The Top Business Strategies to Use in 2022 (With Examples)
Does it feel like your business’s growth has reached a plateau? Are your current strategies not really working? This article will provide you with some inspiration.
Our 2022 business strategies list contains the top 5 strategies that are relevant to modern times. They have worked for other businesses, so, why don’t you give them a try?
Examples of both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies have been included. Why not? When it comes to inspiration for business strategy, you should make use of as many sources as possible.
So, without further ado, let’s begin.
Strategy #1: Don’t Just Pay For Ads, Buy the Whole Media Company
You could pay online magazines and media companies thousands of dollars to display your ad for a couple of minutes. You can even have some PR articles published routinely to maintain a positive brand image. But such business strategies are temporary solutions. Instead, many big firms acquire media companies entirely. This way they own the whole ad platform, can post as many ads as they please and shape customer opinion in a way they want.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post, an American daily newspaper. Forget about negotiating the price for posting newspaper ads, he owns the newspaper! This strategy is still in use. HubSpot, the CRM giant, acquired The Hustle in 2021. This is an online newsletter that over a million business owners and tech enthusiasts read. HubSpot can now market its brand and products to a large number of potential customers whenever they want and in whichever way they like. Amazing, isn’t it?
Now, although this may not be possible for small-business owners or freelance solopreneur consultants, such business strategies should always be kept in the back of your mind. Even if you can’t acquire a decades-old newspaper business, you could, maybe, acquire a smaller media outlet that has a huge potential for growth.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The right strategy, along with virtues like patience and resilience, are key to business success.
- A mailing list can help you save your business in unprecedented situations, such as a lockdown or natural calamity.
- When it comes to sales, being too pushy may turn customers off. This is the age of inbound marketing, so educate your customer through value-providing content before you go for the sale.
- Automate whenever you can, whether it’s lead generation, customer retention, cross-selling or upselling.
- Ratings and reviews are pretty much the norms nowadays. Thus, you should reward the customers who do leave a positive review. If your business has dozens of 4-5 star reviews, the chances of getting more customers without any additional marketing become really high.
Strategy #2: Create a Mailing List to Keep in Touch With Customers
A few decades ago, using the internet to grow a business would have sounded completely absurd. But now, it’s not just a reality, it’s a necessity. Even though it’s likely that life and business will return to pre-pandemic levels in a few months, one must not underestimate the internet’s power in saving businesses during unexpected times. If you’re still in a brick-and-mortar type of business, you should consider taking at least some part of your business online. Let’s discuss an example of a business whose mailing list saved it when physical outlets were shut due to restrictions.
Big Hair + Beauty is a UK-based brand that sells hair care products to individuals with curly hair. When the pandemic hit, customers could not go to salons, which meant they had to use hair care products at their homes. This is when the company saw an increase in online orders and a shortage of stocks (because their products were selling so quickly). To keep the customers satisfied and stop them from buying from other brands, the owner of the company introduced a pre-order service through their online mailing list. Through this, customers were kept in the sales pipeline, and it also helped the business generate revenue before actually selling anything. If it wasn’t for the mailing list, the company would have surely lost a large chunk of its customers to competitors, potentially permanently.
Strategy #3: Educate Your Customers on the Solutions Instead of Directly Selling Products
Content marketing is here to stay, but there is a specific branch of content marketing that you should leverage in 2022—educational content. The pandemic gave us all a range of experiences, and a lot of free time is one of them. Due to this, some people had more time to up-skill themselves by reading a lot and watching educational content that they previously couldn’t due to a lack of free time. Of all the business strategies out there, this one is actually the most useful for customers. Let’s discuss an example.
Brain Dean, an online entrepreneur, created a website called Backlinko to educate businesses on various aspects of online marketing. For example, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, search rankings, etc. He also has a YouTube channel for the market segment that doesn’t like reading. His main product is his SEO training course, but instead of hard-selling that course to his audience, he simply educates them on the possible solutions to their problems. Almost all his traffic comes from giving free value to his audience, a small fraction of which turn into paying customers later.
h2>Strategy #4: Use Technology to Automate Important Tasks
You can only hire so many sales personnel to close new sales and increase revenue. Still, with the right use of technology, your reach could get a hundred times better. You could manually add numbers to a spreadsheet (and end up with a headache later), or you can use accounting software that does it for you automatically. There are so many ways in which you can use technology to achieve results quicker and more efficiently.
Booking(dot)com is a great example of using automation to earn repeat business. The site uses relevant data such as a customer’s browsing pattern and search terms on their platform, and offers personalized recommendations for destinations and hotels. For instance, someone who has recently visited Bangkok may also want to visit nearby popular Thai destinations like Pattaya. The AI system recognizes user behavior and automatically provides highly personalized recommendations for hotel rooms, which helps bring repeat business.
Strategy #5: Reward Customers and Clients Who Leave Reviews
Of all the business strategies that are discussed in this article, this is the one that you can apply right now. Create a list of customers who certainly had a nice experience with you. Then, let them know that you will reward them for leaving a genuine review on Google or your social media. This could be done through an email sequence or even a phone call if you have a close relationship with the customer. At first, offering something like a $50 gift card or a bottle of fine red wine may seem like a costly decision. However, you should remember that having dozens of 5-star ratings and positive reviews will help you beat almost every competitor who doesn't have a better online social proof than you.
A great example of this is Airbnb. Living with a stranger in a different country can be a daunting experience. That is why reviews and ratings are really important. Airbnb’s review system is created intelligently. First, the guest has only 14 days to submit a review. After the 14-day period, they can’t submit or edit a review. This ensures that reviews are genuine and not a false smear campaign to harm a host’s rental business. On Airbnb, hosts with more than ten reviews are ten times more likely to receive new business. Even though Airbnb hosts don’t reward their guests for leaving a review, what we can learn from this example is how reviews can make or break a business.
Final Thoughts
Companies around the world have used hundreds of business strategies to grow their customer base and increase revenue. But along with the right strategy, you also need the right virtues—patience, competency, resilience, and courage. It will take time. However, if you stay on the course and face obstacles with a positive mindset, these strategies will work. It may not happen overnight, but if you keep applying growth techniques to your business and taking inspiration from other businesses, the sky's the limit.
