Economic uncertainty and volatility characterize the current global business environment. In good times, corporations scramble to meet demand and add capacity while standing out from the competition, and at the same time feeling particularly attracted to a growing and robust market.
In challenging times, businesses struggle to encourage reluctant clients and control costs while retaining sufficient resources and personnel to respond promptly when the market evolves and recovers. Whether the market conditions are good or bad, there are multiple opportunities for corporations to leverage their preparedness to remain competitive and maintain steady growth.
Having a clear business vision is one of the initial steps to staying competitive during a recession. A clear business vision helps you stay agile and secure and keeps your customers returning.
Every business has experienced unprecedented and unique challenges in the past two years.
All corporations are struggling to remain flexible. With changes such as transitioning to remote working to minimize risk and improve satisfaction to create time for major commitments, organizations are trying to understand specific conditions that promote business survival.
Security is a major concern. Corporations that do not express their vulnerabilities to a cyber security expert will likely face additional challenges, such as data breaches that ultimately cripple the business. With the availability of numerous competitors in the market, some organizations are increasingly struggling to ensure customer satisfaction. They must closely monitor their social media channels and make it easier for customers to contact them.
Online competition is growing rather stiff. You and your company renew and revise your online platforms to reflect your company ethos, expertise, and skills. Developing SEO-oriented content and looking for emerging trends could also help you with customer engagement.
Employee health is important so you must research emerging trends and create opportunities for workers to raise their health issues and concerns. Flexible working hours will also allow employees to thrive in other areas of their lives.
Businesses need to be very intentional about how they earn and use money. Decisive action on such priorities is a necessity. Identifying and implementing these crucial things amidst shaky, unprecedented markets is one of the initial steps to remaining competitive.
Many investors and executives assume it can leverage customer-data capabilities to secure unbeatable competitiveness. The more customers you retain, the higher the amount of data you can analyze through machine-learning tools to help you create products that attract more customers.
Clear and broad data understanding helps you understand what services and products are leveraging the biggest cash influx, which consumer segments are generating the most business, and the issues such transactions are solving.
Gathering customer data and using it to develop better services and products is an age-old technique, but the process was difficult to scale up, was limited in scope, and had untrustworthy info. For some traditional manufacturers, it implied holding focus groups, conducting customer surveys, and crunching sales data. However, the sales data did not directly connect to individual customers. Since focus groups and surveys are time-consuming and expensive, firms only collected a percentage of data from a small number of clients. Whether this data supported your business vision is debatable.
The advent of new technologies and the cloud transformed this dynamic drastically, allowing corporations to process vast amounts of data quickly.
Internet-oriented services and products can now collect customer information, including usage patterns, GPS location, social media posts, communications, choice of content, search behavior, and personal details.
Data-enabled learning is now a very powerful tool compared to companies’ previous techniques to gain consumer insights.
In the Sigma Six toolbox, the Pareto Priority Index taps into a project’s data and the potential for success, associated costs, and implementation timelines. When you factor in all these inputs, you create a formula for objective metric assessments for projects.
Employing this tool helps you design a successful, data-driven strategy serving as an antecedent for subsequent automation projects. You can also implement the methodology for quality improvement initiatives.
As the economy rebounds from the ripples of downturns, a marketer’s role has become more pivotal to a business’ success. Members of the Forbes Agency Council explore some of the biggest challenges marketers face. These may include:
There are things companies should do on an ongoing basis to identify new opportunities and support their business vision.
Examine your cash flow to ensure you have sufficient funding for critical operations. This evaluation should include a detailed assessment of funding sources and potential vulnerabilities.
Conduct a thorough assessment of the company’s overhead and eliminate those that do not have a direct connection to cash flow generation. This is the first step to implementing cost reductions.
Examine your customer base to identify the most profitable segments and additional services and products you can sell to existing clients. Such an analysis will reveal whether you are spending more on specific customers and what you need to do to shed them.
Marketing your business is an ongoing process. Investing in your marketing efforts reflects your business’ future viability. There are also opportunities for capturing a greater market share from competitors lagging in their marketing activities.
Finally, some firms in your industry may go out of business. This creates an opportunity for you to grow your business’ customer base. You should design focused strategies that target these consumers as an efficient and powerful tool to increase your market share and sales.
Power BI allows you to automate your reporting distribution by creating a system that consistently and continuously gives you actionable insights into your data inputs to support your business vision. This, in turn, results in better decision-making and subsequent business growth.
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