHOR: John Macleod
john.macleod@5xr.co.uk
+44 7501 79 3679
BIO: John Macleod is an X winner of the Dassault 7-week FinTech challenge (Nov’16) and won the Fed Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force Top Technology Award (Dec’17) against 200 other competitors.
He’s an X director of the largest stockbroker in the UK, and Head of Pensions and Head of Broker sales at Barclays where he increased sales by triple digits for 2 consecutive years. Now Director of Strategy at CSJ where sales increased 10X over the last 2 years and a founding director of 5XR.
