Whether you already own a business, or you’re looking to start a business, you must identify, clarify, and materialize your core offering before you can consider additional competencies, scale, and market penetration.
Without a sound and executable offering, your business will not survive. Your business offering is what drives your initial business opportunities and serves as the foundation for future business growth.
What do we mean by offering? In its simplest sense, an offering is a product, good, or service that your business offers. The first step in starting a business, naturally, is your offering… because it provides the value-add that drives your transactions in the market.
If you’re struggling to find your ideal offering, or want to refine your current offering, make sure to keep these considerations in mind:
- Select an anchor offering. An anchor offering gets peoples’ attention and brings them to your company to do business. Example: shopping plazas use anchor stores, like grocery markets, to bring people to the square. Second example: Apple’s iPhone is an anchor product that allows Apple to build additional offerings in its physical stores and in its devices. Once you build one robust offering, you can create more offerings to supplement profit.
- Work on one offering at a time. This is particularly relevant if you’re working on your own or recently just started owning a business. A lack of focus will cause your current offering, and future offerings, to succumb to external market pressures and business demands. Once you’ve developed a proof of concept and gained traction for your first offering, you can leverage your experience in developing that offering as an insightful guideline to follow for future offerings.
For instance, if you’re developing a MasterMind group on social media, keep your initial community small so you can enhance engagement levels and focus on connecting with a small number of members. As you develop these engagement methods, such as video conferencing and weekly group updates, you can find what works and scale for additional members. Start with the base, refine your offering, and let the columns organically develop. In other words, leverage your core offering to adapt your additional offerings for added success.
An estimated 90% of startups self-destruct. Lack of attention is most likely one of the contributing factors for this statistic. With your offerings, you must be clear, focused, and reasoned. Don’t get yourself lost in the sea of opportunity, especially if you don’t have your raft built. That raft is your core offering.
- Adapt your offering(s) over time. As technology, consumer preferences, and markets shift over time, you need to evaluate your current offerings and identify how they need to reposition or readjust for shifting demands. An offering that works right now may not work six months from now. Don’t rest on your laurels – be open to feedback from the external environment and adapt your offering(s) as needed. What got you into business in the first place can take you out just as quickly – failing to adjust for change, and anticipate it, will lead to demise. Conversely, appropriate change management and sustainability will drive your offering toward continued business growth.
Learn the secrets for offering, channel, & customers!
By selecting an anchor offering, you gain clarity. By working on one offering at a time, you develop multifaceted competencies. By adapting your offerings over time, you will grow and scale alongside your marketplace.
Embrace these three insights, and you will be able to create, adapt, and scale your offerings as your business grows.
Stay tuned for future discussions on two other crucial components of your business – Channel and Customers.
If you are looking for help developing, finetuning, or analyzing your offering look at our consultant services here or get a copy of Guide to a Successful Online Business.
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Check us out here and let us help take your Instagram marketing game to the next level! Take action today and reach out. We look forward to serving you and your marketing needs.
By Kyle Crooke
