You have heard about growth strategies, but have you ever heard about what are business strategies that helps you reach your business goals? There are plenty of business strategy examples that not only helps you skyrocket your business but also helps in increase in your sales. If you own a business, especially small business, then the best way to boost your business is to implement marketing small business strategies.

The marketing business strategies are one of the best powerful tools to reach your business goals in no time. The key fundamental aspects of business strategy are to define and implement methods, systems and processes including the tactics within your company that ensures business growth.

In fact, the business strategy guides to make key organizational decisions, such as hiring new employees, installing new infrastructure, relocating, adding new locations, expansion with new technologies and so on. The business strategy helps in structuring and achieving your organization’s vision, mission, goals and objectives effectively.

A business strategy is the one that needs to be strategically defined which must be in line with the company’s vision, mission and objectives. Creating a business strategy takes time, strategic planning and development.

Today, in this article we are going to discuss in detail about, what is a business strategy, what are business strategies examples and marketing small business strategies that generates new ideas for your business to grow.

Contents

1 What Are Business Strategies? What Is A Business Strategy?
2 Why Is Business Strategy Important?
- 2.1 What are business strategies advantages:
3 Levels of Business Strategies
4 Components of a Business Strategy
5 How to Build a Business Strategy Effectively?
6 What Are The Benefits of Business Strategy?
7 How To Implement Business Strategy?
8 Elements of Business Strategy Model
9 Business Strategy vs Business Plan vs Business Model
- 9.1 Business Plan
- 9.2 Business Model
10 15 Business Strategy Examples
11 How To Measure Business Strategy Success?
12 Conclusion

What Are Business Strategies? What Is A Business Strategy?

A business strategy is nothing but a growth strategy that helps you outline your actions and key decisions of a company that helps you reach your goals and objectives strategically. In simple terms, the business strategy helps you define what your company needs to do to reach its goals and objectives which in turn helps you make the process of decision making simpler of every corner of your business.

The business strategies help the different functions and different departments of your company or business to work together and take decisions that supports and ensures your company is in right direction. A business strategy is must for any business, including, a lifestyle business or a small business or a large business.

No matter what type of the company you own or the business you run, the success of the company is determined by the effectiveness of the strategies that it follows. A strategy of any business, explains how a company plans to grow its business, how it wants to make profits, and how it wants to compete in the market.

Thus, when you ask what are business strategies, the simplest definition of a business strategy is, a high-level plan that helps a business to achieve its goals, meet its objectives, grow its business, and increase its profits. Hence, a business strategy refers to an organization’s long-term goals and how it plans to achieve them.

For example, the best example of business strategy is to become the top 10 unique suppliers of best electrical vehicle accessories or to become the cheapest provider of SEO services for small businesses.

Why Is Business Strategy Important?

The business strategy is important because to ensure that your company keeps on growing no matter whether you own an online business or a home based business or a blogging business or you have started a lifestyle business. The business strategies are the one’s that keeps your company in the right direction.

The importance of business strategy for any organization is very clear. Want to grow the business or want to expand your business, the goals and objectives of the company are indirectly interlinked to the business strategies.

Even though there are several reasons why the business strategies are important for an organization, let us see few of such advantages of business strategies:

What are business strategies advantages:

1. Goals and Objectives

The business strategies helps you achieve your goals and objectives strategically with the growth of the company in no time. A business strategy is the core tool of growing your business by implementation of targeting goals and objectives.

2. Planning

A business strategy helps you lay down a strategic planning that helps you easily achieve your company’s goals and objectives. All the business strategies works very well and gives you great results when you have laid down a strategic business plan.

3. Strengths and Weaknesses

When you effectively create a business strategy that is developed based on considering your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, you can easily optimize your company goals and objectives. This in turn helps you tackle your weaknesses effectively and maximize the benefits of having strengths of your company.

A SWOT analysis derived from your company’s strengths and weakness, provides you the option to create opportunities to grow your business and reduce or eliminate the potential risks that deeply affects your business and goals. You can also lay down a structured action plan to overcome problems in future.

4. Efficiency

A strategically developed business strategy will help you in effective allocation of your company resources that ensures that your business activities are performed efficiently and your business grows efficiently. This way the business strategies help you achieve project milestones within deadlines that increases your customer satisfaction.

5. Control

An strategic business plan will allow you have more control over your projects planning including your business activities, which indirectly helps reach your project milestones and your business goals including business objectives. With the periodic reviews of business goal setting and control on your project planning, everyday you will get one inch closer to business goals.

6. Competitive Advantage

A well developed business strategy with in-depth market research, will help you gain competitive advantage over your competitors. This way you can always stay one step ahead of your competitors and achieve your business goals in advance and rank top by being unique.

7. Decision Making

A business strategy along with strategic business plan will make your life simpler by allowing you take decisions in short time effectively. Decision making becomes much easier than others who don’t have a business strategy.

8. Investments

A business strategy is key to growth of your company. Investments and financial decisions become accurate and on spot at right time.

Levels of Business Strategies

When it comes to listing down the organizational business strategies, it is divided into three main levels or categories, namely,

1. Corporate Level

2. Business Level

3. Functional Level

No matter what kind of business you do or what kind of company you run, these are 3 fundamental levels of strategies that must be followed for better results.

1. Corporate Level

Corporate level strategies are the strategies of whole organization or the strategic plans of top management such as board of directors or managing directors CEO, CFO and CTO. The top management defines the company’s vision, mission and key core objectives that directly affects the company’s long-term performance.

The main focus of the top management in corporate level is to provide guidance and decisions that are catered around growth, acquisitions, global footprints, expansion, diversification and investments.

2. Business Level

Business level strategies are those strategies that directly integrates into the corporate vision, mission and objectives, but with a complete focus on a business. The business level strategies can be focused on one business at a time or one business unit at a time for the capacities, needs and requirements.

At the business level, the vision, mission and objectives are turned into concrete short-term and long-term corporate strategies that defines and gives the opportunity to improve on how a business or company is going to compete and perform in the market.

3. Functional Level

Functional level strategies are those strategies that are designed to answer how each functional departments like marketing, production, design, quality, HR and so on so that they can effectively support the organizational or corporate and business level strategies.

Components of a Business Strategy

When it comes to the components of business strategies, there are plenty of them which are very much important for any businesses to keep in mind. In that, allow us to introduce the 21 key components of a business strategy. Do remember that when you want to understand what are business strategies it is also equally important to understand the components of business strategy as well as the examples of business strategies too.

These components of business strategy helps you effectively to scale your business rapidly.

21 Components of business strategy:

Here are 21 components of a business strategy that helps you take your organization to where it wants.

1. Vision

A vision statement is that business strategy that intends to describe the company desires that it want to achieve in the long-run, usually in the time frame of 5 years or sometimes even longer than that.

Having a clear vision helps your company to move in right direction of business activities and ensures growth of your company. With vision, you can also able to create clear instructions, including what needs to be done, who needs to do, who is responsible, who has authorities, who can take business decisions and so on.

2. Mission

The next thing that any business or any company must focus on is to develop a mission statement. As part of business strategy, the mission statement helps you stand firm in the market place and helps in recognition of your company where the company was in past and where the company is at present.

With mission statement, you can clearly state why your organization exists and what it wants to play a role in the society. This helps the company to decide on taking right business strategies decisions strategically, so that you can move your company in the right direction.

3. Objectives

The ultimate aim of business strategy for any company is to define objectives. The objectives of a company at various levels helps the organization to achieve what it wants and reach where it wants to be.

Once you have defined your business objectives, then you can assign team with the tasks to achieve it or make key person responsible to achieve them. To define business strategy, you also need to define company objectives that are linked with the company’s vision or mission.

4. Core Values

What are core values? Or what are business core values? Core values are set of beliefs, practices or ideals that inform how you conduct your business and life, both personally as well as physically. The core values help organizations to determine on how to allocate resources, make key important decisions and grow your business. Having defined core values for your business is an important business strategy for its growth.

Hence, a business strategy is the one that mentors and coaches board of directors and top management executives, including each of the functions and departments about the dos and don’ts that are in line with the core values of your organization. The core values help everyone in organization to stay focused on the same vision, mission and goals of your organization.

5. Ethos

Ethos of a company is nothing but a core set of values or the guiding principles. Even though core values and ethos are same, we have decided to put them separately for the fact that of a corporate culture. The ethos helps corporate companies or any organization to express the way on how they want to behave.

When it comes to business strategy, you can define your brand or core identity of your company that delivers your company to perform its businesses to the culture of your company. Having ethos help your company to move in the right direction and achieve success.

6. Culture

This is where the business strategy plays a major role when it comes to developing the culture of a company. The company culture is nothing but a set of shared values, goals of your company and the business practices that makes your organization unique and characterize your organization.

The culture of a company is that business strategy, wherein the culture defines the way the people feel about the work they do, the values that they believe in, where the people see the company is going and what they are going to do to get there.

7. SWOT Analysis

Whenever you are developing any business strategy, the SWOT analysis is the one that is must required for setting up a business strategy. SWOT analysis is nothing but, Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats.

Basically, SWOT analysis helps an organization identify the strengths of a company and make the full advantage of them. The weaknesses will help the organization to work on them strategically and mitigate the risks. Threats allow the company to implement better business strategic action plans to counter future risks effectively.

8. Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is one of the systematic and forward looking analysis of the impact, likelihood of potential events and scenarios on the achievement of an organization’s business objectives within a started time of horizon. When you are developing any business strategy, you must do risk assessment as it allows management to assess the company’s risks so that you can put on controls and allocate resources where and when needed.

A risk is the one of the event or any event or combination of events, that negatively influences your ability to achieve your business goals. If you want to develop a good risk assessment process, you need to follow the following steps that will help you develop a great business strategy.

Steps to develop good risk assessment process:

1. Identify your company’s risks

2. Create your company’s risk library at various levels

3. Identify your risk owners

4. Identify the controls to mitigate and reduce risks

5. Asses risk potential and impact

6. Revisit annually

9. Business Tactics

One good thing of implementing business strategy is to deploy business tactics which are nothing but short-term plans that don’t deviate from the overall strategy. The actions you take as part of business tactics that influence the success or failure of a business strategy.

Thus, the tactics are the actions and specific things that you implement to achieve strategic business goals. You can wisely choose and implement these micro-strategies as part of tactics that can help you take the advantage various business situations as they keep on developing.

10. Resource Planning and Resource Management

A business strategy is nothing but resource planning and resource management. This allows the businesses or companies to plan the resources such as man power, infrastructure, and so on. The idea is to how properly you allocate the resources and who is going to be responsible for doing it so.

The resource management is the one how you manage your resources effectively and efficiently. With this business strategy, you can able to make decisions on where to allocate more resources to your business or projects so that the goals are achieved.

11. Measurement

The measurement is that component of business strategy, which allows you to keep track of your business output or company’s output. This allows you to determine and evaluate hoe your business is performing with respect to the targets that you set for your company.

12. CSR Initiatives

The CSR initiatives stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR initiatives is that part of business strategy, when an organization or a business takes into account of its overall impact socially, economically, and environmentally, and launches initiatives to ensure its positive impact all around the globe. The business strategy helps businesses to strategies CSR practices that will align well with your organizations overall mission, vision and help to achieve and support those goals.

The implementation of CSR programme’s help both the businesses as well as society, when your organization makes CSR initiatives as the core business strategy. The CSR initiatives help you play more responsible role in the world, socially as well as environmentally. When you properly understand and execute, CSR is a win-win strategy that benefits the company, as well as society.

Here are 6 CSR strategies that are good for your business:

1. Align CSR to your business strategy

2. Earn support from the top with engagement at all levels

3. Look for opportunities to build a future pipeline

4. Strong, sustainable partnerships equal automatic success

5. Find new drivers for innovation

6. Integrate design thinking approaches

Here are 5 CSR business strategies that most companies using today:

1. Promoting healthy and inclusive workplace cultures

2. Designing goals with measurable impact

3. Aligning community impact goals with business practices

4. Socially responsible companies leverage their core capabilities

5. Soliciting feedback and engagement to maximize stakeholder value

Read more about the truth of CSR from harvard business.

13. Funding Streams

Funding is the money which a government or organization or an investor provides for a particular purpose or for the growth of the business. Funding, also called financing, represents an act of contributing resources to finance a program, project, or a need. As part of business strategy, you must ensure that you should be more strategic while deciding on which funding streams you must go for.

There are basically 7 funding streams that businesses should target for:

1. Personal Investment or Personal Savings

2. Venture Capital

3. Business Angels

4. Assistant of Government

5. Commercial Bank Loans and Overdraft

6. Financial Bootstrapping

7. Buyouts

Being a component of business strategy, no matter whether you are starting a startup or want grow your business, you need some form of funding to get going. However, choosing the right funding stream for your business is that part of business strategy that ensures you are in the right path of growth. Research England allows you to know more about funding streams.

14. Investments

Investing is an essential part of business strategy or wealth-creation, which helps you beat inflation to fulfil your business goals, financial goals and also stabilize your financial future for your business. Instead of letting money or profits lie idle in your bank accounts, you can invest in different avenues such as stocks, equities, mutual funds, fixed deposit, or more. To invest is to allocate money with the expectation of a positive benefit or return in the future.

A corporate investment plan is one of the components of business strategy which is designed as a tool for helping your business realize mission and organization goals outlined in your vision and business plan. There are plenty of investment strategies that you can make use of to get the most out of business strategy. But, below are the few best business investment strategies that allow you to out perform than your competitors.

7 business investment strategies:

1. Passive and Active Strategies

2. Growth Investing (Short-Term and Long-Term Investments)

3. Value Investing

4. Income Investing

5. Dividend Growth Investing

6. Contrarian Investing

7. Indexing

If you already own a business or even just getting started, then here are few of the investing tips that you should keep in mind before you think of any investment.

6 investing tips for your business strategy:

1. Set goals

2. Research and trend analysis

3. Portfolio optimization

4. Best advisor or consultancy

5. Risk tolerance

6. Diversfy risk

When you invest your time on investment strategies, you can see plenty of advantages over investment including, diversification of risk over businesses with expected returns, gain more profits over investments, reduce transaction costs, pay less tax, and so on.

15. Feasibility Analysis

Feasibility analysis is that part of business strategy which is the process of conforming that a business strategy, business plan, business model or business design is possible and makes sense. The feasibility analysis is used to validate assumptions, note various risks in activities that are carried in and out of an organization, constraints, decisions, business cases and approaches.

For the success of any project, every project started in an organization must be rooted through feasibility analysis. This also helps to uncover an organizations strengths and weaknesses of an existing business strategy to implement necessary actions to overcome the same.

When we consider the business feasibility study, it means that, a controlled process for identifying problems and opportunities, determining objectives, describing situations, defining successful outcomes and assessing the range of costs and benefits associated with several alternatives for solving a problem.

Here are 7 types of feasibility analysis:

1. Financial

2. Schedule

3. Technical

4. Market

5. Regulations and Standards

6. Organizational

7. Operations

16. Supply Chain

The supply chain is considered to be one of the most important business strategies for any organization. A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute goods or a specific product to the final buyer such as customers.

Like the business strategy constitutes to the overall direction of an organization, the supply chain business strategy aims to or constitutes for the actual operations of the organization and of the extended supply chain to meet metrics of supply chain objectives.

Thus, a supply chain strategy must always support the intent of the business strategy and business goals in order to avoid gaps between the two. The thing is that, many companies will develop business strategy, but fail to develop supply chain strategy which is in line with the business strategy, which is the riskiest area and weakness of an organization. Hence, every organization must design, develop and implement the supply chain strategy and optimize well, such that it can support the business strategy.

Here are 7 steps to align supply chain with corporate strategy that is in line with business strategy:

1. Define and communicate a clear business strategy

2. Identify the areas of the business strategy that are enabled by the supply chain

3. Align supply chain performance metrics with the business strategy

4. Structure the supply chain to optimize the strategic goals

5. Align incentives end to end

6. Keep refreshing the strategy and alignment process

7. Standardize, leverage and keep optimizing the supply chain

17. Location Footprints

Location footprint strategy is nothing but to optimize the geographic configuration of your operations or businesses to achieve strategic, financial, talent and risk objectives to improve your business performance. A location strategy is that component of business strategy which is a plan for obtaining the optimal location of a company with the help of identifying company needs and objectives. The main aim is to search for locations with offerings that are compatible with the needs, requirements and objectives of your company. A location strategy is also a part of overall corporate strategy.

Moving to different locations or having global footprints on various locations, allows the organizations to grow quickly and smoothly. The location footprint business strategy can help an organization to streamline the logistics requirements, customer demands, labour, trading, quick delivery requirements, market growth potential, profits, and so on by being a global competitor in your niche industry.

18. Target Audience and Demographics

A target audience is that component of business strategy which is nothing but the demographic of people who are most likely to be interested in a company’s products or services. The target audience share similar demographic traits, but not limited to, age, gender, location, education, and so on.

In other words, the target audience business strategy is that part of target market which refers to a group of potential customers to whom a company wants to sell its products or services. Specific customers are considered to be part of this group where in the company directs all of its marketing efforts. Identification of the target audience is an essential part of business strategy for growth and is also essential step for development of a company.

If you are looking for target marketing business strategies to scale your business, the here are the 5 target marketing strategies that are must for your business:

1. Mass Marketing

2. Segment Marketing

3. Niche Marketing

4. Micro Marketing

5. Local Marketing

These target audience marketing strategies help you grow your business with ease, so that you can out perform your competitors.

19. Infrastructure

A strategic business infrastructure plan helps to create a road map which is used to start and run an organization or a company. What is infrastructure? Infrastructure is the general term which is used for the basic physical systems of a business, nation or a region. Few of the best examples of infrastructure include communication systems, communication networks, transportation systems, water facilities, electric systems and so on.

As a component of business strategies, the business infrastructure are considered to be the basic facilities, amenities, structures and services upon which the company or the rest of the business is built. Here are 8 examples of business infrastructure that are part of any business or an organization.

8 examples of business infrastructure:

1. Network Services

2. Computing

3. IT Services

4. Business Services

5. Energy and Power Management

6. Facilities or Amenities

7. Transport

8. Business Continuity

20. Marketing

Marketing is nothing but the action or business strategy for promoting and selling products or services, which also includes market research and advertising. Marketing refers to the process an organization or a company that undertakes to engage its target audience or target customers, and builds strong relationships with its customers to create value in order to capture value in return. It is one of the primary components of business strategy, business management and commerce.

A marketing business strategy is referred to as the overall game plan of a business for its mission, vision, prospective or potential consumers and turning them into customers for your products or services of your business. In short, the marketing business strategy is considered to be lead generation for your business. A marketing business strategy is made of,

1. Company’s value proportion

2. Key brand messaging

3. Data and Analytics on target customer audience including target customer demographics

4. Lead generation strategies and so on.

When you develop a successful marketing business strategy you can easily realize on your business goals and take necessary actions to reach the right customers for your business with a key focus on your business strategy. But, the question is what are the steps to develop a successful marketing strategy? or How to develop a business oriented marketing strategy?

8 steps to develop a marketing strategy for your business:

1. Identify your business goals

2. State your marketing goals

3. Research your market

4. Profile your potential customers

5. Profile your competitors

6. Develop strategies to support your marketing goals

7. Use the ‘7 Ps of marketing’

8. Test your ideas

21. Competitors

Competitors referred to as the businesses who are doing the same or similar businesses. What is competitor? Competitors are other businesses who can offer the same or similar goods and services to your customers.

The next thing that will come into your mind is, what is business competition? And how it is the component of business strategy? Competition in business is nothing but the contest or rivalry among the companies in selling similar products or services and/or targeting the same target audience to get more sales, increase revenue, leader in the market, race to number one, and gain more market share as compared to others. There are two types of competition, direct competition and indirect competition.

Here are few of the importance of business competition:

1. Helps to understand and dig deep into the actual needs, requirements, wants and demands of customers

2. Helps to serve customers better than your competitors

3. Helps to realize the strengths and weaknesses of your business

4. Helps to focus on what to offer, marketing, branding, customer service, customer satisfaction and customer retention

5. Helps to innovate and make the product or service better

6. Helps to determine, how to produce efficiently and how to market or sell effectively

7. Helps to offer more options for purchasing to customers while shopping

There are plenty of benefits of a business competition, wherein all the three parties get benefited – business, customers and the market.

6 benefits of business competition:

1. Increases the demand

2. Boosts innovation

3. Helps businesses find its competitive advantage

4. Makes businesses serve customers better

5. Makes employees more efficient

6. Boosts constant business development

How to Build a Business Strategy Effectively?

It is very important to build an effective business strategy that outlines the vision of a business, mission of a business, define its targets, compete the market, and how it is going to grow by considering its short-term and long-term goals. What are business strategies that makes you ask you the next ultimate question, how to build such strategic business plan?

Here are the 6 key steps in building an effective business strategy:

1. Define your Vision

When you search over the internet, most of the articles out there over the internet suggest that, if you want to build a business strategy, then you must start with defining objectives for your organization. Well, if you ask us, this should not be your first step, as it is a too fast, too far approach for standing any business in the market.

Please take a step back and first focus on defining your company’s vision as defining company’s vision is considered to be the most important factor in implementing successful business strategies. This vision must be backed by defining your company’s core values, which are considered to be the building blocks of your company’s mission.

Having a clear vision for your organization helps you to better serve your customers, compete in the market, better target audience, grow your business, and so on. So, consider defining your company’s vision as an important step in business strategy building process as the defined business strategy reflects in better serving the market and satisfy the needs of targeted market.

Here are 7 steps that allows you to define your business vision:

1. Know your company’s goals

2. Know your company’s core values

3. Define your company’s mission

4. Keep your vision simple

5. Avoid being ambiguous

6. Be a forward thinker

7. Establish time-frames

In defining company’s vision, it is very important to make the following factors as the supporting pillars that outlines where your business is going to be in future. There are steps to define vision which you can follow so that they help you well define your vision for your business or an organization.

To build an effective business strategy consider,

1. Offer and Value Proposition

2. Customers

3. Target Market

Offer and Value Proposition:

The offer and value proposition of any bushiness helps to develop an effective business strategy. Offer is the one that helps your organization to clearly define what products or goods and services you are going to offer as part of your business. Whereas the Value Proposition is the one that helps you define why the people should buy your products or services only from you than other company’s.

Value proposition helps you answer your business why your organization exists and how your organization is different from your competitors. In the simplest way, the value proposition is the one that explains how an organization wants to create market demand and compete in the market. For example, take a look at Fiverr. The Fiverr’s value proposition is to offer businesses to find the perfect freelance services. It helps to find talent you need to get your businesses keep growing.

Customers:

When it comes to building an effective business strategy, another key factor that matters is customers. In defining a vision of your company and to build a business strategy is to define what type of customers your company is going to serve. There are two types of customers you can categorize into is B2C (business to consumers) and B2B (business to business).

Since they have different criteria that allows them to choose what kind of products or services they are going to buy, it is very important to know their needs and requirements that allows you to define business strategy.

Target Market:

Target market is also one of the factors that matters a lot when it comes to building an effective business strategy. Since there are two kinds of businesses namely B2C and B2B, target market makes it easier for you to better serve your customers.

When you build an organization that is focused on B2C, your target market must be defined by demographics, age, gender, education, occupation, income, and so on. Where as an organization that is built on B2B, the target market is defined by type of industry, type of business, and so on.

2. Define your Mission

Defining mission for your company is the key step in building an effective business strategy which is next step after you have defined your company’s vision. A mission statement of an organization helps to clearly define why the organization even exists and what is its purposes. The mission statement helps an organization to answer,

Whom does the organization serve?
What does the organization do?
Why does the organization do it?
How does the organization do it?

You can follow the below steps to develop a mission statement for your organization:

Step 1: Gather information, form a planning team and organize a meeting

Start by gathering information from the market, competitors, and potential customers through surveys or emails. Form a planning team comprising of board of directors, senior management and SME’s, if required. Analyze, where your business going to be, what is your business going to do, what you are going to offers, and so on.

The meeting you are going to plan for ensuring that there is enough information is collected that helps in developing a mission that suites your organization’s operations. It is always best to do a brainstorm rather than just deciding on your own.

Step 2: Define whom the organization is going to serve

The organization can either be big or be small or even medium. To serve the diversified market and to fulfill the needs of its customers, you must define who are the beneficiaries of your organization, just by asking a simple question, whom does your organization going to serve?

While you answer for the above question, you must also answer for which category of industry your products and services are going to be?, what are the characteristics of the target market? and where is the target population? or which region your business going to serve?. The answers to these questions helps you easily move on to the next steps in defining the mission statement for your business.

Step 3: Clarify what the organization does

The next step is to clarify on what does your organization do? The team of strategic planning must describe the purpose of the organization. List out the activities or the type of business or services that you are going to start first.

To ensure this you can ask, what are the products and services of your organization?, what are needs of customers? and how does your current products and services going to fulfill the needs of your customers?

Step 4: Explain why the organization does it, in short what it does

Now the next step is to ask the team how does the organization offers its products or services that aim to solve a social problem? In simple terms, why do we do and what we do? The answers to this question will also help you decide and take decisions for what does your organization going to do moving forward.

While you answer for the above question, you also need to answer for what are the needs and desires of your customers? and why is this important for your organization?. Having clarity on why and whom does the organization is doing for, gives you the clear picture on moving one more step forward to defining a mission statement.

Step 5: Describe how the organization delivers the products and services

This is the step where you are going to define the best strategies, means and the resources by which the organization is going to deliver its products and services that meets and fulfill the needs of its customers. To get an idea, you can conduct a market research to know how your competitors are delivering their products or services.

The best way to do it is to ask questions such as, what are the strategies that will be adopted to provide right products and services to its customers?, what are the strategies of logistics that you are going to adopt? and are there resources available for the deliveries of your products and services.

Step 6: Finally, write the mission statement after following all the above steps

Now you have everything you need, gather a small team who are good in writing statements to pull all together in just one to two sentences as a mission statement. Make sure that, your mission statement answers to who, what, why, and how of the organization, that makes it unique and stand out among its competitors.

Once you have defined the mission statement, now its time to get feedback from everyone who has involved in the meeting just to ensure everything is covered, everyone are in the same page, and the written statement has a common understanding. After following every step, now its time to share it with your board members, top management, staff, employees, partners, suppliers, customers, and so on.

3. Set your Key Business Objectives

Once you are done with defining vision and mission, the next step in building a business strategy is to set key business objectives. Having objectives for an organization will help the organization to reach where it wants and measure its success in terms of targets from business objectives.

The organization’s business objectives are usually focused on increasing its sales, increasing profits, to be the number one in its niche industry, and so on. Apart from this the business objectives can also be in the following form:

Increase revenue
Recruit and retain high-quality employees
Enhance customer satisfaction
Improve company culture
Maximize workplace safety
Develop leadership
Expand productivity
Increase product quality
Encourage innovation

You should make sure that the business objectives defined must not include the goals to achieve company’s mission or to reflect its core values. The sole purpose of a business strategy is to increase the company’s overall economic value for its owners or shareholders. Once you have the business objectives defined, you can use core values and mission define the objectives that caters the lower-level strategies, such as the functional objectives or the operational objectives.

4. Analyze your business and market

This step is all about SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This step becomes the most important steps in building the business strategy as it focuses on revealing the overview of the company. Once you have defines vision, mission and business objectives, now its time to focus on defining your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The SWOT analysis helps organizations to define better business strategy.

The SWOT analysis helps the organizations to define the following:

Strengths are the characteristics of a business which are its advantages over its competitors
Weaknesses are the characteristics of a business which are its disadvantages when compared to its competitors
Opportunities are those elements in a company’s external environment that allows it to capitalize and implement strategies to increase profitability
Threats are those elements in the external environment that could endanger the integrity and profitability of the business

5. Define how to gain Competitive Advantage

No matter which organization you are running, if you want to sell your products and services in the competitive industry, then you must define how you want to compete in the market, how you are going to create demand, and how you are going to increase sales and profit margins. Hence, the next step in formulating a business strategy is to how you are going to achieve the objectives that you have defined for your organization.

Types of business strategy:

Basically, there are three types of generic business strategies that one can choose from when they are defining their competitive advantage over others. And the such three business strategies are,

1. Cost Leadership

2. Differentiation

3. Focus

If an organization fails to pursue any one of these generic business strategies effectively, they are in a situation so called, “stuck in the middle”. This is a case where in the organization doesn’t offering a product or a service that entices customers to buy and there is a situation where the price of the offered products or services is too high to compete effectively in the competitive market. This eventually results in failure in gaining competitive advantage which will result in poor sales and profits.

Let us understand how these generic business strategies help an organization to gain competitive advantage:

Cost Leadership:

The best way that an organization can easily gain competitive advantage is to make use of the cost leadership strategy. The cost leadership refers to an organization’s ability in producing a product or offering a service at the lowest cost possible in its niche industry. One of the best ways to gain cost advantage is to develop a cost-effective supply chain management. Apart from this you can also leverage and explore the technologies that can cut down the cost effectively.

Differentiation:

The differentiation strategy is that strategy where in an organization creates and offers unique offers for its customers with highest value for targeted customers. Giving unique offers on your products and services that are much more valuable than your competitors helps you outperform in the market. This way you can increase the profits by raising the prices in small amounts that not harms the interest of your targeted customers.

Focus:

The focus generic business strategy is the one that is aimed to offer products and services to a targeted audience or a targeted market. When the company only aims at a small portion of the wider market segment, the company can either have a cost focus or a differentiation focus. This means, the company is gaining cost advantages as it follows cost-focused strategy.

However, when it comes to differentiation focus, the company aims to cater to a specific need of the customer segment. This strategy is considered to be the niche marketing strategy wherein many small or local businesses would love to adopt. This helps small and local businesses to effectively compete with the larger businesses.

6. Build A Strategic Framework

Once you have followed the above five steps and executed effectively, now you can build a generic business strategy for your organization. As said earlier, the generic competitive strategy can be divided into three strategies, namely,

1. Marketing Strategy

2. Operational Strategy

3. Financial Strategy

Here are some of the objectives that you can define in Marketing Strategy:

Sales Revenues
Market Share
Branding
Product Differentiation
Customer Demand
Pricing

Here are some of the objectives that you can define in Operational Strategy:

Operating Efficiency
Inventory Turnover
Just In Time Manufacturing
New Product Time to Marketing

Here are some of the objectives that you can define in Financial Strategy:

Capital Acquisition
Enhanced Distribution of Profits
Leveraging Investments
Restructuring of Capital
Defining Debt Policies

Defining and constructing these lower-level strategies which are developed below the generic business strategies are called as a strategy framework. Having these strategic frameworks, helps in the success of the strategic business plan as it clearly captures the vision, mission, the lower-level objectives of each of the functions that perfectly align with higher-level business objectives. Along with this, branding, marketing, operational strategies, and products or services helps in the overall success of overall business strategy.

What Are The Benefits of Business Strategy?

The key to successful growth of the company is in defining its business strategies. No matter what businesses you are running, you know you might have already engaged in practice of business management or business strategies. By studying the benefits of business management or the benefits of business strategy, you can become an effective leader in leading your business and in growing your business.

Few of the examples of strategic management and business strategy includes tasks like planning well ahead with a strategic business plan and the art of delegating work. Having strong organizational skills are very important for any organization but as a leader you also need to display consistency in every aspect in managing your business.

The ultimate goal of strategic business management and business strategy is to make consistent improvements to ensure that your business grows. Here are the 15 benefits of business strategy and business management that helps you build a successful business and which in-turn helps to build a successful profitable business.

In order to grow your business, you must implement 15 benefits of business strategy:

1. Gain more knowledge about businesses

The skills that you develop by studying business management and business strategies will help you develop best business strategies of building and operating a business. The business strategies helps new entrepreneurs to handle new and common challenges of starting a business. Learning these business strategies and business management will help you improve your analytical skills, learn how to negotiate business deals, how to make decisions regarding your business expenditures, and so on.

2. Learn how to manage your team effectively

Owning a business means having to hire many employees for different roles to run and manage your business. The best advantage of studying business management is that you learn how to manage your employees. Also studying business management strategies will teach you how to encourage employees to accomplish their goals which will in turn helps in achieving organization goals. The business strategies allow your employees to effectively work under your management and deliver better results for your business.

3. Master business communication techniques

Studying management business strategies helps you communicate better business communications. The small businesses must focus on studying business management that helps them to be a better business communicator. The moment you better communicate with your employees, customers, and investors, you can surely ensure of your business with great success. The solid communication skills are very much necessary when you are communicating your business plan and business strategies to investors.

4. Gain more knowledge about businesses

Learning business management strategies will help you know more about business strategies. The more you learn about the business management, you will be more confident on building your business. Not only that the business strategies help you outperform your competitors. Having more knowledge in business management help you grow your business smoothly and effectively. This way you can able to cater better serve your businesses.

5. Develop self-confidence as a business leader

Learning business strategy management helps you be a better self-confident entrepreneur. Not only that learning business management helps you develop the skills that you need to get past your weaknesses so that you can accomplish what you want. A self-confidence entrepreneur can able to take his businesses to the next level.

6. Expert higher salary

If you are looking for working on a full-time business management job and not yet interested to start your own business, then you can learn business management that helps you earn a higher salary. Additionally, if will help you open many doors by keeping yourself well equipped and experienced before you start your own business.

7. Establishing clarity, focus, and business direction

Having a business strategy in place will help you be clear on your path on where your business is currently at, where your business is going to go in future and what you are going to do to get there. This will give your business clarity, focus and direction which will help you align your business to achieve your business strategies. This way learning management business strategies helps in making business strategy happen rather than letting your business drift align without having any purpose.

A strategically built business strategy will help you set the direction of your company. Having a clear direction for your business will help your employees to work towards a clear path. Whether you want to be the best supplier in delivering a certain product or best supplier in offering the best business services, the business strategy will help you set clear target to aim and to work towards.

8. Making wise business decisions

The business strategy helps you make wise decisions over your business with a clear vision. The business strategy makes it easier for you to differentiate between good and bad decisions that ensures the success of your business. With business strategy, no matter what kind area of business you are going to focus on, you will end up in taking right business decisions.

9. Avoid competitive convergence in your business

It is always good to look and follow competitors for best practices that ensures the success in their business growth. However, companies without a business strategy, always end up with competitive convergence that makes your business to go no where. As a result of competitive convergence, the market becomes diluted and makes it impossible to determine between the companies.

This is where the business strategy plays a major role in making your business to stand among the crowd. A business plan along with multiple set of business strategies can really help in the growth of your business with unique characteristics that can standout among the targeted market rather than just following the traditional-general trends.

10. Measure success of your business

Any business can’t measure its success easily when it doesn’t have a business strategy in place. Business strategy makes it easier for you to measure the success of your business easily by revealing what you are trying to achieve. With business strategies you can define and set targets that are measurable pointing to the success of your business. These targets will in turn help you make progress in your business consistently and progressively.

11. Increase employee satisfaction

The best part of business strategy is that, it keeps your employees to stay focused and driven. When the employees are clear on what exactly they are working for, for what to achieve and how to achieve, the employees will automatically get motivated and will be satisfied with the job. This is for the simple reason that, they are very clear on their job role. The more the company achieves its goals based on business strategy, the employees are going to be more satisfied about their job.

12. A better understanding of your current business

Having defined business strategy for your company will allow you to change your strategies and be flexible on your business plan so that you can make business decisions wisely. When you develop a business strategy, it will help you understand where your business at present. Knowing your current business, allows you to look at overall business, including most of the key KPI’s such as financial performance, customer satisfaction, turnovers, sales & marketing trends, and so on.

As the business strategy helps you know the current status of your business, it allows you to make the best of your company’s strengths and work on weaknesses, opportunities and threats too. This helps you to understand the internal as well as external business environment that affects your business and your competitors. By knowing all these, you can easily make your business decisions and the way forward.

13. Agreement on the long-term future of your business

When you develop a business strategy, you will also define your long-term vision and business goals that are very clear for you on what you want to achieve in future. You can either think of increasing your business value and profitability by two times or multiply on the sales revenues either by keeping the same current company team size or increasing the company team size. Eventually, when you consider all the factors the business strategy helps you have a great future business in the long-term.

14. Identifying the key steps needed to achieve your strategy

Defining and developing a great business strategy will help you identify the key milestones for your business that decides what is the future of your business. Not only that, you can also develop the key steps that decides how you can achieve milestones of your business and where you want to be in future. The key steps are interlinked with the milestones of your business and helps in the growth of your business.

15. New opportunities for the business and better business results

When you develop a strategic business strategy focused on future of your business, it enables you the option of new opportunities in your business. You can get creative, innovative and think of expanding the business. You can generate great new ideas for your business and opportunities by constantly reviewing the business strategy on a periodic basis.

Business strategy makes it easier for you on where you want to be. A well developed business strategy helps you achieve better business results and better business performance, as the business strategy will be completely focused on where you want to be in future. With business strategy you can avoid distractions in your business, minimize wastage’s and keep moving in the planned direction to achieve your goals and objectives.

How To Implement Business Strategy?

A business strategy is the combination of all the business decisions that are taken and actions performed by the business to accomplish the business goals so that you can secure a competitive position in the demand market. The business strategy is the backbone of the business as it is considered to be the road map for reaching your desired goals or milestones.

The success of any business depends on the business strategy, business plan and the business management. Thus, any business that you can think of running or already have a running business must implement the business strategy that supports your goals and objectives. But the question is how to develop and implement a business strategy that is going to be successful? Well, here are our 7 steps to implement business strategy for your business.

7 steps to implement business strategy:

1. Define Vision, Mission and Core Values

The first step in implementing the business strategy is to write down a mission, vision and core values for your business. The vision and mission clarifies on what the organization is about, what it want to do, what it want to be, and what it want to achieve. Whereas the core values helps the organization on how they do the business based on the guiding principles that allows the organization to make wise decisions.

2. Develop Strategic Business Plan

Once you are done with defining your vision, mission and core values, now its time to define a strategic business plan. The business plan helps you identify the steps that are needed to achieve your organizations mission and goals. You can either define, short-term business plan of 1 to 2 years or long-term business plan of 3 to 5 years. You can also develop 10 to 20 years of strategic business plan for long-term strategies for growing your business. The short-term business plans are very helpful when you serve the fast changing industry and fast changing market.

3. Organizational Goals

Business goals are considered to be the organizational goals. The organizational goals are the high-level goals that are intended to be accomplished. These goals are set for organization for board of directors, chief executives, or senior executives such as CEO, CFO or CTO. These goals decide on the fate of the company and decides where the company is heading and what the company is going to achieve.

4. Departmental Goals

Once you have written down the organizational goals, now its time to write down departmental goals called as departmental objectives. These objectives are intended for senior managers, and managers. Once developed you can also define the roles and responsibilities for each managers and engineers to achieve the same. Usually, the CEO is accountable for setting up these departmental objectives for managers.

5. Employee Goals

Once you are done with setting up the departmental objectives for managers, now its time to set objectives for engineers or employees which are called as employee goals or individual goals along with their responsibilities. Every employee who are in mid-level management or lower-level management must have individual goals that are linked to organization goals and which in turn helps to achieve the organizational goals.

6. Job Description

Now once you have set all the objectives for each of the employees at various levels of management, now its time to define the job description for each individual employees. The job description must include their goals and must be updated on an yearly basis. This ensures that they are in right direction in achieving their goals and are on track on their work with their job with accuracy.

7. Performance Appraisals

Once everything is done, now its time to define a well structured performance management process. Make sure that the performance management system must be developed based on the goals or objectives defined for the employees so that they can be considered as part of appraiser process. When they are held accountable for their performance will indirectly ensures of achieving the company goals.

Always do remember that a corporate business strategy is implemented based on 3 classifications, namely, Growth Strategies, Stability Strategies, and Retrenchment Strategies, which are developed by considering all the internal and external factors.

1. Growth Strategies:

The growth strategies are those growth business strategies that are designed to grow your business in a defined a way. Growth strategies are those strategies that includes entering into new locations, entering into new markets, expansion of current businesses, diversifying existing business, adding new product lines, and so on to grow you company.

2. Stability Strategies:

Stability strategies are those strategies that are designed to combine and integrate an organization’s current position, by keeping an eye towards creating a strategic environment which will provide you the best flexibility for the future opportunities of growth or retrenchment strategies. The stability strategies are considered to be the conservative strategies which highly focuses on preserving profits, minimizing costs, and creating a platform for identifying and investigating future strategic possibilities.

3. Retrenchment Strategies:

Retrenchment is an act of cutting down or reduction, particularly of public expenditure. Hence, the Retrenchment Strategy is adopted by an organization when it aims at reducing its one or more business operations with the view to cut expenses and reach to a more stable financial position. A retrenchment strategy is the process of aggressively cutting costs in ways that have impact to your operations and revenue.

Elements of Business Strategy Model

When it comes to applying a business strategy model, there are many number of business models that many organizations use as part of their strategic planning process. However, almost of all the business strategy models follow the same structure as shown in this diagram:

The business strategic planning is considered to be the highest top-level strategic planning among all of the other plannings that are used in an organization. The business strategic planning is nothing but the corporate strategic planning which helps the organization to find out many answers. Any business strategic planning for an organization involves the following elements:

1. Defining Vision

2. Defining Mission

3. Defining Core Values

4. Defining Key Focus Areas

5. Developing Corporate Objectives

6. Defining Departmental KPI’s

7. Defining Individual KPI’s

Let us understand each one of the 7 elements of business strategy model.

1. Defining Vision

Any organization that is built and starts its journey by defining the corporate vision that decides the company where its going to go in future. A vision statement of an organization helps to define the company’s purpose, what the company is striving for, and what it wants to achieve by building this company. In simple terms, the vision of your company communicates its value and its commitment in achieving its goals. Thus, before you move on to next steps you must define a vision for your company so that you why your company exists, what are the plans of your company, what are the future goals of the company and why its doing its businesses.

2. Defining Mission

The next element of business strategy model is the mission. A mission of an organization is the a brief and broad statement about the organization’s goals and how it wants to achieve those goals. A mission helps the organization to address what it wants to offer and how it wants to serve its customers, employees, investors, external stakeholders, and so on. In the mission statement, the organization will write down a short statement called mission that describes why the organization exists, what are its overall goals as a business, what are its operational goals, what kind of products or services it provides, who are its customers, which is the market it serves, and in which region the organization serves.

3. Defining Core Values

The core values are a set of fundamental beliefs, ideals or practices that an organization follows in doing their business. The core values are considered to be the guiding principles of an organization that helps them to define the way they do their business operations. The core values are the pillars of an organization which must be followed by all of its employees, suppliers, investors, or any other stakeholders. There are plenty of core values that any businesses can adopt. However, here are few of the examples of core values, Commitment, Passion, Efficiency, Reliability, Dependability, Honesty, Loyalty, Optimism, Positivity, Initiation, Teamwork, Growth, Fun, Integrity, Innovation, Safety, Customer Satisfaction, People Development, Ethical, and so on.

4. Defining Key Focus Areas

The focus areas of the business strategy model are referred to as the pillars of an organization on which the business strategy is built up upon. These are the high-level categories called as pillars of key focus areas where in the organization is going to put all of its focus that helps the organization to strive towards its vision. Generally, the focus areas of any organization will be more than three to five. Few of the focus areas of an organization could be Cost Optimization, Innovation & Technology, Customer Satisfaction, Lean Management, Waste Reduction, and so on.

5. Developing Corporate Objectives

Another element of corporate business strategy model is the corporate objectives. The corporate objectives are the objectives that relate to the business as a whole. These are the objectives that are set by top management of an organization for running and managing the organization which in turn helps to set up more detailed objectives for functional objectives or departmental objectives, operational objectives, and individual objectives.

Here are some of the examples of the corporate objectives:

6. Defining Departmental KPI’s

The next element of business strategy model is the departmental KPI’s or departmental objectives. The departmental objectives are those which are set by the top management of the company for departmental managers. These objectives are also considered as the objectives set by top management for departmental managers who runs the departments. These KPI’s helps managers to run their departments and achieve the targets that which in turn helps to achieve the organizations objectives. These objectives are very important as they results affects the overall corporate objectives.

7. Defining Individual KPI’s

These are the objectives that are defined for each employee of the organization. The individual objectives are usually set by the managers of the department to their team members. These objectives are the objectives which on achieving results in the achieving the departmental objectives, which in turn helps in the achievement of corporate objectives. Every organization must define objectives for every employee as they will help to achieve the overall corporate objectives.

Business Strategy vs Business Plan vs Business Model

The business strategy is a part of the strategic business plan which is a part of the big conceptual structure called the business model. The business model is a conceptual business structure that explains how it is planning to run its businesses, how the company operates, how the company makes money, and how it intends to achieve its goals. The strategic business plan defines those goals, and business strategies that outlines the road map of how to achieve them successfully.

Business Plan

A business plan is strategically written document that describes the company’s core business activities, key objectives, and how it plans to achieve its goals. Great business plans must include an executive summary, products and services, marketing strategies and analysis, financial planning, and a budget. The business plan is the foundation of your business. You must write down a detailed business plan with the help of business plan template. A well developed business plan guides an organization through each of the stages of starting a business to managing the business. The business plan is used to how to structure, run, manage, and grow your business.

Basically, there are 4 types of business planning:

1. Operational Planning: Operational plans are considered to be the part of business plans which emphasize on how things need to happen. The operational plans typically describes on the day-to-day running of the company. These plans are often described as single use plans or ongoing plans.

2. Strategic Planning: The strategic plans are part of business plan that are strategically implemented plans that explains all about why things need to happen. The strategic plans are considered to be long-term plans which explains the story of long-term thinking of an organization. The strategic planning all starts with a highest level mission statement and casting a vision. Typically, the strategic plans are developed from 2 to 10 years. The vision, mission and core values are the important components of strategic planning.

3. Tactical Planning: Tactical planning are the plans that explains about what is going to happen. In general, the tactical plans are built on a tactical level, including many focused, specific, and short-term plans, where the actual work is being done, which supports the high-level strategic plans. The tactical planning is the backbone of strategic planning.

4. Contingency Planning: Contingency planning are also part of strategic business planning that are developed in keeping view that anything or something unexpected happens or something needs to be changed. These types of plans are must have plans for ay businesses for in case something happens as a backup plan that allows the company to continue its support for supplying or offering products or services and ensures customers are satisfied and needs are met.

Business Model

A business model is the model of an organization that it rationalizes on how an organization creates, delivers, and captures values, in an economical, social, cultural or other contexts, and so on. The term business model refers to the company’s strategic plan for making a profit. This clearly explains on how to identify the products or services such that the business plans to sell, its identified target market, and any other anticipated expenses. No matter which ever your business is new or a well established businesses, the business model is must.

In short, the business model is an outline of how a company plans to make money with their products and services that they offer to a specific market. At a core, a business model explains the following four things:

1. What product or service a company will sell

2. How it intends to market that product or service

3. What kind of expenses it will face

4. How it expects to turn a profit

There are basically 12 types of business models that are present in the market and they are:

1. Subscription model

2. Bundling model

3. Freemium model

4. Razor blades model

5. Product to service model

6. Leasing model

7. Crowdsourcing model

8. One-for-one model

9. Franchise model

10. Distribution model

11. Manufacturer model

12. Retailer model

15 Business Strategy Examples

Now we have understood what is business strategy, let us also understand the business strategy thoroughly through business strategy examples.

Here are 15 examples of business strategy.

1. Cross-Sell More Products

Cross-sell more products strategy is the best example of business strategy. Cross-sell more products is nothing but selling additional or more products to the same customer to make more profits. Cross-selling business strategy works well for businesses or companies who offer online products, or for banks, online retailers, and so on.

The strategy here is to increase the cart value by offering the customer to buy similar products or the products brought together. Even if you can able to make customer add his cart with small product or of small value, then that means you are going to make a significant impact on profits, without even having to spend money for asking customers to buy more. This strategy is considered to be the best for acquiring more customers or to generate new leads to your business.

2. Most-Innovative Product or Service

This business strategy is used for making more profits, more sales, or to acquire more customers effectively through innovation approach. The strategy here is to define innovation as part of your vision and mission. Making innovation as your business core values, you can offer and compete in market by offering most innovative products or the most cutting-edge technology products or services. This business strategy is most effective and best for the companies who are in the field of technology, manufacturing such as automotive, healthcare or electronics, and so on.

This strategy also help your business to outperform your competitors and grow your business rapidly. The companies that offer innovative products and services, are the ones which sees a higher success rate in conversion of sales in the market. The companies that drive their vision as most-innovative company are the ones that have higher customer retention base.

3. Grow Sales from New Products

This business strategy of business strategies is to grow sales from new products. Many companies adopt the approach of growing sales of their company by offering new products through constant research and development, being innovative. No matter whether they already have successful products or bringing new products, this strategy helps to bring in more customers through the crowded market easily. This business strategy is all about introducing new products to the market and keep updating the existing products through innovation.

4. Improve Customer Service

One of the best business strategy examples is to improve customer service across various areas of your business services. Many companies adopt many customer services or additional customer services to build the company’s reputation. The strategy is very simple, the more the customers are happy with your service offerings, it is more likely to be them to be your regular customers. This strategy also helps in to bring in more customers. That’s why many company’s make improving customer service as their company’s prime objective to grow their business. Usually, many companies fail in this area very badly. That’s why many companies make this as their first and foremost objective by offering better customer service including 24×7 online support through online chat, a direct call, or an instant email support.

5. Cornering a Young Market

Many large companies love to dominate the market just by cornering the young market and acquire more market space. This strategy is being adopted by almost of all fortune 500 companies and acquire its competitors to gain a competitive advantage in the competitive market. This way, the large companies corner the young companies to make more profits by acquiring huge chunk of the market. This helps the large companies to grow rapidly in the market, have strong presence over the market across various regions and retain as many as customers as possible for their products and services.

6. Product Differentiation

Product differentiation is one of the most preferred, common, and most used business strategies to keep the business growing. Production differentiation is that type of marketing strategy which is designed to distinguish products or services of a company from the competition. The best product differentiation involves identifying and communicating the most unique qualities of a product, a service or a company that will highlight the differences between its products or company and with its competitors.

The main aim of product differentiation is to create a competitive advantage for the product’s seller that helps to build the brand awareness in the market. Few of the examples of product differentiation are the fastest high-speed internet service or the most gas-efficient electric vehicle on the market. Product differentiation is what makes your product or service to stand out to your target audience.

7. Pricing Strategies

There are plenty of pricing strategies that businesses can adopt depending on the products or services that they offer. Generally, there are two types of pricing strategies that business can adopt, either keep the prices low to attract more customers or keep the prices high beyond the reach of ordinary customers making it an exclusive luxury product. This type of business strategy is the most common examples of business strategies.

The low pricing strategies works for businesses who sells products in higher volumes and the high pricing strategies works for businesses who want to maintain the exclusivity of their product wherein they can retain higher profit margins per product that they sell. Apart from this the business can play around depending on the demographics, region, location, season, festivals, and so on to make profits, sell more products or services, and to compete in the market.

8. Technological Advantage

Technological advantage is that part of business strategy that helps businesses to gain higher competitive advantage over others. The technological advantage business strategy helps you achieve better sales, improves productivity and dominate the market seamlessly. Any business can make the best use of the technological advantage by heavily investing in research and development, acquiring smaller companies, hiring employees with unique skills, and so on that helps you gain competitive technological advantages over other businesses.

9. Improve Customer Retention

Many businesses use lead generation strategies to attract new customers every month. Attracting more customers through lead generation means, spending more money. But this strategy doesn’t going to help you in customer retention as you will keep on spending money for attracting new customers. That’s why you need to improve customer retention through various customer retention strategies to grow your business.

This business strategy works very for almost of all businesses as it its easy to retain customers rather than spending money to attract new customers. You can use many customer retention tactics to retain your customers and increase profits. Most of the customer retention strategies involves offering discounts, coupons, or amazing offers that helps to retain customers. Apart from this you can also engage customers in fun activities when they visit your stores which makes them to come again and again.

10. Sustainability

The best example of business strategy for any company or businesses is the improve sustainability of the business. This is the best strategy that helps businesses to sustain their business for a longer period of time. The best way to achieve this is to develop your business strategy aiming towards increasing the sustainability of your business. Parallaly, you can define objectives linked to your sustainable business strategy plan that helps you grow your business. Few of the examples of sustainable business strategy are, reduce energy costs across your business areas, 3R’s of business (reduce-reuse-recycle), reduce wastage’s, adopt lean manufacturing strategies, and so on.

11. Creating a New Market

This is another best example of business strategy that helps your businesses to expand your business by entering into new markets. Here, either you can launch new products that are linked with your business strategies or businesses or you can create your own new markets for targeted audience to bring in more sales to your business. Creating new market means filling the gap of needs of customers who are already willing to pay for. You could either launch new products or services to fill the need of new market that aims to fulfil the needs of customers. This strategy holds good for many businesses that helps in growth of your business in no time.

12. Buying the Competition

Buying the competition is another business strategy example which we have already addressed before in this article. We thought of mentioning this separately with an example because this strategy really works well and helps you understand it better. Rather than competing in the market it is best to buy the competition that gives better results. The big tech giants always buy the competition and increase their capital value rather than developing new technologies which could cost them a lot.

Take an example of Facebook, its best strategy is to buy the competition rather than developing the technology by itself. Facebook has acquired WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, etc. which gave an edge over its competitors such as MySpace. Now, Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company. Similarly, take an example of Google which also acquired many companies such as Motorola, Nest, DoubleClick, YouTube, Waza, HTC, AdMob, ITA Software, and many more. Now Google is considered as a most valuable company and a trillion dollar company along with its parent company Alphabet.

13. Cost Leadership

Many businesses focuses on cost leadership as the best business strategies to compete in the market. To become a cost leader the businesses must offer their products and services at a competitive price that sets them apart from its competitors. The best way to do this is to implement unique cost strategies to lower the costs without affecting or sacrificing quality of products or services. Many big giants adopt this strategy to grow their businesses at a rapid phase.

14. Acquisition

Acquisitions are on the raise. Many organizations make acquisitions as they think that its the best business strategy one can adopt to grow their business, make huge profits, and they are very true. Acquisitions helps companies to grow at a rapid phase as the acquired companies are already making huge profits. This strategy helps to beat your competitors and create a monopoly and one brand that offers everything. This way you can increase your profits just acquiring businesses rather than investing on technologies and building companies on your own.

15. Structuralist

Another unique example of business strategy is to build and adopt a structuralist strategy that helps organizations in building their business operations just around the current market conditions and to work around the bounds of structural factors that helps your businesses to grow predominantly in the competitive market. This means you can leverage the products or services by order placing on vendors systems and processes who are already well established to build a bushiness strategy that helps your business to grow.

How To Measure Business Strategy Success?

The best way to measure the success of business strategies is to look at the measures and results of growth and improved competitive or financial performance. The best way to achieve this is to define, measure, and evaluate by monitoring many number of key performance indicators called KPI’s.

Here are few of the examples of KPI’s that becomes part of your business strategy.

1. Growth KPI’s:

Here are few of the examples of Growth KPI’s that becomes part of your business strategy.

2. Competitive Position KPI’s:

Here are few of the examples of Competitive Position KPI’s that becomes part of your business strategy.

3. Financial Performance KPI’s:

Here are few of the examples of Financial Performance KPI’s that becomes part of your business strategy.

Here are few more KPI’s that organizations can define as part of their business strategy:

4. Financial KPI’s:

Net Sales (Dollar Growth and Percent Increased)
Gross Profit Margin
Pretax Earnings (Dollar Growth and Percent Increase)
Operating Expenses (SGA) as a Percent of Sales
Receivables Turnover
Debt-to-Equity Ratio
Total Equity Dollars
Operating Cash Flow
Investing Cash Flow
Financing Cash Flow
Ending Cash
Earnings per Share
ROI, ROE, ROA

5. Customer KPI’s

Improving Image/Reputation
Number of Customer Complaints
Percentage Market Share
Number of Customers Retained
Customer Satisfaction
Dollars per Account
Time Spent with Customer
Revenue per Customer
Number of Transactions per Unit Time
Average Sales Dollars per Transaction
Customer Satisfaction Index
Number of Customers
Number of New Customers
Ratio of New to Existing Customers
Average Sales per Customer

6. Internal KPI’s:

Percentage Operating Costs
Billable Efficiency
Quality of Product/Service
Defects Ratio
New Product Success Rate
Cycle Time to Deliver
Project Turnaround Time
Number of Defects or Returns
Delivery Times
Delivery Response Time to Customer
Number of Test Market Trials
Relative Product Quality
Number of New Products
Number of Products Produced
Average Cost per Product
Number of Products Sold

7. Employee KPI’s:

Employee Retention
Employee Satisfaction
Number of Quality Resumes on Hand
Employee Turnover
Number of Ideas in the Pipeline
Number of Employee Suggestions
Percentage of Employees who are Systems Efficient
Average Sales per Employee
Number of Net New Positions
Number of Relevant Trainings Attended

Conclusion

A business strategy is at the pinnacle of organizational strategy. The business strategy provides your company with all the essential tools that are required for your business to compete in the competitive markets. For you owning a business and trying to understand what are business strategies that helps your organization to grow faster is going to benefit a lot and offers insights to make the most out of it.

Hope this article has helped you immensely in understanding the different business secretaries including business strategy examples. Tell us which business strategy do you think is most effective in the comments below. Or do you have your own business strategy? Let us know, we would be happy to add it to our list of business strategies.

Sachin Ramdurg

“Hey, I am Sachin Ramdurg, the founder of VDiversify.com.

I am an Engineer and Passionate Blogger with a mindset of Entrepreneurship. I have been experienced in Blogging for more than 5+ years and following as a youtuber along with blogging, online business ideas, affiliate marketing, and make money online ideas since 2012.

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