When you increase your company’s value, it’s easy to see how much of a positive impact is made on your business’s bottom line. From improving plateaued profit margins to hitting scaling goals, you can do more when your business’s value skyrockets. However, knowing how to add value beyond traditional measures like heightening productivity levels and improving conversion rates can be challenging.
What happens when you’ve exhausted all the well-known ways to boost your company’s value? That’s when you turn to creative strategies.
Looking at the “How do I add value?” question creatively can help you spot opportunities you might have missed. If nothing else, your exercise in creative brainstorming will enable you to re-examine all your company’s internal and external processes. And that’s never a bad thing. Diving deeper into your workflows can expose unidentified and unwanted procedural gaps and roadblocks.
To start your journey to uncovering untested avenues to grow your business’s on-paper and perceived value, consider taking five steps.
1. Invest in fostering a healthy, engaging workplace culture
This isn’t just the era of widespread workplace disengagement, a problem that Gallup’s been tracking for more than a decade. It’s also the age of “quiet quitting,” an unnervingly widespread workplace phenomenon, according to reporting in The New York Times. Both disengagement and quiet quitting won’t necessarily leave you struggling to replace lost people, but they will leave you with a staff of underperforming, uninspired workers.
Combating these issues begins with fostering a positive workplace culture where employees feel empowered, heard, and essential. That way, great people will want to stick around. And the longer high-performing employees stay with your company, the more value they can bring. For instance, an employee who’s been around a while isn’t just someone you can count on. The employee is also a source of legacy knowledge. And it’s not unusual for long-term employees to move up the corporate ladder, further cementing their bonds with your business.
Since every workplace has a different environment and culture, you’ll want to consider how best to develop yours to match your corporate mission and vision. For example, you may want to put funds into making your workplace more attractive, particularly if you expect people to work onsite regularly. To that end, some companies have made their offices more kid-friendly to accommodate the needs of employees who are parents. Their efforts have included adding onsite childcare and after-school care programs to installing playground equipment.
Playground equipment like swings, slides, and sandboxes can serve a dual-value purpose: It appeals both to employees and incoming clients or customers. Ensure you consider all children’s needs when designing safe indoor and outdoor play spaces. As Playground Equipment notes, around three million children live with disabilities or have special needs. Adding adaptive, inclusive playground equipment to the mix shows that your company genuinely cares for its employees and their kids.
2. Stretch your products and services into adjacent markets
Even if it feels like you’ve explored all the possible target audiences for your products or services, you might be missing a few. There’s always the possibility that you could sell to groups of people other than the ones that make up your core demographics. And uncovering a new audience naturally uncovers an untapped source of recurring revenue.
How can you figure out if you’ve overlooked a market? One method involves social listening. AI-based social listening tools like those recommended by Gartner can help you discover what people are saying about your products and services on social media. Sometimes, you may find that people other than your core customers are finding uses for what you sell.
Another strategy to pinpoint unexplored markets is to gather feedback from your current customers. Again, you’ll want to learn how they use your products and services in real-world settings. Having answers can open doors to new audiences.
Never underestimate the possibility that what you’re offering the public could be stretched beyond your original concept. When Lego first came onto the scene, its marketing was squarely directed toward children. Today, Lego has repositioned many products to appeal to everyone, from collectors to adults who want an escapist hobby. As a result, the company’s value has soared, with The Harris Poll noting that Lego brings in more than two billion annually. And it’s all because its leaders were willing to make changes based on how the world saw and used its products.
3. Redesign and differentiate your customer experience
Consumers want a terrific, personalized customer experience from the companies they buy from. You may need to fiddle with your customer service and support to meet their needs. Otherwise, you could quickly get a reputation for a lackluster customer experience, which won’t be conducive to building your company’s value.
It can be hard to know where to start to improve your overall customer experience. A solid technique is to find out what your top competitors are doing. Create a competitive analysis document. Then, use it to answer questions like “How can we improve upon our competitors’ service?” and “Where are our competitors falling behind in their service expectations?”
Remember that a need for instant gratification drives consumers. They don’t want to wait to get assistance or answers. The simpler you make their experience with your company, the higher the likelihood they’ll return. Not only will that lower your customer churn rates, but it will also boost your customer lifetime value numbers.
Worried about the cost of upgrading your customer experience? You don’t have to pay much more to impress customers with amazing service and support. Affordable chatbots can speed up the time it takes for a customer to resolve an issue without requiring you to spend a fortune or hire new people. Upgrading your website to make self-service intuitive and quick can be economical, too. As Zendesk explains, more than half of consumers are ready to embrace AI chatbot support to get the service they want.
4. Update your marketing and outreach copy and campaigns
Has it been a while since you’ve checked the pulse on whether or not your corporate content and messaging resonate with audiences? Marketing copy can go stale practically overnight. If you haven’t reviewed your website’s verbiage in a while, it might be worth another look.
Giving your logo, website, or voice the “spring cleaning” treatment can revitalize how people think about your company. In a sense, you’ll be undergoing a reinvention designed to keep your company from seeming too dated.
To be sure, it can be a challenge to try new things or see your company from a variety of viewpoints. Nonetheless, it’s worth undertaking if improved value is your objective. The more old-fashioned your company appears, the harder it can be to bring in new business.
This doesn’t mean you have to lose your origins or veer away from your company’s founding story. You can stay true to your business’s original intent while remaining on the leading edge. Look at Patagonia. The company has been around for decades. During that time, it constantly updated its product features and branding elements. (Oh, and it’s updated its logo several times, as illustrated by 1000Logos.) But Patagonia never wavered from its inherent commitment to nature, inclusivity, and sustainability. Is it any wonder that it’s held its standing as a trusted brand and enjoys tremendous customer loyalty?
5. Develop partnerships with other companies and nonprofits
Permanent partnerships and one-time collaborations with businesses and charities can expand your company’s worth and value. Why? Forming alliances with other entities can amplify your branding and introduce your corporate name to consumers. The right type of partnership can spike your sales and elevate your brand reputation by association.
Finding partners that align with your corporate culture, beliefs, and aesthetics is the key to making partnerships and collaborations work. Even if a partner isn’t fully aligned with your products and services (or sells something that falls into a completely different category), it’s okay as long as your businesses are on the same page in other ways. As a Forbes article notes, the secret to making alliances work is clear communication and transparency, openness, trust, and respect.
That said, winning partnerships don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen without a lot of forethought and planning. Expect to spend a lot of upfront energy mapping out precisely what your collaboration will look like. Talk about how you’ll market to audiences, share lead and customer data, and divvy up customer service and support needs. Having a media game plan is also a critical component of a partnership. Journalists and publications may question why you partner with a specific brand, business, or nonprofit. When they come knocking, you’ll want to have answers.
Your company’s value today doesn’t have to be the value of your company tomorrow. If you’ve taken all the conventional approaches to increase your business’s value, you still have more room to grow. All you have to do is leverage some creative methods.
