Whether you run a product or service-based business, identifying new business opportunities is essential for business growth and diversification. You must always keep your eyes-wide open to uncover yet-to-be-solved problems in your niche so that you can create a solution that will help your business attract more customers and increase your bottom line.
After all, building a highly profitable and sustainable business is about spotting opportunities where others see obstacles. Most times, these opportunities come in the form of economic or market trends, expanding customer base, and change in technology.
In this post, you’ll learn 5 ways to identify new business opportunities that can help you provide more value to your existing customers or attract a new set of prospects.
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Analyze Your Current Business Performance
Most times, business opportunities are right within our reach, only waiting for us to tap into them. One of the tried and tested business performance formulas that has worked in many business environments is using SWOT analysis to evaluate your current business to know exactly how you are performing.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic analysis tool that focuses on four key factors that affect your business, which include:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
A careful SWOT analysis provides you with valuable insights about your business which can help you identify new opportunities and prospects for business diversification.
Take for an example, if the analysis shows that opportunities lie in changing market trends, you may want to respond by introducing a new product or service based on an unmet need, offering an existing product or service in another market or adopting new technology to improve your process.
Either way, the important point here is to evaluate your current business model and where you currently stand in relation to change in trends, new technology, and the change in customer tastes.
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Listen To Your Customers
One of the proven sources of ideas for a new business opportunity is simply listening to your existing customers. This helps you understand their pain points and problems, then finding new ways your business can provide value and help solve their problems.
How exactly can you listen to your customers?
By simply asking the right questions through a survey or a customer interview session. Ask them how satisfied they are with the solution your business currently provides them. Ask them how your business can better serve them. Ask them to tell you the biggest problem they are facing in their personal lives or business, and the type of solution they are looking for. This is literally making your customers tell you what they want you to sell to them. There is hardly a better way to test if your next product or service is going to be a success than this.
Another way to approach this is looking at your customers’ frequently asked questions when they visit your website or during a call with the sales team. Essentially, listening to your customers helps you create products or services that meet an unmet demand, rather than on what you think people want to buy. There’s a huge difference between both.
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Find Opportunities In Your Own Local Community
No business exists in isolation. If you want to succeed in business, then you must be passionate about helping members of your local community to solve their problems. Get out there and find out the people are struggling with.
Once you feel the pulse of your local community, you can easily tell what their biggest issues are. Then you can come up with unique and creative solutions to solve their problems. If you are successful at solving problems at your local community, it becomes quite easy to grow and scale because you already have a proven solution.
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Listen To Your Employees
It’s important to build a workplace where employees are free to offer creative and innovative suggestions and ideas about ways they believe are beneficial to your business growth.
When employees come up with new ideas, you might want to listen to what they have to say. You could consider and pursue these ideas by asking yourself some important questions such as, “Is there a market for the idea?” “Does the product or service solve any real problems?” “What are the risks involved?”
Let your employees know that they are important and you value their input. Encouraging open communication with your employees helps build a healthy and progressive business environment.
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Spy On Your Competitors
In the process of researching a new business opportunity, you might want to take time to spy into what your competitors are doing. Conducting discreet competitive research to understand what other businesses in your industry are doing, and not doing can provide you clear insights into what new offer or angle you can introduce to capture a bigger market share.
Your research should answer questions such as: where are they doing better that you can learn from? What makes customers choose them over you? In what areas are they falling that you can take advantage of?
In addition, you might want to find out if your competitors are already penetrating foreign markets. Are they leapfrogging you in the area of adopting new technology? What’s their business model like and how have they managed to win more customers over the years?
Analyzing your competition will help you identify key business opportunities that you can leverage to expand your market reach and develop more valuable and hot in demand products or services for your customers. Additionally, this can help you establish your unique selling proposition which will help you stand out in your niche.
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