Are you wondering why your business is not seeing the results you hoped for? Then it’s time to level up your business strategies.

The future of work and business is changing rapidly, and to stay ahead of the competition, leveling up will help you find gaps and streamline processes to maximize results.

When we talk about leveling up your business, we focus on building the fundamentals and implementing new ways to scale your business to achieve sustainable growth.

Leveling up your business does not have to be complex, and the good news is, that we have come up with seven easy-to-follow-level-up strategies for all areas of your business.

Keep in mind some tactics may not work for your line of business. You should follow level-up strategies that you can stick to and dedicate the time required to achieve long-term results.

Let’s start with automation.

Automate Processes for Better Efficiency

What is automation?

Automation is a variety of technologies that are used to simplify business processes by reducing human intervention.

Digital transformation continues to introduce innovative solutions to level up your business and automation can free up your time to focus on what’s new.

Start by taking a look at your existing business processes and pick out areas using maximum resources and time to perform repetitive tasks.

You can decide which tasks can be automated to streamline processes, reduce costs and human error and increase reliability and achieve scalability with more time to focus on innovation and creative thinking.

Here are some areas where you can implement automation to level up your business strategies:

Marketing: Recent research by Gleanster, a research firm, found that 51% of companies currently use marketing automation to improve customer communications with email automation, at all stages of the customer journey. Automating your email responses can help increase customer engagement, build loyalty, and increase sales.

Customer Support: Automation is a great tool to boost your customer service with quick and personalized responses to customer queries. Using a chatbot might be worth considering too! Chatbots Life found customer support costs reduced by up to 30% with the help of chatbots.

Social Media: Social media is one of the key tools to utilize for leveling up your marketing strategy for any business, but it can also be time-consuming. Using automation to schedule posts and interactions with your audience can reduce the hours you dedicate to social media every week.

Data Collection: Data is crucial to any business and is key to leveling up your strategies. Many tools and apps are integrated to collect data, and automation can help you sync this data and send it to a centralized location so you can share and access information in one place.

Management: There are a lot of daily and monthly tasks that require attention. The other demands can take over, so automation can ensure you don’t miss a meeting, or forget to follow up with emails.

Here are a few automation tools that are creating a lot of buzz in 2022 and helping businesses of all sizes automate processes easily across applications:

1. Zapier for workflows
2. Hootsuite for social media
3. Grammarly for editing content
4. Google Ads for marketing
5. Calendly for scheduling appointments

Use Social Media to Build Awareness

Social media is a powerful tool if used the right way. To level up your business, you need customers and sales. There are a lot of social media platforms out there, but you don’t need to use all of them. Identify the ones that allow you to post the type of content that can attract and connect you to your target audience to build engagement.

You may have heard that content is king, and for a good reason. Social media offers various ways to create content, from videos, and stories, to posts. The type of content you post makes the difference.

If you are thinking about leveling up your business strategy. In that case, you can do a few things you can do to ensure the content you are creating, is educational and valuable to your audience. Competitor research is essential, and a social media calendar can put your content plan into perspective. Introduce some automation, and you have a winning formula!

Social media is a great place to get to know your audience and understand their pain points. Using the information from your research, you can curate content that will make a difference in how customers relate to your brand.

Pro Tip: Stay true to your brand voice and personality by consistently using brand colors and images to build awareness.

Create a Sales Funnel to Optimize Sales

What is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is a tool used to generate leads and nurture potential customers throughout the customer journey. A sales funnel is divided into three parts: top, middle, and bottom, and four stages of intent.

Here is a simple diagram to highlight the intent of a sales funnel:

The sales funnel can help you manage the customer journey and your marketing and sales efforts to maximize the results at each stage.

Stage 1: Awareness: At this stage, potential customers are being introduced to your brand. To help build awareness, marketing activities and the content you post will be crucial at this stage. Use a suitable content calendar software tool and focus on the top-of-the-funnel content such as social media, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics.

Stage 2: Interest: Potential customers have a basic idea of what you offer at this stage. This stage helps them to learn more about your product and services and the problem you are trying to solve.

Stage 3: Decision: This is the point in the customer journey where potential customers want to know more about pricing and offers. Your sales team will play an important role in increasing communication with phone calls and demos to encourage action.

Stage 4: Action: This is the stage you are hoping for. Nurturing campaigns to deliver relevant content like FAQs, customer testimonials, and product reviews can help customers make purchases.

It is important to know where a customer is in the journey to plan what level-up strategies can be implemented to increase sales.

It can also help you understand what is working for you and what isn’t so accordingly you can change your approach.

Your marketing and sales teams will benefit from analyzing your sales funnel after performing activities and measuring the results, and collecting data.

Your level-up strategies at each stage of the funnel will continue to change as you find gaps or different solutions to keep customers moving along the funnel.

According to Acadium, “68% of businesses fail to identify their sales funnel.” This means they are missing out on the chance to convert leads into sales because they are not able to measure results.

Be Open to Partnerships

Reaching out to companies that compliment your brand is a great way to increase your brand reach and increase long terms profits.

Leveling up your business doesn’t mean you have to go at it alone.

But keep in mind that partnerships do not happen overnight. It takes time to understand goals and plan level-up strategies that work for both of you.

One strategic and successful partnership example we all know and (Mc)love is between Mcdonald’s and Coco-Cola. Their partnership started in 1955, and both brands have continued to support each other to promote their products, which both offer good quality and great taste.

A more recent one is Spotify and Uber, and although two different brands, their services complement each other and enhance the customer experience. To give you a little more

context, Spotify allows you to stream your playlist while riding in a Uber.

The top benefits of strategic partnerships are:

• Reaching a new and wide audience
• Creating more brand awareness
• Establishing brand trust
• Providing value to existing and new customers

Partnerships are a great way to level up your business to achieve more than putting in the effort alone. Commonalities between your products are great, but there is no harm in searching for partnerships outside your industry too. This will help you grow your product and services with creative and unique solutions to help everyone achieve your goals.

Utilize an Advisory Board

A lot of things go into running a business and as they say, two minds are better than one, especially when it comes to leveling up.

Forming an advisory board doesn’t necessarily mean the internal and external advisors you choose will make business decisions for you. An advisory board is more like a support system in some ways that can offer knowledge to help the decision-makers take the right steps to scale the business.

The main benefits of having an advisory board are to gain more insights to help solve business challenges and identify new opportunities to explore.

86% of companies have experienced positive results with a 24% increase in sales and an 18% up in productivity with an advisory board.

Before you recruit your advisors, outline your mission and the goals you want to achieve so you can ask the right people to help. Use job descriptions to help pick out the ideal candidates.

To get the most out of your advisory board, have contracts in place, schedule meetings to keep things consistent, offer compensation for their time, and communicate effectively.

Focus on the bigger picture when it comes to your advisory board. Although it may take something out of your budget, it offers you more to focus on running the business while your advisors work on improving it.

Host Events to Enhance the Customer Experience

There are a few benefits from leveling up your business by hosting events which include, networking, educating customers, building relationships, creating content, and collecting data.

The different types of events that you can explore are:

• Seminars or masterclasses
• Webinars
• Fundraisers
• Conferences

Depending on your business goals and your brand, you can plan events that can best highlight and demonstrate your services and expertise.

A lot of planning is involved, so make sure you have a team set up to ensure things run smoothly.

When planning an event, you can get things rolling much before by creating a buzz on social media and utilizing your marketing strategies to create the impact you are looking for.

Leveling up to drive business growth doesn’t have to be difficult, and you do not have to be an expert event planner. But you do need a plan.

Pro Tip: The big buckets to consider before getting started: are the venue, guest list, budget, audience, and theme.

Plan Leveling Up Strategies For Long-Term Results

Last but not least. How you decide to level up your business and the leveling up strategies you decide to implement depends on what success looks like to you and what resources you have available to implement strategies for future growth.

Every strategy in place should start with a plan that covers these core questions:

• What are your goals
• Do you have/need a budget
• Can you implement this strategy now
• Who can you ask for help
• What actions do you want your customers to take
• How do you want your brand to be perceived

All strategies started with a plan, whether it is to level up your business, implement automation, outline marketing activities, or build an advisory board; you need to understand the current situation vs. what you want the future to look like.

Your plan should be flexible but achievable and don’t try to do too much too soon. Research is your best friend in any business because it helps you understand the market better and how your brand fits in. 

The bottom line is…

There is always room to do better, and although it can take up time, there are leveling up strategies that are worthwhile and can even reduce the time it takes to see results.

Build your teams, focus on your vision, collaborate, and always be aware of what is happening in the world around you to find inspiration to scale your business with easy-to-follow leveling strategies.

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