You do not need a large corporate-sized advertising and marketing budget to be able to compete for and win business. Keeping an eye on the market and looking out for relevant opportunities can help you grow and increase profit.
You must be clear about what you want to achieve with your business. You also need to be able to differentiate your business from your competitors.
Research your marketplace, understand your product or service and know why people would want to buy from you.
This guide outlines what you can do to find and create new business opportunities – and how you can compete successfully for them.
How to identify new business opportunities
Spotting market opportunities is essential for growth and survival. You need to know where to find these opportunities and understand how to take advantage of them.
There are a number of ways of working out what are the best opportunities for your business, including:
- carrying out an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and the opportunities and threats it faces (a SWOT analysis)
- establishing your unique selling point (USP)
SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of your business, the opportunities and threats it faces and how these factors influence your business.You can find out how to conduct a SWOT analysis on the businessballs website.
Using the results of your SWOT analysis, list how you can exploit the opportunities you have identified.
Threats do not necessarily have to be a negative for your business. Consider what opportunities you would have if the threat didn’t exist or didn’t happen and use this information to help you plan for growth.
When considering threats to your business, identify those trends that currently affect your business and those that could affect it over the next 12 months or so. You need to expect and plan for change.
As these trends will create both opportunities and threats, you will need to think about how you will prepare your business to adapt to these changes. Ways you might do this include introducing new products, altering prices, changing your marketing methods or adding value to the customer experience.
Establish your USP
Set yourself apart from your competitors by establishing your USP. Position yourself as being different to your competitors. Identify why customers should buy from you and promote this.
