3 Key Business Growth Strategies to Close Out 2018

The end of the year is in sight but it’s not time to slow down. The final months of a year is a great time to reflect on successes, consider areas that need improvement, and continue ongoing brainstorming for new initiatives and plans. There’s always room for growth; key areas to work on are market research, social outreach, and resource management and planning.

IWI Consulting Group offers IT and Sage consulting services for enterprises who are looking to improve their efficiency and growth, plus transition from traditional practices to the digital realm. With over 100 plus years of combined expertise in various industries and with combined technological knowledge, we can help your business implement Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management solutions for a competitive advantage. Below are three areas that are important to not only keep an eye on but to make pillars of your company’s entire growth strategy.

1. Include Trend-watching in Growth Marketing

Your market research already includes competencies in areas like targeting your demo, testing and feedback, sales, advertising, pricing, distribution, and more. It’s important to add trend-watching to this list to help bolster the others.

Before developing or launching anything new, take the time to study trends in your niche area, and in adjacent and related ones, to see what customers, influencers, competitors, and companies from which you’re trying to differentiate yourself are talking about, moving away from, and excited to buy.

Get to know the average lifespan of trends and develop an eye for quality ones that show a substantial shift in culture, ways of thinking, and innovations, versus a hot trend that will quickly burn out. Make this an ongoing and seasonal process. Good places to start are your social platforms like Instagram.

2. Improve Your Social Strategy

It’s well-known that utilizing social media platforms is a necessity in 2018 and in the future. Yet using social platforms effectively is still elusive for many.

It’s not enough to simply open a Facebook and Twitter account: you need to increase your following and engagement to grow your brand and reach new customers. Providing quality content is the cornerstone of a social feed people will want to follow. Consider why customers would want to follow a brand. Receiving useful information through regular posts, helpful tips through reading blogs, interesting and entertaining media, access to special deals and opportunities, and learning about what’s next.

Monitor your channels and respond to people and take part in community-building activities. Though it’s wise to register your brand name on all platforms to reserve and protect the name from being taken by someone else, it isn’t necessary to actively use all social media sites. Know which couple platforms your target customers use and spend time and resources making those great.

3. Enhance Your Enterprise Resource Planning

With Sage Enterprise Management software which was formerly known as Sage X3, you can integrate your departments and processes, create a coherent system of workflows, access centralized data, monitor inventory and orders, review and approve expenses, and easily create reports using one program.

Risk and costs are simpler to manage and it’s easier to identify opportunities with improved insights. And, with cloud capabilities, you aren’t confined to the office computers, nor are your employees.

IWI Consulting Group can help you make sense of your data and create strategies for customer engagement and growth. Your customers are fully digitized as should your enterprise be. You can call us to learn more about our whole suite of ERP and CRM software solutions.

Growth is all about accessing the right information, applying it to your situation, reaching customers and engaging with them, and tightening up the efficiencies of your operation. Digital resources can help you achieve all these goals, and IWI Consulting Group is here to help you achieve them.