Planning and strategies
Strategy and planning
Strategic planning, developing detailed action plans, preparing them for implementation, and evaluating their success after setting the company’s long-term goals. It is a theory that focuses on integrating different departments within a business to achieve its strategic goals
Stages of strategic planning that must be taken into account:
Conduct a SWOT analysis to discover (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats)
These are where you should start. A good knowledge of your business or the business for which you work and what it offers, products or services enables you to build your strategy on the basis and establish long-term goals. And then we go to:
Market research and study to collect and analyze data that will help us develop a business plan and expansion methods.
Analyzing direct and indirect competitors, we monitor their business, prices, and online activities to come up with better ideas, discover what they do right, learn from them, and what mistakes they make to avoid.
Set SMART Goal (Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Realistic-Time) General Goals These goals should be measurable to determine if they are right for you.
By researching your target audience from which we can learn about the language used and the ideas it attracts, you’ll get a bigger picture of who you are and who you’re communicating with.
After implementing all the data and information from your deep research, you now have a closer picture of your business, a clear understanding of your market, a good knowledge of the market competition, and your specific target audiences.
Frequently measure your key plans and strategy for your business to achieve your goals.
When it comes to planning there are important things to consider:
1) What is your business providing?
Here is the place you should start from, good knowing your business or the business you work for, and what it provides, product or service make you capable of building your strategy on a basis and create your extended plans.
There is a simple way to identify the business which is the SWOT analysis, it’s a common way to figure out the business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
In SWOT, we divide it into two groups: internal factors and external factors.
The internal factors are strengths and weaknesses.
In strengths, we name our strengths points like good quality, pricing, and packaging.
In weakness, we name those weaknesses points like few branches, no website, and not active online.
We use this data to focus on our strengths and develop them even more. And for the weaknesses, we study them to enhance what we can.
The external factors are the opportunities and threats.
Opportunities mean everything happens in the market, with the competitors or in the industry itself we can use it to our advantage.
Threats, everything might cause any damage to us is a threat like economic issues, new competitors, or bad reviews.
2) Market study
What happens in your market? Is it getting bigger or turning down? Are there any opportunities coming? Answering those questions will make you have a better understanding of your market, your position in it, and ideas on how to obsess over new market share.
3) Competitors analysis
Competitors are direct and indirect, always monitor their work, prices, and online activities to come up with better ideas and to discover the things they do right and learn from it and the mistakes they are making to avoid them.
4) Objectives
One of the most important stages of planning is setting the company’s objectives. To determine your objectives you should answer some questions like where do you want to go with your business? What do you want to accomplish? What are your long term goals and the short ones?
When you set a company’s objective, avoid general ones like big sales, high annual profits. Also, avoid unrealistic goals.
Your goals must be SMART. by smart we mean:
Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely manner.
Set a specific objective, not general ones.those objectives should be measurable to determine if it is suitable for you.
Can your objective be achieved? You must figure out if your goals can be achieved or not. Also, it should be realistic, for example, you can’t say your goal is to sell a 100k product when you just started your business. one of the important things is the timing, you need to set specific timing to achieve a certain goal.
5) Target audience (persona)
Identifying your audiences is such an important step, take your time to think of: who are your audiences? Where are they? Which channels are they using? When are they online? Their behavior and traditions?
Through your research to answer those questions will make you have a bigger picture of who you are and who you are delivering your message to.
6) Implementation
It’s time to apply all the data and information from your deep research, now you have a closer picture of your business, a clear understanding of your market, good knowledge about your competitors, your objectives are set in a SMART way, and identifying your target audiences.
You are ready, start your work online now.
7) Measurement
It’s not over yet! Your plans and the main strategy for your business should be measured frequently. Why is that!
To know what is good for you and what is not, you can change certain parts or come up with a new plan or even strategy if it’s not achieving your goals.
It’s a tricky phase and some people don’t give it much importance but how would you figure out if you’re achieving whatever you want when you don’t measure your performance! To continuously measure your performance and don’t be afraid of changing your plan or strategy. It might be more successful and suitable for your business.
Whatever you are looking to accomplish starts with planning because great planning leads to great results.
It’s your way to be more successful in your industry.