Having a healthy business growth is the dream of many, if not all entrepreneurs. After all the investment in both our time and money,of course, we will want it to grow bigger and bigger.

Although in any business, there are a lot of aspects, departments, and teams which each have its own respective function, arguably marketing will be the most important in solidifying a business’s growth. Thus, a great marketing plan and a great execution are highly essential.

In this article, we will discuss how to build and execute an actionable marketing plan, and how to utilize it to drive your business’s growth efficiently.

1. Envision Your Goals

The first step in achieving your business growth is to set a goal, both for your company and for your personal finance. A realistic goal must be based on a thorough evaluation of past achievements, so first, let us answer this question:

On average for the past three years, what have your company profits been doing?

• Going down
• Staying flat
• Going up 1-33%
• Going up 34-66%
• Going up 66-100%
• Going up 100% or more

After you’ve understood how your company has performed, set a realistic profit goal for the rest of 2016 and 2017. Make it realistic and clear. The clearer it is, and the easier it is to remember, the more committed you will be to achieve it.

Also, set your personal financial goal; what number will be your ideal monthly, or annual earning? Make sure both your personal and organizational goal are aligned with each other, i.e., don’t take too much of personal earning while you kept your company’s growth target too low.

After you’ve set your goals, we can move on to the necessary steps to achieve it.

2. What Kind of Company Are You?

With so many marketing strategies available, in the end, it will come down to this: There are only three ways to move your company’s growth forward. Depending on the product or service you are providing, and the industry you are in, you can push your growth either by going:

• Faster
  Delivering faster services, pushing your production efficiency to maximize production capacity, etc.
• Cheaper
  Maximizing cost efficiency so that you can charge a more competitive price. In some price-sensitive industries, cheaper is always better.
• Better
  Increasing the value of your product/service through many means, so that you can either charge a higher premium or give more to your customers without charging a higher price.

Which one do you think your company, with the current team, can maximize the effort on? Focus on it.

What then, will be the purpose of going faster, cheaper, or better? It is either to:

• get more customers

or

• Get your customers to spend more often

Or even better, you can do both at once! To achieve those two goals, there are ten specific ways we deemed the Profit Driver.

3. Selecting Your Profit Driver

The ten profit drivers you are going to focus on are:

• Profit Driver 1 – Get more leads
• Profit Driver 2 – Produce more Meaningful Communication
• Profit Driver 3 – Get more Sales Engagements
• Profit Driver 4 – Get more Clients
• Profit Driver 5 – Get more Money per Transaction
• Profit Driver 6 – Get more Clients to Reactivate
• Profit Driver 7 – Get more Frequent Purchases
• Profit Driver 8 – Get more Products and Services Sold (yours and others)
• Profit Driver 9 – Retain more Clients
• Profit Driver 10 – Get more Referrals

Can you do it all at once? Definitely! But it’s a lot better to focus, take action, and succeed on one that will benefit your company the most.

So go on, figure out which one do you think will benefit your company in its current state. Write it down if necessary. It’s time to brainstorm with yourself and the team to build a strategic plan for the profit driver. But don’t worry, we will still guide you along the way.

How to best determine a strategic plan? It’s to determine which strength do you need to build to achieve the goal.

4. Building Your Marketing Muscle

Here are the notable marketing strengths you must have in this modern business world of 2016:

• Content Marketing

You’ve heard it a lot: content is king. Do you have the necessary team to develop high-quality contents with both the right messages and the effective engagements?

• Core message

What’s one of the most common reasons for business failures? It’s the failure to communicate the core value of the company and its product and service to key customers.

• Personal Sales

Up close and personal is still one of, if not the best way to get more purchase.

• Public Relations

In this crowded world of social media where everything is ‘social’, maintaining a healthy public relation is harder than ever before.

• Partners

Both internal and external. Having the right partner to run a business with is essential. Having strong partnerships with media, influencer, and many others are also very important.

• Traditional Advertising

Who said traditional advertising is dead? It’s just you will need to know where to look, and what to use.

• Digital Advertising

On the other hand, the digital advertising world is getting very saturated. It’s easy to fall into the trap of utilizing the wrong ones.

List down which areas your company is strong at, and which can be improved. Would you need to invest in more people? Or even scrap the team you have and build from scratch?

But remember, it’s a lot better to focus on strengthening your strength than fixing your weaknesses, so let us do it like this: Pick one or two of your biggest strength out of the seven, and build a strategic plan on how to strengthen it further.

Remember, the goal of strengthening your muscle is to achieve your Profit Driver, so keep that as your focal point in making decisions.

5. Plan (And Execute) Your Profit Driver Campaign

After you’ve got all the right weapons and tools in place, it’s time to start planning a campaign to achieve your Profit Driver. Set a campaign plan, execute it, and continuously evaluate it until you’ve achieved your goal. Base your campaign on the strength of your marketing muscle we’ve discussed before, and always focus on your goals.

If you have any trouble in planning or executing your Profit Driver campaign, don’t worry! We can be your partner in achieving your goals.

Contact us now for a FREE 1-hour consultation and we can help you to plan and execute an effective Profit Driver campaign.