What do you want to achieve with your marketing strategy? Your marketing objectives are the basis for all of your marketing activities and the foundation of your marketing strategy. This Microcast details what every entrepreneur should measure, where to target your customers, and how to evaluate the marketing methods of competitors. You will also learn how to decide what goals and measurements are right for your business—setting specific sales growth goals, landing partnerships, expanding distribution, and more.
Pricing influencers have a dramatic impact on your ability to set pricing. The more flexibility you have the higher price you can charge and the more margin you can get. In this course, Ken will walk you through each of the eight pricing influencers and give you strategies to help improve your position giving you more flexibility in your overall pricing strategy. Ken will also explore tactics that you can apply to your business, supporting you in setting the most appropriate price for your product or service—without leaving money on the table.
Time to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Take a look inside the Prep Worksheet that prepares you to write the pricing strategy section of your business plan. The key to success is taking the time necessary to deeply understand your business and be prepared to run it—use this workshop and Prep Worksheet to do just that.
One of the most important concepts of your product strategy is identifying your minimal viable product or service (MVP or MVS). This walk-through takes you through a process for identifying what key qualities of your product or service comprise your MVP. Once you identify the minimum offering that addresses your customers’ needs, you can position your business for launch.
How and why customers perceive the unique value of your product or service is something integrated into all aspects of your customer communication—from your website to marketing and social media to packaging. This lesson explains how that works by looking at a few top brands and how they communicate their unique value propositions.
Who are you selling to? While entrepreneurial optimism might lead you to believe the entire world is your market, success depends on a focused definition of your core audience that aligns with the rest of your go-to-market strategy. This course outlines commonly used demographic and psychographic attributes for profiling your target market, in addition to tips for developing your own business-specific market characteristics.
The competitive matrix is a graphic that highlights your unique strengths vis a vis other players in the space. The visual snapshot is easy for investors to parse — but it’s more than a pretty picture. As you identify your most relevant strengths and how you stack up against competitors, the process of developing a competitive matrix gives you a greater understanding of your market and your business, and a valuable marketing tool. This learning stream will cover how to identify the most relevant strengths to plot on your graph, how to identify and evaluate competitors on the matrix, and how to position your business as a market leader.
Your market’s growth rate is out of your hands — but how you position your business to capitalize on it is entirely within your control. By selecting the most relevant growth rate for your market segment and aligning your company’s objectives accordingly, your projections will hold up under scrutiny and set you on the path toward profits. This course solves the challenge of projecting future growth with a framework for researching statistics, methods for calculating growth rates, and a list of pitfalls to avoid.
The Company Overview section of your business plan must excite investors. From the founders’ bios and company history to your business location and business model, it must be clear that you’re poised to succeed. This learning stream helps you navigate the five essential sections to include in your plan: company profile, team, staffing, business model, and current status—all with examples, as well as solid business mindset tips and how to talk to investors. The workshop provides a walk-through of the tactical aspects of the learning stream will be walked-through in the workshop step-by-step.
Your business was likely born out of an audacious dream; vision and mission statements invite others to share that dream. Tools form this course will empower you to create vision and mission statements that inspire excitement. We provide strategies for articulating the lofty aims of the vision statement, the concrete components of the mission statement, and the philanthropic pledges of the social mission.