For small businesses, local marketing is the ultimate lead generation tactic. Identify your tactical marketing mix using the 7 Ps of marketing If you can choose the right combination of marketing across product, price, promotion, place, people, process and physical evidence, your marketing strategy is more likely to be a success.
These are Society” — knowing who is being targeted and who is the ideal client; Silo” — identifying the niche(s) the business can dominate; Solution” — recognizing the problems the business can solve that no other businesses can solve; Strategy” — developing a plan; Structure” — accountability, management and compensation of the sales force; and Systems” — the methodology that the business deploys.
Some of the biggest mistakes in business strategy arise when the manager is unable to see past his own nose – for instance, when Detroit’s car giants didn’t spot the trend of smaller cars, unlike the Japanese companies; or when IBM similarly overlooked smaller computers.
4 These percentages are consistent across industries (see figure 5). Survey data also suggests that technology budget allocation is rapidly changing as well: The percentage of technology budget spent on business operations is expected to change from 56 percent today to 47 percent within three years, while the 18 percent spent on innovation today is expected to increase to more than a quarter (26 percent) during the same time period.
As technology and business leaders consider the immense task of creating an ecosystem in which cocreation and innovation thrive, they can begin both by reimagining what technology can do for the business and viewing technology as an opportunity to enable business disruption and create sustainable competitive advantage.