As the saying goes, ‘A jack of all trades is a master of none’ however when it comes to your business, a lack of focus can have worse consequences. For instance, if your business decides to perform multiple marketing campaigns, you may result in having achieved none of them well. Thus, focus is key, in any area of your personal life but particularly in the world of business. Unfortunately when individuals discuss the necessary attributes of a business aspects like team-work, ambition, resilience, motivation and leadership, rarely is focus brought up.
This newsletter will hopefully change how you perceive its significance. Furthermore, we will inform you on the importance of focus for yourself and also for your business. areas that you should focus in and how you can achieve that.
Like the topic of this newsletter, I will focus onto 3 distinct areas that require focus: the overall strategy for your business, the initiatives for that strategy and the necessary daily/weekly tasks that are essential to succeeding with your strategy.
Campaigns & Initiatives:
Campaigns and initiatives support your overall strategy and goal. A lack of focus here can lead to a lot of wasted time and money in scattered marketing channels and campaigns.
Focus on one marketing channel – One of the biggest faults of being unfocused in your marketing is never giving each marketing channel a fair shot by not dedicating enough time, energy or money and giving up too early.
Whether it’s search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Facebook Ads or pitching bloggers, they all require a really solid effort, some time to show results and sometimes money.
Particularly when first starting out, prioritize and choose your marketing and social channels selectively based on what you think will work best (based on product/market fit). Make sure to give each one a fair shake by devoting enough time, energy and money before moving onto the next channel.
Overall Strategy (Changes Rarely):
The overall strategy is the big picture and the ultimate direction as well as purpose of the business. This is usually something that doesn’t change unless you are making a major market shift and pivoting. Within the overall strategy, there are two major elements that need to be considered in particular:
Focus on your unique value proposition – Consumer have dozens if not hundreds of other online destinations they could choose instead of you. So, why should they buy from you? That’s the question you need to answer as you start formulating your unique selling proposition.
Focus on product/market fit – We recently discussed product/market fit on the Shopify blog, but your product/market fit might just be the most important element to focus on, especially early on. Focusing on this alone in the early stages of your business can mean the difference between success and failure.
The Priority Matrix – The Priority Matrix is another popular way to divide and prioritize tasks. Using this matrix, all tasks are divided into four quadrants: important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, not important and not urgent. This makes it easy to classify each task and deal with the tasks in priority to the quadrant they belong to.
The Pareto Principal (80/20 Rule) – The Pareto Principal is simple and can be applied to many things in life. It states that 20% of your actions and inputs will create 80% of your desired outcome. The key here is identifying and focusing on the 20% that is actually achieving the 80% of your desired outcome and not falling in the trap of working on the 80% that’s only achieving 20% of the desired outcome. The 20% you do choose to work on should mostly work towards improving the one metric you chose to focus on.
Tools to Help You Focus
Achieving focus for your business strategy and day-to-day tactics isn’t easy. Below we have listed some tools that can help you find and regain focus:
Business Model Canvas – The Business Model Canvas is different from typical business plans, which are over-complicated and littered with buzzwords. Instead it is a one-page road-map that lists the key strategic elements of a business. Most importantly, it really forces you to think about the most important elements of your business to identify and focus on the most important areas.
One way in which to achieve this focus is RescueTime, an app that analyses each day of your week and encourages you to become more productive by refining your focus. This is particularly useful when your focus is divided by many daily activities and it can be difficult to self-assess how much of your time is being wasted doing unnecessary things.
A tip that is simple to implement is keeping the deadlines realistic but short as this can help motivate you to get the job done when working on a project.
Hopefully this has given you an insight into how focus is a significant attribute to have in order to further your business.
We look forward to hearing from you.
