Developing Your Business Strategy – Answering the How Question

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Tags – Developing Business Strategy

Given the fact that I teach Strategic Management at a UK university, I should be able to answer the following question:

How Business Strategy is Developed?

I will not be giving you line by line instructions of what to do. At a deeper level, you need to do some form of analysis that covers the internalities and externalities.

This blog is more interested in the concept of developing a business strategy. How you put it to paper, even if hypothetically, depends on you.

And I know that the above question is grammatically incorrect. This leads me well into my first suggestion.

Find Out What People Want

Knowing what people want is a great place to begin from. I understand that it is not always possible to state what people want. But, technology has made our life easy here.

That grammatically incorrect question up there is searched by 20 people per month, only in the UK. How do I know it? Simply, through some keyword research. In fact, keyword research forms the basis of digital marketing.

There are a multitude of tools available to do your keyword research. At Axies Digital, we use Keyword Keg and Answer the Public. Using these tools, all you need to do is add a few base terms relevant to what you are trying to do. Based on the provided info, the tools will then suggest you an endless supply of what people are looking into. Your job here then is to translate this search into a viable business idea.

For instance, to find the keywords for this blog, all I typed in was “business strategy”. And, here we are.

And, of course, you have the option to figure out what people want by other means. Or, you could choose to build a business based on developing an audience. You have multiple options here. Depending on how you think overall, take your pick.

Now let’s move onto how you can fulfil the need that you have just found out. You have two distinct options here.

A. Know Your End Goal

Your first option is to backward engineer your strategy. In order to apply this, you should know your exact end product or service and then draw backwards towards the options you have to fulfil the goal.

To be completely honest with you, I am not a big fan of this approach. And, there is a simple reason for it.

When the end goal is set too firmly, your business may lose the necessary flexibility to provide a product or a service that solves a problem. At the end of the day, you are not doing the business just for yourself. Your end goal is to provide something that is consumed by an audience.

And, keyword research and development of end product is only relevant at a given time. You may work on the whole project and end up finding out that the market has moved on. There has to be some level of allowed movement from the central position as the market around you changes.

This is where your next option comes.

B. Agile / Lean Approach

In Agile / Lean development, keyword research becomes more valuable.

The aim of keyword research is not to answer the question – what will be successful. Keyword research merely represents what people are interested in. And, there is a fine line between a people’s interest and how much, if anything, they will pay for it.

This is why the minimum viable product (MVP) works for businesses.

After understanding people’s interest, all you need to develop is a product that won’t break the bank, but will get your foot through the door. The stages of development afterwards are determined by your target audience.

But, this is where you need to find a balance between blindly following and using your judgement to make the right decisions. There is a greater mix of understanding in developing customer-driven, personalised products than credit is given in Lean / Agile development of products or services. You may never produce a product if you keep making changes, based on everything people say.

We have gone through this whole process before clicking with our Digital Marketing service across 6 UK cities. We have defined our processes and goals as we have moved forward. The biggest ingredient, values, were set from the beginning. Oh yeah, I forgot, you need to know what you stand for.

To learn more, get in touch today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]