The past two years have been tough for everyone, including businesses.

In a time when major business bankruptcies have become commonplace, just managing to survive has been hard enough for some. Add to that oil and gas price troughs and then spikes, dealing with the great resignation, and businesses having to sharpen their focus on ESG and sustainability. Things have changed forever in a really short space of time.

It's meant businesses have had to reassess their priorities and consider new markets to generate more revenue.

Across industries, companies are asking: “How can we do a better job of getting in front of new audiences, and demonstrating superior value once we do?”

The answer: dress for the market you want, not for the one you’ve got.

That means being confident about your vision and comfortable talking about the future as if it’s the now. It starts with making changes to your marketing before you change your business.

You’re unlikely to alienate the market you have. Instead, you’ll open up opportunities to win new business in the market you want. You’ll pave the way to move into your chosen segment and convert your business aspirations into an income-generating reality.

Repositioning for the market you want can be driven by several things, including geographic expansion and/or new product development. Starting that process of repositioning can take several forms, depending on where you are, and where you are going.

Here are three first steps that we’ve implemented for clients this year:

Messaging, messaging, messaging

When a company significantly repositions its priorities for new audiences, it must affirm who it is, what it values, and why its offer is the best around. Strong brand and product messaging, supported by a compelling narrative, provides the foundation for demonstrating your value, so your new market fully gets what you’re offering. That’s important for existing customers too.

Stronger sales and marketing alignment

For a while before the pandemic, the dependence on in-person sales and customer engagement was slowing down, and companies were making adjustments to their sales processes accordingly. Now, they have a couple more years of significant insights from their sales teams about what new prospective customers want to learn on their own, how they want to be engaged, and when and how sales can most effectively engage. This data can support the fastest, most impactful repositioning of the buyer journey, resulting in shorter sales cycles, more qualified leads, and more revenue.

Growth Driven Marketing

Strong sales and marketing alignment are the prerequisite for what we call Growth-Driven Marketing. GDM is a scalable solution that sets up a solid foundation, and quickly moves to activation, while allowing for iterative improvements. It can help companies not only reach existing markets but new ones too.

Here’s a real example.

A company had two business units; an established product design unit, and a new product manufacturing unit. The goal was to use the existing product design market to leverage business growth in the new market of product manufacturing.

They had a small sales and marketing team with a ton of shared data which they’d derived some insights from. But they lacked the bandwidth to fully capitalize on those insights.

They wanted to gain awareness and generate leads by moving on many fronts at once: enhancing their website, bolstering their social media, and revamping their email marketing campaigns.

GDM, including an audit of the existing web and social landscape, identified that the messaging for product design needed strengthening first to enable it to leverage more business for manufacturing. The website messaging was strengthened, resulting in improvements in SEO and SEM. More content on the company’s leading and patented technologies was added. Within the first quarter after activation, a significant number of leads were generated for manufacturing.

Say what you (don’t yet) do

Dressing for the market you want is a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable and there are many ways to achieve success.

Don’t wait for all your ducks to be in a row before you start talking about your new offer. Do it now. By looking the part and saying the right things ahead of the change you’ll gain awareness in new markets faster, leading to more leads and ultimately more sales.