11 Secrets to Business Transformation Framework Success

One of the fastest ways to get business transformation is to get up to speed as a small business owner as fast as possible. The information is based on hurdles I have seen in small business and startups over 10 years. Personal testing has created my website with over 1 million users per year. Concepts have been tested and refined with clients to match what they need. Now, if you'd like to succeed at a business transformation framework, here are 11 sure-fire tips for doing just that!

#1: Know Your Market Niche

This step is important because you learn the size and attributes of your market. Use data from Google Trends, Amazon product search, Amazon book search and Facebook group search. Here's how you use this data, Google Trends show 15 years+ of topic trends plus related terms, Amazon products can show competing products, Amazon books can show what topic problems are being addressed, Facebook topic groups can show what questions are being asked. Quora and Reddit can show the current questions and answers around your niche. Review any direct competitors and see where you could improve relative to them. Use this when you start up or every year.

#2: Know Your Customer Avatar

This is critical to your success because you need to understand your customer from a logical and emotional level. Here's how, speak with your prospects in terms of pain points, wants, questions, desires and roadblocks. Google Adwords Keyword Planner can show monthly search volumes of your topic and related phrases. Imagine the popular topic attributes you could address with products and services. This is most helpful when you want to define your customer segments.

#3: Know Your Value Proposition

Knowing your value proposition will help you define what products and services you will provide to help your customers complete jobs, avoid pain, create gain, save time, improve status etc. This means you create a unique offer that matches your customer segment(s) which could include written, audio visual, physical and miscellaneous items. e.g. product guides, instructions, how to videos, tools, social media groups etc. It’s critical to remember that your value proposition needs to address emotional and logical needs such as benefits and specifications.

#4: Document your product and services benefits

You need to know product benefits to document why your products and services are valuable to the customer. Here is what I mean: what benefits will the customers receive; what emotional queues will be fixed; what frustrations will be avoided; why is your product better; what will the gain be; compare the dream and nightmare scenarios and what mistakes could be bypassed. Consider what the audience is going through. This helps you later with marketing, content marketing and copywriting.

#5: Document your marketing message

Messaging comes next to help your customer go from awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, purchase and retention. Which means you can more easily communicate the customer’s journey to your business. Use customer keyword phrases relating to your customer avatar with target audience messages. Consider where your audience is found online and what will gain their attention. Draft some headlines and document type for your customer journey. Headlines: Secrets to fix…; # step to …; lessons I learnt from… Document Types: Topic social media post; article; guide; product review; product datasheet.

#6: Review your marketing assets

Your marketing assets are important as you can repurpose them. E.g. Instructions into social media post tips or checklists, video can also be a transcript or podcast, an interview can be audio and an article, photos can also be slideshows or video. Here is what it means to you, time can be saved when creating content for your customer journey to your business. Create or outsource the remaining content to build.

#7: Complete your Google My Business Listing + products + services

Do not neglect this step for a physical business or work from home business. Google My Business is free and builds a Google Map entry for your workplace including business description, industry group, contact details, products, photos and posts. This information can be used by prospects searching by business type in your local area. Google emails monthly on how often the map pin was shown, how often the phone number link was used, how often the website link was used and how often directions to your business was used. As an option you can create Google search text ads from this same interface to drive measured traffic to your business website or business phone. Recent experimental data showed clicks to my website at 44 cents.

Facebook has over 2 Billion uses and LinkedIn has over 600 Million users, some of which could be your ideal customers. Business pages are free to create and can include product information. Once you have Business Pages created you can advertise on those platforms. Facebook allows ad targeting by region, age, interests and group memberships. LinkedIn ads can target regions, companies and roles. Followers of your page receive your new posts on their news feeds. Ads can be used to like/follow your page, boost a post or have a Lead Ad to swap name and email for a lead magnet document. Recent Facebook experimental data shows page likes for 2 cents and lead contacts for 65 cents to my book Business Page.

#9: Build your Website which means long term sales

Your website is a critical business asset that can reach 4.1 Billion Internet users including 21 Million Australians. There are 3.5 Billion Google searches per day that could reach you. Websites can be used for simple information, dynamic information, blogs, ecommerce, membership sites, digital product sites and applications. They can include text, images, video, audio, maps, forms and embedded pages like from YouTube. There are choices for website hosting depending on your needs. Look at the total cost of website hosting + domain name + SSL https certificate. Try to pick hosting close to your main audience by country. Modern websites need to be fast and mobile responsive. There are options to self update content management system websites with just a browser. Build unique content around your niche topic, industry sector and location. Use 3-5 word popular keyword phrases around your niche. Create the web pages needed for your customer journey. Your website will provide relatively free 24/7 marketing to your business. My website has 300+ web pages providing over 1 million users per year.

#10: Turn on digital marketing to drive quick sales. PPC, Email, Lead Generation

Digital marketing will help you initially business leads and customer awareness. This means ads can drive traffic and business to you in 1 day. Facebook and Google can mix and match headlines, images and descriptions to test for the most effective combinations. Landing web pages with optin forms can capture prospect names and emails for follow up email marketing. Facebook Lead Ads can collect names and email directly within Facebook. Email marketing can provide automatic email sequences upon subscription for multiple offers. Google Shopping ads can link directly to your product pages. Both Facebook and Google can be used with retargeting to put ads to previous website visitors. Digital marketing is powerful as it can provide 1000’s of ad views for free and pay-per-click (PPC) to your website or Facebook Business Page. The fastest I have created an ad, gained ad approval and received traffic is under 2 hours. Start with a test budget < $30 and refine your ads and offers. Scale up when your profits exceed your ad cost but be prepared with new ads. Other digital marketing ad sources can include YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

#11: Run Key Performance Indicators for people, processes, customers and financial. Actions. Measures.

“If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It.” Does your business have enough business and technology skills to implement business strategy? Are your processes leveraging technology with high quality? Are your customers happy with low refunds and high lifetime value? Finally are you making a profit? These questions come from a Balanced Scorecard and are interrelated.

Fill in the form for your business and check if the actions are generating the measured goals.

Conclusion

So there you have it 11 steps to help any and every small business owner get business transformation.

It will amaze you how much faster you can get things done as a small business owner just by understanding these 11 business transformation framework steps and how to use them to your advantage.

Implementing Business Transformation - Actions and Results