As you begin to grow your business you should ongoingly review your impact and plan ahead. Businesses used to plan their strategy on a three to five year basis but the pace of change today means that businesses are reviewing and planning on much shorter times frames in order to continue to grow and meet the needs of changing customer expectations. The coronavirus has shown how businesses have been forced to plan on a weekly or 24 hour basis as business owners have pivoted their business models to respond to changing circumstances.
As you grow and scale-up, a strategic review can help you to evaluate your impact and identify priorities and opportunities for growth. Strategic in the sense that you are taking a helicopter 360 degree view of your business which can be done in a rapid and agile way.
Tools such as Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas and McKinsey’s 7S coupled with the use of a SWOT analysis, and gathering of internal and external data and information, can help you to step back out of the immediate running of your business and reflect strategically on it as a whole. Internal conversations, interviews or workshops with your team members or a small sounding board of critical friends, influencers, or key customers, can help you assess your operations and identify key issues and priorities for growth. You may need you need to conduct specific research in a particular area to help you. For example, your review might show that you are at risk of struggling with supply-side capacity to meet the demands of your customers, and that you need to source new suppliers. Or the focus might be on new product or new customer development and assessing the external market and conditions for this.
The Ansoff Matrix is a useful tool for thinking about growth opportunities and strategies. Market research can help you to not only explore these opportunities, but also to test them through minimum viable offers, prototyping, focus groups or conducting primary and secondary research.
Market Penetration
Here you are looking to grow by selling more of your existing products or services to existing or similar customers or markets. This involves selling more of your products or services to existing customers, or finding new customers within your current market or sector.
Market research can help you understand your current customer experience at a deeper level and what it is your customers value most about your products and services. This can be used in your marketing as you seek to attract the attention and awareness of more people. You could build up a B2B lead list of similar customers within your sector or use geodemographic data to help to find your consumer profile in larger datasets. Research can also help you to evaluate the potential of your products and services.
Market Development
In a market development strategy, you are aiming to expand into new markets with your existing products and services. Here, market research can help you to carry out market or customer segmentation to target different groups of businesses or consumers. It can help you to evaluate and assess the viability of a new market, and look at market size, trends, the key players, routes to market, barriers to entry and feedback from influencers and experts. You might need to carry out primary research to identify which marketing and sales channels are going to be most effective to reach new settings and audiences.
Product Development
Here you are creating and developing new products and services targeted at existing customer groups and market sectors. You may be focussed on adapting or improving your products and services or developing new offers.
Market research can help you to gain a deeper understanding of the customer experience, needs and expectations, helping you to adapt the product. And it can help you to test out your product and service with customers. Product development carries greater risk than market penetration
Diversification
This strategy carries the greatest level of risk as you are venturing into the unknown and aiming to sell new products or services to new markets. Market research can help mitigate these risks by helping you to assess the potential of the product or service, as well as understanding the market environment and context you are moving into.
The Ansoff Matrix is a helpful tool for thinking about growth. But like all tools it should not be used in isolation. Supported by market research it can help you explore, assess and plan/test these strategies and do due diligence on opportunities to reduce the risks. A nine box variation of the Ansoff matrix recognises that the realities of business development, for example the modification of products/services rather than being totally new.
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