Brand awareness is a constant battle for businesses. This is a consistent truth whether you run a large operation or a local, small business. Building a brand is all about persistence and smart money management. In order to succeed, you’ll need to maintain a strong balance between advertising and promotional spending, and uphold financial strength across other sectors of your business plan. Keeping this balance may feel precarious, but with a firm foundation, the persistence to never give up, and a great business plan, anyone can succeed at developing their brand into a household name.
Start with a strong plan.
The first thing that any business should do when working to expand their footprint is to utilize the tools of productivity in order to create or build upon their business plan. This is the best way forward when working on a new product, service, or even a totally new business idea. With the help of a system like WorkBoard, businesses can plan their future in a rich environment that’s complete with the professional tools that some of the largest companies in the world rely on to enhance their own business processes.
WorkBoard is a provider of systems like the OKR framework. OKR is a goal planning and tracking mentality that stands for objectives and key results. While setting objectives, your leadership team can really dig into the processes and plans that make your business tick. This phase of the OKR process is dedicated to uncovering and building upon the bones of your operation. Many companies—especially newer ones—are still unsure of the elements that make up their primary priorities. With the OKR framework, your team must spend a considerable amount of time just thinking about where you want to bring your business and brand in the future. These ruminations are crucial to planning a future of growth and greater market penetration. However, many businesses fail to take this time for planning and simply jump into the market and hope to discover their direction as they go.
Soon after you uncover the objectives that you want to see obtained for your brand, you will set key results. These consist of five to six midstream goals that are measurable as a number or percentage. Google recommends this framework for setting and following through on key results because it allows for a constant tracking ability that simply isn’t inherent to ‘yes or no’ milestones. With the key results framed in this manner, you can receive constant updates on how your team is progressing on each task and make alterations or priority shifts as needed in order to meet the overriding objectives that have been set for the company. In addition, an OKR framework is publicly available, so each member of your team is on display for their colleagues. This leads team members into a natural, friendly competition and drives productivity through the roof.
Keep your books in order.
Managing your finances during a pandemic has proven to be a unique and difficult challenge that businesses all over the United States and the world have had to contend with during 2020. Keeping a handle on your financial health is essential to creating the growth necessary to expand your brand and find success in business.
With services like ReconArt, these processes are made far easier and can help you focus on the goals of the company rather than line item reconciliation processes that are a complete pain to get through. With the help of an automated process, you can reclaim the incredible amount of time it takes to manually match line items in expense reports and budgeting for the quarter. This can really drain even the most professional teams, and without the need to conduct reconciliation processes on your own, you can refocus all that energy back into the growth strategies that demand your constant attention as well.
Take chances in order to enjoy improved successes.
Taking risks is a core value in the business process. Without the inherent risk of a business proposal, there would be no growth opportunities—both in the service industry and in your financial reward. Taking chances on an idea is the cornerstone of great business, but of course, you must find the right opportunities to go all-in for.
Take a page from Vivek Ramaswamy’s book. He’s the CEO of Roivant, a pharmaceutical company that’s changing the game. He has recently secured over $1 billion in funding to revive older drug trials from other research labs in order to provide life-saving medications to those who need them most—and at a discount. Consumers are keen to the fact that prescription drugs are things you should never pay the retail price for. With the availability of discount and generic drugs that reduce costs drastically, most of us take the reduced rates happily. However, drug prices still remain far too high. By purchasing the rights to medications that were stopped in trials due to expense issues rather than the science itself, Ramaswamy and Roivant stand to add many essential prescription medications into circulation for the benefit of those who need these alternatives to the high priced options.
In your own business, you need to take chances as well. Regardless of the service that you’re providing to your customers and community, it’s essential to go big on marketing and promotional materials for the products you’re selling and the services you’re offering. Take a risk on yourself in order to find success. Without the belief in your own vision and brand, you’ll never be able to go all-in on the business plan that you have painstakingly developed. You and your team are highly intelligent experts in your field, so the only thing that’s really preventing you from continuing to expand your footprint and financial health is a fear of failure. If you’ve done your research and believe in the business, then all that’s left to do is take a chance on the right marketing avenue or product launch. With strong fundamentals, the rest will fall into place.