Building a great product doesn’t necessarily mean that the business you build around it will be successful. Being an entrepreneur requires a different set of skills from being a product developer, even if the business you want to set up consists of little more than you and your product.

In Part One of this blog series, we discussed strategic planning and market research, both of which are essential to getting any product-based business off the ground.

But after you’ve done your market research and created a strategic plan, what comes next? The answer: Implementation.

Implementing your strategic plan

Just because a company, business, or organization has successfully developed a strategy, doesn’t mean that it has the tools, knowledge, or resources to successfully implement it.

In fact, many businesses fail because a company doesn’t have the processes or resources in place to put the developed business strategy into action.

Firms with business development expertise, like Pivot, can help you avoid this fate by working with you to align your business with the strategic plan you’ve put in place. This includes:

  • Aligning initiatives and resource allotment with strategy. If you want to meet your business goals, you have to align your business initiatives and resources with the strategy you created.
  • Designing an organizational structure that reflects strategy. Your business must be structured in a way that will allow you to meet your goals. That could mean adding or removing departments, changing the chain of command, or adding an executive position.
  • Engaging staff. Getting everyone in a business behind a new strategic plan can be challenging, but it’s absolutely necessary if the business is going to succeed. Once everyone is on board, rolling out the new strategy can require its own change management plan to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
  • Monitoring progress and adapting accordingly. If you want your strategy to last longer than a few months, make sure it’s flexible. Market conditions change, and you have to be able to adapt to them if you want your business to survive.

Your strategic plan will change over time, as will your business – but if you start by implementing a plan that’s comprehensive and adaptable, you’ll be much more ready to weather the changes that come your way.

Marketing and advertising plan

The final element of successful business development is creating a strong marketing and advertising plan.

In this era of social media and digital marketing, deciding how to allocate marketing resources can be overwhelming. Do you want to spend the time maintaining five social media accounts on five different platforms, or would two or three be sufficient? How do you split your ad dollars among digital, print, TV, and other types of advertising? How do you maximize your ROI for both digital and traditional forms of marketing and advertising?

Answering these questions requires stepping back and creating a complete marketing and advertising plan.

Your market research should have given you lots of information about your target customers and their buying habits. Armed with that information, you can start making decisions about which social media platforms to prioritize, how to spend your digital advertising dollars, and whether or not you should take out ads in traditional mediums.

When all these development pieces come together, your business – and your product – stand a much greater chance of succeeding. If you’re in need of help getting your business off the ground, contact Pivot for a free consultation. To learn more about this topic, and about Pivot’s business development services, read our e-book “Turn a Great Idea into a Thriving Business