2: REVISIT YOUR PRODUCT

Now that you have mapped your position of where you stand and what you want to achieve, the next question to ask yourself is if your product/service is in the best form of its capability.

Ask yourself the following questions to understand where you stand:

3: GROW YOUR COMMUNITY

Now that you have understood our product's opportunities and obstacles, your next step would be to learn and adapt to your audience. We recommend you to go where your audience is already present, in the present scenario, it's almost always going to be online and social media — the best place to be in given the current situation.

It is of utmost importance to retain your current customers and increase organic traffic on your pages by creating non-brand-orientated campaigns and content of their interest where they can engage and help you build a community.

Once we understand your community and the customer journey, we can move on to invest in paid advertising and developing our marketing funnel and leading to airtight sales.
The bottom line is that we do need to reach a larger audience and convert them to customers that will help to keep the lights on.

While doing this, a brand should never overlook investing time and money in developing new ways to acquire a new target group.

4: COMMUNICATION

Once we have defined and understood our audience, now you need to focus on how to communicate with them through engaging content. Before you start to develop ideas for campaign and content, you need to learn from your mistakes, recognize your strengths and essentially understand what is the goal of the campaign. Communications strategies can be divided into two categories.

• Campaign focused (short to medium-term strategies)
• An organization focused (medium to long-term strategies)

Now that we have our initial plan ready, you need to involve people who can help you strategize better and increase your chances of reaching the right TG.

During this stage, we would advise you to connect with your marketing/ branding agency to help you understand this better and can assist you on making your plan more effective.

5: BUDGETING

For this step, you will need to start with a clear mind. Plan and develop a structured budget that will consist of all necessary parameters, which are your primary, operational and outsourcing costs such as rent, electricity, staffing, product, marketing and miscellaneous.

In this stage, we will also discuss the necessity and importance of rise in analytics. We start by compiling a simple sales analyse of your last 12 months. With this information we receive limitless information, such as

• Missed Opportunities
• Market Trend
• Customer understanding
• Effective Channel
• Predicting Future Trends

Reach out to your advisory agency to help you derive a structure from this information, where you can create a margin cap on full sales. Don’t worry if this stage is too much to process just accomplish the task one by one with the help of the professionals. This stage, we will help you with an entire budgeting system for your business.

6: EMPLOYEE & HR

This step involves growing and understanding your in-house community - Your Employees.

Why and how should you keep your people engaged, motivated, productive and happy?

First, let's understand the WHY - The main part of an employee in the company is his/her sense of belonging. When an individual feels his / her contribution has made an effect they are more involved and treat the growth of the companies as theirs.

Moving on to the HOW - we need to constantly take some time and connect with our employees to understand their strengths, weakness, grievances, issues, and need. From this evaluation, we understand the following

• The individual contribution
• If an employee's traits can be used in another department
• Responsibilities of each individual

This will also help you in filing, organizing and categorizing each employee's roles and their contribution in providing to the company's growth

Tip - Create feedback forms for each level to get in-depth information.

7: DAMAGE CONTROL

Now, let's focus on the current scenario. With the outbreak of the virus, what should be your next steps to make your place a safe place to visit?

For Example - Complete sanitization of the place, health check-ups of employees, sanitization stands at the entrances ,etc.

By planning in advance, you will get enough time to execute your plan in the future and also keep you ahead of your competitors.

8: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

This step can help you have an edge over your closest competitors and create long term value for your business. Customer is king- with that said, a well-crafted customer journey and experience is the key to success of most brands.

We focus on the 5 E's to understand and keep up with our customer experience as follows:

Entice – How will your future customers first hear about you?

Enter – What impression do you want to create for new customers when they walk into your business/website?

Engage - The Engage stage is generally the longest, from the customer learning how your business works, through to making a purchase decision.

Exit –What is your customers' last impression?

Extend – What triggers a repeat purchase or visit

Starting from the first point of interaction with the customer to the end point, we need to create an exceptional journey for them to re-visit us without any hesitation.

9: SYNERGY

This step is required in every sector, level, and industry.

Strong coordination within the team ensures airtight operations and leaves no spaces for loopholes.

Each company needs to plan its synergy between its employees, business associates, operation team, franchise owners, etc. to extract the most out of your resources – time, skill and money.

This is a constant process of pivot and improvisation to achieve maximum output.

10: GUIDELINES FOR EVERYTHING

Based on the above 9 points, this step will rely on you to compile all the information into a small handbook - which will now be your business bible. Guidelines are nothing but protocols right from your day to day operations, your brand language and your brand vocabulary. These guidelines will help you stick to the plan and target right audience to ensure constant growth and sales.