How Continuous Business Improvement Can Build a Competitive Edge

October 22, 2021 by Patricia Bennett

When you hear the words continuous business improvement, what comes to mind? Do you think of targets and KPI’s? Endless board meetings that focus on the strategic growth of the company? Or reams of data and information that need to be analyzed to ascertain the business’s strategic trajectory?

Continuous #business improvement can be defined as the ongoing process to improve an #organization’s products, services, or processes. Click To Tweet

It is the empowering of employees and managers to solve problems and improve the efficiency of their work processes. So, it doesn’t particularly need to involve long, complicated processes, rather smaller adjustments to day-to-day functions that will allow the business to continually grow.

So, with this in mind, we thought that we would look at how these processes can help scale your business and what you can start putting in place today to help your business grow.

Have an In-Depth, Adaptable Business Proposal

You might be thinking to yourself, “I can skip this point as I have already been in business and running for a few years,” “I am well beyond a business proposal.” However, a well-written business proposal is the foundation of your company whether you are just starting, or have been in business for a while.

It not only establishes who you are, what your offerings are, who your customer is, and what your competitive edge is, but it also establishes short, medium, and long-term goals. This is your company’s blueprint, and a good proposal should be updated regularly as your business grows. Also, each project proposal sample should be in line with it.

Business team

With the right proposal software, you can create and manage relevant and up-to-date proposals. Whether these are going out to qualified leads regularly or even potential investors or business partners, you will want real-time, relevant proposals ready to go out at all times.

The right solution will also provide you with metrics and a live activity feed for you to track your prospects, have an overview of what is in the pipeline, provide you with accurate forecasting, and reduce the bottlenecks of prospects.

Project discovery phase helps you to create your company’s blueprint, and then a proposal should be updated regularly as your business grows.

Shift Your Social Management Strategy

Social media has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Not only has the functionality radically altered over the last few years, but also the ways and means of interacting and engaging with fans and followers have changed.

Social Media

One of the biggest pitfalls of modern clients with regard to social media is being stuck in a 2018 social media strategy. While engagement and interaction on posts are still important, metrics such as click-throughs and open rates far outweigh mere post engagement.

Furthermore, followers and the number of fans on each platform are diminished if the majority of the followers are bots or are not quality leads you need to manage and potential converting customers.

It is vital to shift your strategy to developing a community on social platforms rather than simply building numbers for an effective social strategy.

Suppose you’re on Instagram, for example. In that case, there are a number of platforms and solutions that allow you to increase your following with organic Instagram followers and ensure that they are real accounts with the potential of converting to paying customers. They will also be able to assist with engagement, content promotion, and real-time metrics and reports.

Have Real-Time Insight Into Your Metrics

Not only do you need to have an overview of your Instagram followers, but you will also need a keen insight into all aspects of your business.

If you mostly work in the digital space, you will need a constant overview of what traffic is coming to your site, how it is behaving, and where it is going. Luckily, there are tons of tools that you can use that will allow you to keep track of everything that is happening.

Say, for instance, you are launching a brand new campaign. It goes out to your mailing list, is sent to your affiliate partners, is posted across all of your social platforms, and goes live on your site. You will want to track how successful that campaign is, right? You will want to see how much traffic comes into your site and how much of that traffic is converted into paying customers.

Competitor Analysis

You will also want to know which platforms generated the traffic and where it came from. Were the social posts effective? Or did the emails drive the most traffic? Google Analytics is a staple tool for you to monitor this traffic and watch how it behaves on your site. So, once on the site, does it bounce? Or does it go through the sales funnel?

Each social platform and email tool also has metric reporting capabilities. You are able to track opens, click-throughs, and overall engagement with all of these. You are then able to put all of this data together as a full analysis of the success rates of all of your campaigns. This will, in turn, help you effectively strategize your marketing strategy going forward with what really works.

Conclusion

One of the last things we can advise is continuously keeping up to date with what is happening in your industry and with your customer. Remaining competitive in this current environment means that you have to know what your customers want and need, even before they do.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *