The Five Most Critical Factors to get Business Growth

Don’t get distracted by all the fancy tools you may see in your marketing toolbox. They are important, but only within a relevant context. Tools cannot be utilized effectively if there is not a nail to be smacked into the wall, or a light that needs to be fixed, or a wall that needs to be patched. There are circumstances that need to be in place before any particular tool can be used in an effective way.

The most critical factors that need to be in place for business growth to work are the following five items:

1. A clear understanding of the target market or the target audience that you are pursuing. These are your ideal customers or clients. If you don’t know who to aim at, how can you know what needs require satisfying?
2. A positioning for your company or your product or service. That positioning needs to explain very quickly who you are as a company, what you stand for, what values you have and why you are important to your target audience.
3. Your positioning needs to be differentiated – in other words it can’t be the same as or copied from a competitor simply because you can’t define it yourself .
4. Your positioning also needs to be relevant in the eyes of your target audience. If you don’t have something unique and appropriate to say or show, you will simply blend in and not be noticed at all. And that has absolutely no value to you.  So having a positioning that is differentiated, but at the same time relevant to your target audience is the ultimate starting point of any kind of business growth process. If you have a good look at your products, your services or your company and you critically analyze what is unique and different, then you can position yourself in an appropriate manner. If you can’t clearly identify what makes you different and relevant then it will be very difficult to position yourself in the eyes of the target audience. Don’t fall into the trap of saying, “My target audience is everyone”, because no one has the unlimited resources required to reach everyone. So you are going to have to take the bull by the horns and be a little more selective – you may have some primary target audiences and some secondary target audiences and that is fine. Make sure you segment your market in such a way that you can focus your efforts on defining a positioning for your products, service or company, which is then differentiated and relevant in the eyes of that target audience. Then the final step becomes self-evident – to create the final building block:
5. A brand and an identity around that positioning. If your brand is complicated or your brand does not reflect that positioning, differentiation and relevance, you will find it hard to break through into the minds of your target audience.

To summarize, once you have these five pieces in place:
1. Target market
2. Positioning
3. Differentiation
4. Relevance, and
5. Brand
you are able to translate them into communications tools and in fact, the choice of those communications tools will be made that much easier. These five items will help to define what may or may not work for you.  They will help you to define your message in the most appropriate manner.  Without a really meaningful ansd appropriate message, you will not be successful in communicating with your prospective customer.  Take the time and do these steps properly – it will be absolutely worth the effort in the long run.

Get started with creating a new reality for yourself.  Without these critical steps you will probably not become a leader in your market, and that is what will make you most successful.

Neville Pokroy is a principal of Mastermind Solutions Inc., a Toronto-based consulting firm, and leads the marketing practice. He has more than 30 years of experience in corporate marketing and consulting in entrepreneurial businesses across an extensive range of industries. His focus is on helping companies with a vision to achieve business growth.  He can be reached at (905)886-2235 or neville@mastermindsolutions.ca

Neville is the author of Big Bang for Business: 8 Steps to Create Explosive Growth and Success.