Why Business Development Is Never A One And Done Project

0
2370

Share on LinkedIn

As part of starting your business, you created a business plan, built a website, created a social media presence, and defined your ideal customer. You’re done, right? Now you just sit back and run your business.

Not exactly. These four examples show how business development is a perpetual process of fine-tuning instead of something you do once and forget.

Living up to your mission

As part of your business plan, you should have listed out your values and your mission statement. Now that your business is up and running, are you living up to your ideals? If you wanted to provide excellent customer service, are you managing that? Do you have a concrete method of tracking customer experience, and how often is it reviewed?

Whatever you set up as your mission and your values, it’s important to periodically review and make sure that you’re keeping to them. These things, after all, are a big part of your brand. Many companies view them as promises to customers. If you are breaking those promises, you will struggle to create long term positive relationships with customers.

If you find that you aren’t living up to your mission, plan out the steps you need to take in order to get back to making the dream reality.

What response are you getting on your social media profiles?

When your business is first building its brand, I recommend that you target a few specific social media networks to avoid getting overwhelmed. Once your company is up and running, it’s good to set some more specific rules about what your social media profile will do for the company, as well as what you hope to achieve in terms of followers, shares, and engagement.

Since social media is still a relatively new player in the online business plan scene, this may be an area where you need to frequently adjust your business’s approach. While social media profiles do not directly correlate to increased sales, there are many things that a business can do with its social media profile – grow its audience, connect with its customers, offer exceptional customer service – that can enhance the buying experience over all, and improve customer retention.

But since so much is changing and in flux in the world of social media, it’s important to keep an eye on the platforms you’re using and making sure your content is continuing to bring in your desired audience.

As new platforms open up, it’s also a good idea to assess them for suitability for your audience.

How’s your website performing?

One aspect of web development is planning out what sort of conversions the website will generate, which pages will direct to others, and how long customers are likely to spend on any given page. While these metrics aren’t the full story of your website’s success, it’s good to review the numbers regularly to make sure that there aren’t problems you didn’t anticipate.

If viewers regularly bounce from your landing page, you should take a look to make sure it isn’t getting found through inaccurate keywords, or having a loading problem.

The SEO and marketing communities usually respond quickly to Google’s announcements with an action steps that web site owners need to take in order to keep their current positions. Panda made us all re-examine how we were using keywords, for example, while the mobile update meant that many designers rushed to ensure that their pages were mobile responsive.

Is your ideal customer who you thought?

When you originally created your product, you might have thought that it would primarily be used by older women, without kids, who live primarily in the Northeast. But as your product’s reach expanded, you found that you were also connecting with younger single mothers who live in the Southwest.

At that point, you need to assess how well your current customer profile is serving your new customers. Is your profile incorrect? Are you reaching a different group because of how your marketing is targeted, or because your marketing reached past your initial plan?

To survive for years to come, your business will need to flex, change, and grow as time and the market develop. For most businesses, it makes sense to regularly assess how well the business is doing meeting its objectives and adjust course as necessary. Talk to your business partners to decide the best spread of time for your company.

Margarita Hakobyan
CEO and founder of MoversCorp.com, an online marketplace of local moving companies and storage facilities. Business women, wife and mother of two with bachelor's degree from the University of Utah with a concentration in International Studies and a Masters Degree also from the University of Utah with a degree in International business.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here