Business opportunities are everywhere. But not all of them will deliver expected returns on your investment.
To grow your business as an entrepreneur, you should develop effective methods for identifying profitable business opportunities.
This post provides effective ways to seize the moment, and find new openings to expand your business.
1. Ask Your Prospects
Your potential clients are searching for something new. They are looking for better ways to solve their problems.
That’s an opportunity for you to win them over. But how will you find out what they want?
Simply ask. Tell them to tell you what they want, providing as many details as possible.
To achieve consistent year-on-year growth, you should create a system that constantly reveals the hidden desires of new prospects.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
* Use a website chatbot to interact with new visitors to your website
* Ask new email subscribers to tell you their most urgent need.
* Offer a free consultation to discuss with your prospects
* Offer a gift to prospects in return for the information they provide
As soon as you have fresh insight into your prospect’s needs and problems, many new business ideas will come to you naturally.
2. Listen to Your Customers
If you have been a diligent marketer, you will have a long list of active customers or subscribers. Your list is a goldmine of business opportunities.
You can tap into this treasure in different ways:
* Ask them to participate in a survey and reward them for the time spent on it.
* Give them a chance to rate services, products, and support experiences
* Ask them why they choose you over your competitors.
* Encourage them to discuss their frustrations and complaints without reservations.
Use this information to discover how to create solutions that will boost business growth.
3. Observe Industry Trends
Subscribe to and read your industry’s major publications. Connect with industry experts. Listen to their podcasts and follow them on social media channels.
Be an active member of your trade association in your locality. Attend meetings regularly. You can easily detect trends when you attend association meetings. At these meetings, market your business with printed materials, like brochures, business cards, and flyers. They produce a unique impact on the recipients.
Also, set up alerts on Google for any industry terms. Observe the trends on Google Trends, and you will detect growth or decline in interest in a particular aspect of your service.
4. Consult Your Team
Both old and new employees can provide new business ideas. So, tap into the talent you have in your company.
Many employees keep quiet until you ask them to provide their best ideas for new products or services. But you can draw out ideas for new products through periodic corporate retreats, requests for proposals, and intra-team competitions.
Rewarding employees for offering good business ideas can also increase the flow of new opportunities.
5. Spy on Your Competitors
Competitive analysis is usually part of any business startup process. However, busy entrepreneurs may forget their competitors when immersed in daily business operations.
If you are too busy to keep an eye on your business rivals, you can delegate the task to someone else. Ask a member of your team to study and report on:
* What competing businesses are doing or not doing
* The new blog posts and marketing messages they are sending
* What they are sending to their email subscribers
* Where they are excelling and where they are failing
* Customer complaints about their service on sites like Trust Pilot.
Analyzing your competitors can help identify open doors for business expansion. You can fill in gaps created by your competitors’ failures.
6. Study Your Analytics
If you use analytics tools for marketing (and you should), you can discover actionable insights in them. Well-designed analytics tools have dashboards that reveal how your marketing channels are performing.
You can also use the built-in report designer to create custom reports to view important marketing metrics.
Data analytics will reveal your traffic sources, the parts of your website that customers interact with most often, and the types of devices used to connect to your website.
Use the insights from analytics tools to develop new strategies and take advantage of hidden opportunities for growth.
Now, you know how to recognize new business opportunities to grow your enterprise. Make a plan today to get fresh ideas from your customers, employees, competitors, industry experts, and analytical tools.
