Business Direction: 3 Ways Even the Oldest Industries Keep up to Date

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself the difference between a business who can't seem to get out of survival mode and the confident entrepreneurs who lead growing enterprises? It's a question any aspiring business person should be asking themselves. It all boils down to marketing. In business, financial success is a directly proportional to sales. Every successful business persons have clear marketing strategies that make everything they do a tad more effective.

Many old businesses out there give too much focus to routine marketing tactics such as blogging, optimizing their landing page, advertising, tweeting, sending email et cetera and forget to come up with a proper strategy. For these tactics to bear fruit, a business must work on the decisions that will improve their performance. Simply put, a strategy is the decisions that you need to make your marketing tactics give better results. A marketing strategy is a basis of:

• The creation of brand awareness.
• Generating interest in your brand.
• Making new sales.
• Keeping your customers engaged.

No business can attain real financial success without a proper marketing strategy. For it to be successful, many factors need to be considered in the creation of a strategy. Here are five important decisions that old businesses need to evaluate to bring sanity into their companies and improve performance:

Who is Your Target Customer?

Come up with a narrowly defined set of target customers. Who will you be serving as your customer? Clearly defining a narrow set of customers should be your first order of business. You can't do effective marketing sans this step, and yes, it may mean saying no to some potential customers who might buy from you but ultimately distract from your goals. You will need to master a high level of discipline for that. Never forget your internal customers: your staff. Ensure that the working conditions are safe, sanitary, and provide an atmosphere for productivity and innovation.

What Unique Benefits Are You Offering?

Establish the unique benefit that your business offers to clients. Does whatever you are selling — product or service — deliver the benefits that your customers are really looking for? That should be the center of your business. If the answer is no, you have some work to do to improve your product/service.

Take the time to do some research in your market, your own offerings, and any research or scholarly information that can offer insight into what you might improve. For example, if your company provides industrial plumbing supplies, look for resources like infographics on advanced water treatment , statistics on modern construction, etc. that might reveal a product/market/service you’re missing.

Know Your Competition

Understand who your real competition is and study them carefully. If someone (a potential customer) has a problem and is looking for a solution, they will be on the lookout for options to compare against what you offer. Your product or service needs to be properly differentiated from your competition. For you to be able to differentiate your products, you need to understand who your competition is.

Come up with a brand that's clearly different from your competition. Picking out your competition is one thing, and making sure that your product or service clearly stands out from theirs' is another. If done right, it's a very simple process. List down your plans and rank them in terms of priority on your home page. Avoid overcomplicating things – people just need to know one or two things to make a decision.

The final part of knowing your competition comes from your own capacity to understand your market. If your outdated degree, or lack thereof, is impeding your progress, take it upon yourself to educate yourself. Just by searching “ mba no gmat online ” you can find programs that can improve your knowledge on your own time without having to take the extra time traveling to and from a school.

Running a successful business doesn't have to be hard. If you have a successful marketing strategy — regardless of what you are selling — you will be successful. And that's the only way old industries can keep up with this fast paced market.