Admittedly, the business world is increasingly becoming more competitive. The ever-dynamic industry makes it difficult to create a competitive edge, leave alone maintaining it. However, businesses have to be adept at strategic thinking and modern technology to enhance their position, performance, and value.
As the New Year approaches, how do you want to remain competitive? This article gives shares ways that would make businesses maintain a competitive edge in 2020 and beyond.
Create Demand for Your Business
Demand generation for your business goes beyond marketing into intensive research and grasping your customer needs and offering yourself a solution.
Mostly, no one can resist a solution to an unsolved problem. When a business positions itself to adequately tackle customer needs, customers will flood in at the expense of competitors.
Whose duty is it?
Demand generation is a collective responsibility as opposed to being a marketing role. Marketers should find out what customers want. Then content marketers craft excellent content that appeals to customers. And product marketers should position the product as a solution to the pain points of the clients.
Other practices that lead to demand creation involve email marketing campaigns, customer review sections, real-time messaging, etc.
Note that no one is going to listen until you can prove your usefulness. If you want to stay competitive, you ought to keep your customer’s pain points in mind.
AI And Machine Learning
AI technology continues to impact the whole world and it’s expected to maintain a leading role in making businesses competitive. The coming years will see stiff competitive due to innovation and the use of technology in nearly all industries.
One AI system that helps businesses stay competitive is Netra. Netra has the capacity to analyze the visual content from social media platforms such as Facebook to determine customer’s interests. It helps give a clear picture of the audience want which in turn makes it possible to design products/services which appeal to them.
Siftrock, on the other hand, works together with your marketing automation software to generate new leads. It can help find new sales leads from out of office replies, email signatures for new contacts, or even find replacement contacts when people change jobs.
Then there is InsideSales.com, a platform using machine learning to build sales models from third-party data sources. The tool predicts and determines the accounts which are likely to close and recommends the next viable marketing move.
All-inclusive Digital Platforms
Today, the demand for all-inclusive platforms has risen as customers and business groups want to accomplish several things without leaving the current tab.
A good example is Prime Trust which offers its customers a one-stop shopping for all infrastructure and financial services. The use of such convenient platforms is gaining popularity.
Today, customers seek to use platforms with diverse payment methods, and it more speculated that those interfaces with the Bitcoin payment option will skyrocket soonest. Users will also want secure, instant and all-time access to funds.
That’s why businesses need to engage experts who can guide them into having this technical maze which will push them ahead of the competition.
Use of Big Data
Big data is potentially advantageous for organizations in any industry. Do you know that 90% of all available data was created two years ago? Do you know that by 2020, we will have 50 times more data as much as we had in 2011?
Well, the huge volumes of data indicate its fundamental role in expanding the digital universe. The internet of things is also increasing at supersonic speed with gadgets creating data every time.
For instance, John Deere uses sensor data to help farmers make better farming decisions, monitor machine optimization and control the ever-growing fleets of farm machinery. The super-sensitive sensors by Shell can find additional oil in wells leading to a massive collection of oil.
Businesses use big data differently depending on their needs, including finding new markets and new business opportunities, a better understanding of competitors, knowing customers in real-time with the help of the van westendorp method, and others use.
These are just a portion of what big data can accomplish. There are endless uses of big data and its correct usage will certainly increase the business value as well as helping them stand out from the competition.
Focus On Youth Demographic
For youth, the internet is an integral part of everyday life. It’s so essential that a day without the internet would turn the world a dull place to live in.
Today, youth make a huge consumer market and those companies who move their products to marketing platforms usually have a competitive edge over those who don’t. This because online is the place to capture them.
According to the VidMob survey, 59% of generation Z used their YouTube a lot more than they did a year ago. It means that this a highly potential platform, as well as other platforms dominated by young people.
It is critical to determine who your customers are, what they are interested in and where they are spending their money. If you want to stay ahead in 2020 and beyond, invest thoroughly in digital marketing and you will make a catch of a lifetime.
