Crucial importance of strategy development and planning
It may seem to be obvious for some of us but we see this mistake to be repeatedly made by lots of companies’ management and administration. Evolving and growing as a company without any specific strategies or plans and just going with the river flow may work for a while but it is extremely ineffective. We believe that you should always know what’s ahead for you and follow the plan to achieve the goals effectively. So this article is just a quick reminder and example of how and why you should always develop your strategy and plan your office’s actions.
Let’s say you want to increase the number of visitors on your site and do more sales. What would you want to do for it? Well, you can try buying some traffic which may even be effective at the moment. But it is more of a spontaneous act then a professional move. What we recommend is another scheme. Imagine your big global final result like making more sales and then go back step by step from your desired result to the point where you are here and now.
Following the example provided above, for more visitors and buyers on your site as one of the things to do you may want to upgrade your site to be more modern, user friendly and competitive. You need great UI/UX layout, overall structure of the site, great design, relevant content, attractive photos. To better understand what is it you have to do with your site you may want to evaluate what your direct competitors do and find some great ideas they already use which make them look better than your product. And for you to know it you should look deeply into the market of your competitors and find out who’s good at what and why. Keep going back and splitting. Create very specific and easy to understand tasks which you can then send to the specialists to do.
Again, to have a great site, you have to improve the design. To improve the design you should learn what’s trending now, what your competitors offer. To do that, you should research their sites and products.
In order for your site to not be empty and abandoned, you need content. To make great content and not just some SEO texts which is getting less efficient nowadays you should research what people are looking for in topics related to your product to make your site alive and interesting.
And it goes the same to every single one of the characteristics of the site. The same goes to each and every other aspect you have to do to achieve your initial goal. How you can launch the traffic? How you can analyze it? How you can test it? How you can improve your site? Develop your strategy by pointing the biggest steps to do in order to achieve the goal – like improving the site, launching traffic. Then split them to lots of very specific smaller tasks like each and every research, design tasks, layout tasks and others. Now you have your strategy and plan. What’s next? Add deadlines to each step. As you get more and more experienced you will be able to add very precise deadlines. Also add brief expectations of the costs of each step. This way you will be able to easily explain your plans, your steps, your deadlines and your budget to anyone including company management or investors. And as easy as it may sound, this really makes a difference and makes work much more structured and effective. We highly recommend implementing it in your business if you haven’t already as it makes things much more systematic and predictable.