One thing you should do before you invest in any Marketing Growth Project

One thing you should do before you invest in any Marketing Growth Project

The biggest Problem most of our customers struggle with.

Some weeks ago we developed the video you see below this text. The problem described in this video seems a bit exaggerated. Most business owners seem to have a clear understanding of what they want to do next and which growth channels they need to enter.
But if we look at the statistics we also see 9 out of 10 businesses disappear within the first 5 years. Choosing the wrong strategy at the wrong time can be a deadly fault. The concept of corporate stages is described in many business books but somehow the concept seemed lost during the last years. Why should you have a look at stages of development when todays the best companies like Google or Facebook just grew extremely fast within some years.
The problem is our culture features the stars and winners (1 out of 10000) while forgetting about the average small business. Most small business are financed by friends and family and sometimes they get a bank loan.
But now we suggest you watch the video and hopefully get some value out of this.

 

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Growth Project overwhelm syndrom

Have you ever experienced a situation like Jane in this Video.

You start to research possible growth channels and the more you search and explore,
the more channels and opportunities you find:
Social Media
Marketing Automation
Google Adwords
Facebook/Instagram Ads
Inbound Marketing
SEO/SEM
Website redesign
Retargeting
Linkbuilding
Corporate Blogging
Corporate Storytelling
we could go with this list forever and still would miss many options.
In 2016 there were more than 3500 companies  selling you marketing software.
In 2011 there were just 150 companies.
Click on this link to see the full graphic
martech dev 2011-2016

The one Thing

Before you invest in one or several growth channels you should first do some dwork on understanding your own company.
Imagine your Organization like a living organism.
While every organism is 100% unique, it is  also growing through stages and has predictable and repetitive patterns of behavior as it grows and develops. Some of these patterns are healthy others can be dangerous.

New Stages New Challenges

At each new stage of development, your organization is faced with a unique set of challenges. How well or poorly these challenges are addressed has a significant impact on the success or failure of your company.
Leading an organization through stage transitions is not easy, or obvious.
The same methods that produce success in one stage can create failure in the next. 
This is the reason that 8 out of 10 small businesses disappear during the first 5 years. Most of the time they are not able to enter the next stage of a companies development because they do not understand the challenges and tasks they need to master and climb to the nexts stage.
Most Problems appear in predictable patterns and have common causes.The typical growth pattern with a short description of a companies growth phases could be described like this:
1. Incubation Phase : The time it takes to develop the idea (Task Dreaming)
2. Start up Phase : Getting the business safe of the ground (Task Doing)
3. Stable Phase : You hit the Plateau (Task Innovate)
4. Growth Phase : Messy but exciting ( Task Delegate)
5. Adolescence Phase: The company is born again 
So the number on thing we suggest for every small business leader is to think about the stages concept and understand at which stage their company is currently located. We also thought about how we could offer help and support.
Thats why we took some of the questions we normally discuss with our clients and set up a test to help you to get a glimpse of the current stage of your companies development. Please feel free to click on this link or on the photo below and take the test. We will send a result immediately by email.

During each of the growth phases you should concentrate on major checkpoints. Have a look for:

Strategy how is your business is going to achieve its purpose in the world
Checkpoints represent the major “developmental milestones” that your business will need to complete at each stage as a prerequisite for moving to the next stage
Accelerators are tactics that work well at that stage to grow your organizational capacity and your results more quickly
Road Hazards are the most common problems that businesses encounter at that stage that you must avoid

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