Creative development

With many companies now understanding the significance of Creative Thinking for business, it’s no wonder that more and more organisations now have permanent creative thinkers on the board.

Creative thinkers look at your business issues from a different perspective, often highlighting issues rather than hiding them. They take a different approach to conventional decision makers and offer alternative actions that make a business totally unique.

1. Conduct market research

Market research is a key part of developing your market strategy. It is about collecting information that provides an insight into your customers thinking, buying patterns, and location. In addition, market research can also assist you to undertake an initial sales forecast, monitor market trends and keep an eye on what your competition is doing.

2. Profile your target markets

Content managers are responsible for a website’s content. A content manager’s responsibilities include the strategic planning and creation of digital content as well as updating content in a content management system (CMS).

We ensure the right content will appear at the right time at the right place on the site they supervise. The job includes editing text and images so that they appear on the website at the optimum size and quality.

Using content management software, such as Typo3, WordPress or Drupal, is central to the tasks a content manager must complete. In each case, the application’s primary function is the preparation and uploading of digital content to the Internet in the form of text, graphics or videos.

3. Identify your unique selling proposition

The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) (or unique selling point or slogan) is a factor that differentiates your product or service from its competitors, such as the lowest cost, the highest quality, the first-ever, or some other differential. … Using a USP is a great marketing tool to help position and sell your product.

4. Develop your business brand

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets.

Your brand strategy is how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand messages. Where you advertise is part of your brand strategy. Your distribution channels are also part of your brand strategy. And what you communicate visually and verbally are part of your brand strategy, too.

Consistent, strategic branding leads to a strong brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company’s products or services that allows you to charge more for your brand than what identical, unbranded products command.

5. Choose your marketing avenues

While there are many available, consider your target audience when you are determining which to use.

Options include a business website, social media, blogging, brochure and flyers, networking events, print advertising, word of mouth, cold calling and letter drops.

6. Set you goals

Marketing goals will help you to define what you want to achieve through your marketing activities. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.

You will also need to allocate a budget to your marketing activities. Your marketing budget will need to include elements such as:

• website development and maintenance
• search engine optimisation strategy
• design of branding
• printing of promotional material (business cards, brochures, signage, etc)
• advertising
• donations and sponsorships
• employing staff to undertake marketing activities.

7. Nurture your loyal customers

Marketing is like dating: Just as you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on a first date, you shouldn’t ask your customers to buy your main product the first time they become aware of your brand.

It’s important to nurture your relationships with your customers, as you would any relationship in life. The customer lifecycle is one effective way to do that: It starts with building attraction, moves into the committed relationship stage with a purchase, and continues into spreading the word of your relationship or your brand.

8. Monitor and review

Both monitoring and review are a part of the risk management process and involves regular checking or surveillance. A planned, resourced, approved and documented “Monitoring and Review” process and/ or program is a critical component of the risk management framework and risk process.