• Innovative Strategies That Create More Profits

Author: harborcapitalgroupinc

Would You Like To Know The Answer Ahead Of Time?

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Will your startup be viable? Will customers want to buy your new product? What is the optimal price point for your new product? These and many other questions can be answered in a matter of days for only a few hundred dollars, and you can even do the research yourself.  

Entrepreneurs usually have to make decisions with little data no history. Think of all the angst you could get rid of and replace it with some real data. Here is a Landing Page research program can give you the answers you need, And you can even do it without a website if you want,

MailChimp has the tools you need (email capture and database, analytics, and templets for the Landing pages) for about $15 per month. You write the copy. If you have a social media following, you can use them or you can buy pay-per-click ads from Google or others with a defined budget of $100 per month. And one month will certainly give you some information. 

The amazing thing about this program is that it is easy to do, provides lots of data for your analysis and decision making… and it is extremely inexpensive to implement. 

Also, you can continue testing one question after another to get the information you need or to optimize a program. Plus, with these low costs and quick turnarounds, you can make a lot of progress in a very short time. 

 Here is How It Works

1 Open a MailChimp account. Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and an email marketing service. They have a free account but you will need the $9.99 per month account and the Landing Page module at $4.99 month.

2 Once you have your account, you have an option to use your URL (@company.com) or you can use a URL from MailChimp or you can buy a URL to use for your research.

3 You can then create landing pages which you will use to do your testing. Landing pages are a single web page that appears when someone clicks on your “advertisement” (from Google AdWords, Facebook. Twitter. Or from your content marketing program, or other social media). 

4 MailChimp hs several landing page templets you can use. These templates are easy to use. No coding. Just drag and drop. 

5 When someone comes to the Landing Page and sees your “offer” which could be anything from information, discounts or even get on a waiting list or to purchase something, Obviously, the more compelling the offer, the more sign-ups.

6 When prospects sign up, the information (name and email address) goes into your “audience file” at MailChimp. You will get data and analytics also which you can use for evaluation.

7 Also, you can set up an automatic response page welcoming everyone. You decide what to say on the response page,

And finally, in today’s market, you need to continuously improve your product or service so your company and its product stay viable over the long term.

There you have it. Get answers to specific questions in a matter of days and at a cost of only a few hundred dollars. 

What answers would you like to get in the next 30 days?

Want To Make Better Decisions? Here’s How To Start

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We all make some decisions. Some we celebrate and some we would like to redo. Estimates are that CEOs from established companies make the right decision 57% of the time. However, If you are the leader of a startup company, you will have to make more decisions, more quickly, and with uncertain information or little information at all.

Our culture says that leaders are strong, confident, have conviction and remain consistent. But what if they are wrong? It actually happens quite often. For example, Blockbuster, Blackberry, Xerox, and Sears to name a few. Ninty-five percent of startups are started and closed every year in the U.S. Most of us could do better. Here’s how.

The key to better decisions, according to Al Pittampali in his book “Persuadable,” is the willingness and the ability to change your mind in the face of new information. To do this, you have to reject absolute certainty and treat your beliefs as temporary. Plus, understand that no matter how confident you are in your view, you could be wrong,

This kind of thinking requires you to seek out counter-arguments against even your most long-standing trusted beliefs.

Therefore, exceptional decision-makers, are people who are first, “Persuadable” and have the mental flexibility to change their opinion. If they are persuadable, they need to evaluate critical information or arguments as objectively as possible and update their beliefs accordingly. This analysis starts with a good knowledge of critical thinking skills. We will have information on critical thinking skills at a later time.

Here is another way to think about it, Maybe rather than you trying to persuade someone else of your opinion, maybe you may need someone else to persuade you.

Do you consistently question yourself about your opinions and biases?  And let others know you are willing to listen to their arguments and views?

 At Harbor Capital Group, we help entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses.

Creating And Sustaining A Competitive Advantage

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An advantage is rooted in asymmetries among rivals. It is leadership’s job to identify which asymmetries could offer an advantage. You want to exploit real advantages and be careful to avoid your weaknesses.  You also don’t want to get into a fight you can’t win.

A Sustainable Competitive Advantage

A sustainable competitive advantage like lower costs or higher quality is the goal of every business, but you also have to realize that your advantage may not be across the board. Your advantage may only be in certain products or services. Also, your customers are not monolithic. They differ in knowledge, biases, perceptions of quality, budgets, etc. Therefore, your advantages may be limited or temporary and not extend across the market.

To have a sustained advantage, your competitors can not be able to duplicate your advantage (eg, even lower prices or higher quality). To achieve that you need patents or processes, or unique skills and methods that you have obtained through experience or a strong brand name like Apple.

Interesting Advantages

Some advantages are more interesting than others. Richard Rumelt in his book “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy” explains that a competitive advantage that is “interesting” only when the advantage helps you increase value.

Competitive advantage and profitability are not equal. You can’t make money or get wealth by simply having, owning, buying, or selling a competitive advantage. The connection between competitive advantage and wealth is dynamic. Wealth increases when competitive advantage increases or when the demand for the resources underlying it increases.

How to increase value

Increasing value requires a strategy to do at least one of the following:

  1. Continue to strengthen your advantage (stay in beta mode forever)

  2. Keep expanding your advantage in both products and markets

  3. Create a higher demand for your advantaged products

  4. Make it difficult for competitors to copy or imitate your advantage

Deeping your competitive advantage

Start by defining advantage in terms of surplus — the gap between buyer value and cost. In other words, widen the gap by increasing value to buyers, reducing costs or both. This is difficult for two reasons:

One, Management must believe that improvement is a “natural” process and that it can not be accomplished by pressure or incentives alone. Improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just cost controls.

The same improvement rules apply to products except observing buyers is more difficult than examining one’s own systems. Companies that excel at product development and improvement carefully study the attitudes, decisions, and feelings of buyers. Then have empathy for buyers and anticipate problems before they occur.

Two. The second reason deepening your advantage is difficult is when your methods and processes themselves are weak. The improvements must be embedded or protected from rivals.

Broadening Your Advantage

Extending your competitive advantage into new products or markets means encountering new competitors. This requires looking at and reexamining the underlying skills and resources of your proprietary knowledge.

Extension based on customer beliefs (brand, reputation, etc,) may be diluted or damaged by careless extensions. (look at how Disney has protected — no cursing,  no sex, and no gratuitous violence- its brand while expanding) A brand’s value comes from guaranteeing certain characteristics of the product. But those characteristics are hard to define

Creating Higher Demand

Advantage increases when the number of buyers grows or when the quantity demanded by each buyer grows Technically it is the scarce resources that underlie the advantages that increase in value.

Note; increases in long-term profits only occur if you have already created a competitive advantage and you continue to use your proprietary processes and methods to expand demand. Engineering increased demand for the services of scarce resources is actually the most basic of business strategies. The increased value will come from less imitative competition.

If you continuously improve, more and stronger patents, strengthing your brand-name additional copyrights, etc your competition will have a hard time imitating your products. It’s like staying in “Beta” forever.

 

How To Leverage Your Competitive Advantage 

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Leadership needs to identify and understand the specific asymmetries between your offer and your competitors’ offer. For example, if you can produce your product at a lower cost then your competitor you have a competitive advantage. However, how you use that advantage can make a significant difference.

Much of the following information comes from UCLA Professor Richard Rumelt’s  discussion of the sources of power and how to overcome obstacles in his book on good strategy/ bad strategy,

The advantage is not generally across the board, It depends on which products and which applications, knowledge and tastes, etc. There is no such thing as having an advantage across the board to all customers,

For advantages to be sustained, competitors must not be able to duplicate them or the resources underlying the like patents, trademarks, talent, economies of scale, network effects, etc. Apple is a good example.

Competitive advantage and profitability are not equal. You can’t make money or get wealth by simply having, owning, buying, or selling a competitive advantage. The connection between competitive advantage and wealth depends on the interaction between the product and the market, Wealth increases when competitive advantage increases or when the demand for the resources underlying it increases.

Increasing value requires a strategy for progress on at least 1 of 4 different fronts,

  • Deepening the advantages
  • Broadening the extent of advantages
  • Creating a higher demand for advantaged products
  • Strengthing the isolating mechanisms that block easy replication and imitation by competitors

Therefore, a competitive advantage is interesting when one has insights into ways to increase its value,

Have you identified your competitive advantage overall and product by product, and how you are going to exploit their value?

Anticipation Is A Strategy Leverage

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Anticipation is simply Insights into anticipated future events or others’ behavior that you can turn into

an advantage (e.g., investing in a property that you think will increase in value).

In business, we think of anticipation in terms of potential changes in consumer demands

or actions competitors will likely take. (e.g., Netfilicks vs Blockbuster).

Most of the time, we worry about current competitors and potential new entrants into our market.

At the same time, competitors are trying to anticipate what you are going to do.

Most strategic anticipations draw on predictable “downstream” results such as;

1 Results of events that have already happened

2 Trends already at work

3 Predictable economic or social dynamics 

You have to be careful when you do “standard” forecasting because we tend to predict

three things and then take the middle one (like shoppers do in stores when they have three choices).

Also, we tend to extrapolate a continuous rising curve to future developments,

which may not be valid. e.g., n the 1970s, the price of oil kept rising rapidly to $100 a barrel,

and then oil was so valuable in the ground that producers started

to pump more oil, increasing supply, and prices began to tumble.)

 

 You don’t have to be a psychic to anticipate what might happen in the future.

Just look around, and pay attention to consumer habits and other trends. These trends will be in plain sight.

 

Next, you have to look at pivot points.

To achieve strategic leverage, you have to have insight into specific pivot points that you can

focus on and use resources to gain a significant advantage. These pivot points could be

products, technology, processes, operations, or business models.

You are looking for specific insights that have the potential to increase demand and leverage your advantage.

 

Finally, You Have To Concentrate

After you have identified your pivot point, you have to concentrate your talents and resources on exploiting it.

When you focus on fewer objectives, you can generate more significant payoffs.

Also, your company may have some constraints you have to deal with, and there may be

a threshold requirement (like the amount of advertising and sales required to break through the everyday noise).

It may also make sense to introduce a new product region by region,

concentrating its advertising where the product is new to spur adoption.

Also, it may be preferable to dominate a small market segment over having

an equal number of clients who represent only a sliver of a large market.

Questions

Is keeping track of and anticipating future changes and trends on your radar?

Is it on every team member’s radar?

Do you have touchpoints with your entire organization every so often to discuss strategic alternatives?

 

How To Use Anticipation As A Powerful Strategy Tool

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Insights into anticipated future events or behavior can deliver opportunities. In business, these insights are generally about future buyer demand or how competitors will respond.

These future events take time to develop, and they will not always evolve the way you anticipate them too. But, most often these trends, technologies, regulations, etc are in the open and already underway and visible. They may be ways off, but you have to seek them out, monitor them, and anticipate where they are headed. Otherwise, you could miss a significant opportunity or end up like Blockbuster.

Once you understand the significance of this future change or trend and the timing, you have to find a pivot point that you can leverage to your advantage. Finding this pivot point will take some insight. It could be re-imaging your product or value proposition or your technology or operations or other organizational functions.

Once you have identified your pivot point, you will need to concentrate and focus on specific, limited objectives around that pivot point that will generate the most significant profits. Unless you have unlimited resources, you will have to select and limit yourself to one target,

Is your company using anticipation of future events to build or maintain your market position?

If you would like to learn more about how to develop your business, check out our website at www.https://harborcapitalgroupinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Braintopview-1.jpg.com

At Harbor Capital Group, we help serious entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses.

 

How To Use Your Website to Build  An Enormous eMail List

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 Encourage visitors who go to your website to signup for your email list and make it easy for them to sign up. In today’s market, you have to build trust before you can convert prospects into customers. One way to do that is with popup displays on one or more pages on your website. It’s easy to do. You can do it yourself and it’s very inexpensive, 

You can use popup displays in many ways, to capture names and email addresses. A/B testing of messages, product or service value propositions, and more. The email signups can even go automatically into your mail program (for example Constant Contact or MailChimp).  

There is also a lot of analytical information you can get from the program. I use OptinMonster and  following are some basic things to think about when designing your program,

 1 Create a clear, very visible call to action (e.g., email address)

2 Personalize your popups (friendly tone and referral source if you know it, or special segment if the source was targeted).  

3. Offer an irresistible incentive (special white paper, informative blog, special price, etc.)  

4 Use a design that stands out (but it should also blend into your site because it is your offer, not some company’s advertisement. 

 There are many different kinds of popup designs and many different ways to use them depending on your needs and marketing strategy.  Ask yourself how you could use these popup ads, and if interested, put a plan together to use them effectively. It does take some time to prepare and develop the materials you offer (blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc.).

You might also want to look at our blog post on how to write effective headlines at https://https://harborcapitalgroupinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Braintopview-1.jpg.com/how-to-write-headlines/

If you have questions, you can always go to Contact and email me.

How To Build Your E-mail List

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Encourage visitors who visit your website to signup for your email list and make it easy for them to sign up.

In today’s market, you must build trust before converting prospects into customers.

One way to do that is with popup displays on one or more pages on your website.

It’s easy to do. You can do it yourself, and it’s very inexpensive,

 

You can use popup displays in many ways to capture names and email addresses.

A/B testing of messages, product or service value propositions, and more.

The email signups can even go automatically into your mail program (for example, Constant Contact or MailChimp).

You can also get a lot of analytical information from the program.

I use OptinMonster, and this information comes from them.

Following are some basic things to think about when designing your program,

 

1 Create a clear, very visible call to action (e.g., email address)

2 Personalize your popups (friendly tone and referral source if you know it, or special segment if the source was targeted).

3 Offer an irresistible incentive (special white paper, informative blog, special price, etc.)

4 Use a design that stands out (but it should also blend into your site because it is your offer,  not some company’s advertisement. 

5 Create popups for desktop and mobile (design for platform-specific campaigns

for mobile users are limited to touch controls, bandwidth, and certain SEO rules).

Also, a lot of mobile users are having negative ideas about ads in general on their mobile dev\ic,

6, Use exit attempts to capture abandoning visitors before they leave (you can convert

an additional 2-4% of visitors into email subscribers. (OptinMonster lets you use a mouse to track movement toward the exit

and gives you another chance to get them to pull the trigger on your call to action.

For example, you might have to offer something different,

a discount, a case study, or something else the prospect would value.

7 Show your popup ad at the end of your web page or post.

Give the visitor plenty of time to evaluate the information on your website.

The popup is often limited to appearing too quickly before the visitor has time to see what you are offering.

8 Keep your request noticeable with a floating bar.

Some popup ads are designed to be floating bars that are always visible

but not hindering their ability to digest the information on your website,

But, when they are ready, the opportunity to signup is there.

9 Build a dedicated landing page with a full-screen email popup landing page.

You can use large popup ads as landing pages and rotate different messages for testing purposes,

or with additional information in an attempt to turn them into a customer,

10 Create friendly slide-in requests.

They don’t appear until the visitor has viewed some of your content.

You can determine how long to wait (maximum number of pixels or seconds)

11 Use a welcome gate on your home page.

This full-page ad covers the content before the visitor sees what you are offering

and some gates actually switch the visitor to another page.

Make sure your welcome gate does not switch you to another page as Google will

penalize your SEO ranking for this. OptinMonster’s welcome gate keeps the visitor on your page,

12 Ask for visitor feedback.

You can also use popup ads to gather information.

You can direct the visitor to your contact page or create a popup to ask a question or take a survey.

13 Use progressive profiling,

like just asking for their email address and later ask for

additional information when they are more comfortable with you and your website.

14 Create a plan for new subscribers

A Send a  welcome email series (these emails get 85% higher opens), so send several,

B, Send information during the onboarding process to help customers get acclimated and learn more about the benefits of your product or service.   

C. Segmenting your list. Personalized emails will get you much higher transaction rates, but you must segment your list.

 

Depending on your needs and marketing strategy, there are many different kinds of popup designs and many different ways to use them.

Ask yourself how you could use these popup ads, and if interested,

put a plan together to use them effectively. Preparing and developing your materials (blogs, newsletters, white papers, etc.) takes some time.

 

Good luck. Let me know how this process worked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How To Breakout From Destructive Competition

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Many companies today face a very competitive market and are looking for a way out to break out. When every competitor is focused on short-term tactics (ie, special sale, drawing for a prize, etc.) the solution only lasts until one of the competitors comes up with a new tactic.  

Self-destructive competition is one of the problems W.Chen Kim and Ranee Mauborgo take on with their book, “Blue Ocean Strategy”.  For example, if your company is experiencing: 

  • Margins shrinking
  • Competition growing more intense
  • Competition driving commoditization
  • Rising costs

Too many companies focus their strategic thinking on the competition which puts the competition, not the customer, at the core of their strategy. Stop benchmarking the competition and responding to their strategic moves because it means you look more like the competition. 

Instead, put your strategic focus on the buyer and innovate new ways to deliver more value. Note: just because a  competitor is doing something, doesn’t mean it of value to buyers.

Think about these questions:  

  • Which features of your product or service could be dropped because they are not valued by the buyer?
  • How much would this reduce your costs?
  • What products or services could you add with those savings that would have value to the customer?   

If you know someone struggling in an overly competitive market, tell them about this post.  Maybe it will help. 

Part Three: Test And Verify Your Business Model

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You have analyzed all the elements of your business model and designed a business model that appears to offer an excellent opportunity. But, you still only have a hypothesis, and your risk is real. The next step is to test, iterate, and verify your business model.

Following is an example of why you can’t take your business model for granted, even if the model had proved it works, When JC Penny was in trouble they hired Ron Johnaonk the man who designed the Apple stores which have been an enormous success, How could they go wrong? He laid out the store design into various boutiques rather than the traditional “boys department,” etc..

Plus, because the concept was so successful (at Apple), they modified all their stores within a  year, which cost millions of dollars, But customers hated the new store and loss of “bargain items,” sales declined rather than increased. A little over a year later, they fired Ron Johnson and looked to go back to their old way and search for another business model.

A lot of the information here is from Seve Blank, entrepreneur, and professor at Sanford University, and comes from his book,  “the Four Steps to the Epiphany.” The point of testing and verifying the business model is to move away from the standard product development model and move to a customer development model. Having a product isn’t sufficient, You need to verify you have paying customers and a financial model that works.

The cost of getting the business model wrong is devastating, and not all startups are the same. (See our article on market types).  This test and verification process looks at two areas: customer discovery and customer validation,

In Customer Discovery you are trying to find out who the customers are for your product and if the product or service you solve is vital to the customer. nOt just the early adopters but to the mainstream customers, You are developing a sales model that can be replicated and can drive customer demand,

In Customer Validation you are developing a sales pathway for sales and marketing, You are trying to prove you have found customers and a market that is positive about your product or service.model and the process is repeatable

These two steps will:

  • Verify your market

  • Locate your customers and identify the economic buyer

  • Test the perceived value of the product or service

  • Establish your pricing and channel strategy

  • Establish your sales cycle and process

When you have completed both of these steps, you can move on to executing your business strategy and model,