Diversification Strategy

At Harnessing Strengths, we are strong believers in personal responsibility.  As citizens of the country in the world, USA, as husbands and wives, parents, as caretakers of family, and followers of Jesus Christ, that it is our responsibility to do what it takes to grow God’s Kingdom, to provide for our families, and help give back to people in need.

Furthermore, as business owners, a VP, a Director where you have team members that depend on us for paychecks, for leadership, for personal growth and a vision in life, we have a bigger responsibility.   At the end of the day, the buck stops with us. There are no excuses.

So knowing the above, in doing what do we do we make certain we always fulfill our financial responsibilities and we diversify!  We have to do everything it takes to make certain that we have enough diversification to weather unexpected storms on all fronts. Here are five important forms of diversification you need to make.

1. Diversify Your Products and services – When you add new products or services that you are going to offer to make certain that you are continuing to add and expand your products and services.  You don’t want to keep offering more and more of the same product and service.  The goal of launching a new product or service is so you can expand and diversify the audience you are targeting.  At Harnessing Strengths, we believe in doing a full product analysis including keyword research, competitor analysis, market analysis, sales analysis, etc before you add the product or service so that you can always be 100% certain that you are growing and expanding your customer base.  You never know if Amazon might close a product category, or if Google might change the organic rankings on a specific niche, or a huge competitor might jump into the industry and take a huge market share.  The only way to continue to grow and weather changes in the industry is to diversify the products and service you offer.
2. Marketplaces Diversification– Marketplace diversification is the most important way you can protect your business.  Too often a company will have over 90% of sales coming from Amazon.  The problem is that when Amazon makes a change, or you get bad reviews, or the competition to too strong, you can lose most of your Amazon traffic overnight.  This is why you have to expand to as many different marketplaces as possible, so if there are any changes in the industry, you have 20+ marketplace channels, and you only lose 5% to 10% of sales. So if you are not already, we recommend that you start selling on Walmart.com, eBay.com, Jet.com, WISH.com, Sears.com, Zulily.com, wayfair.com, etc.  If you need help setting this up, please let us know. We specialize in marketplace diversification and implementing a solution to manage our inventory, sync your inventory, manage orders, and tracking codes. We can even setup solutions that will list all your products, sync all products and everything that will make your life easier.  We look forward to talking with you soon.
3. Marketing Diversification – In today’s world, marketing is changing every day.  We are not just talking about TV, Radio, direct mail, and Googles algorithm, but also talking about marketplace ads, social media, YouTube, influencer marketing, content marketing, mobile apps, and more.  Needless to say, you can’t rely on just one or two marketing streams. You have to diversify your marketing streams so that you can weather all the changes.
4. E-commerce Diversification – After you fully diversify your products, your marketplaces, and your marketing strategy, next, it is time to diversify your e-commerce strategy.  At the end of the day, you really only control the websites you own and the email list that you have put together. So it is important to diversify your website foundation as well.  Your goal is to have 5 to 10 different websites, so you don’t have to worry about the ups and downs of one or two websites.
5. Team Diversification – When building a diversification strategy, you need to not only hope it is successful, you need to plan for it.  The goal in diversifying is to not spread yourself so thin that you cannot do anything well.  Your goal is to have healthy and stable growth. You also need to build the right team as well.  Now, I am not suggesting you hire a 3 to 10 person team because you think you will have sales in future, you need to always walk before you run when the ROI and cost justification is there.  So how to do you diversify and grow your team custom effectively?
   1. Prepare for Problems – As you get more complex more problems happen and you need to have a team ready to help. You can’t always be the person that fixes every problem or you will not be able to effectively do your job well. So, where do you start and how do you stay above the weeds?
   2. Strategy – Put together a Growth strategy with Details and accomplishable goals each month. Then you hire the team to fill the spots. So normally you want to have something like this.
   3. Copywriters – Have your Copywriters writing new and unique content each month. You have to be developing new and unique content each month and evenly over time.
      1. E-commerce and SEO Team – You have to have an eCommerce team optimizing to your website, growing the website, and adding the new content, new landing pages, and new features.
      2. Amazon Team – Have your Amazon Team optimizing, providing customer service and growth your Amazon account.
      3. Marketplace Growth – Have your Marketplace team growing to new marketplaces each month. The reason why you have other people doing your other marketplaces is you never want your lose focus on Amazon or any potential problems. One late order or response, or review can start a snowball.
      4. Marketing Team – Have your marketing team that is running for Amazon ads, Marketplace ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, and more each month
      5. Influencer Outreach – You also have an Influencer outreach team that is reaching out to new content marketing opportunities every day. With a 10% to 20% success rate, you have to be reaching out constantly or it will never happen.

How to do this cost effectively?

• Indeed.com – You post a job, you will get 200 to 500 to apply for the job. Ask for an hourly rate and availability, and you have to vet them, check references, background check and build your own contractor team. Then after they prove themselves and the demand is there, you can hire them full time.
  Or
• Contractor Site – You post a job on Upwork or Fiver, and you will have 50 people very cheap. You have to vet them, check references, but they will have a starting rating and hours worked, but you can get your own contractor team without the cost of in-house employees
• Or you can just hire Harnessing Strengths and have 15 years experience in Commerce development, online marketing, marketplace diversification, or a detailed growth strategy; please let me know. We are happy to help in any way.

1. E-commerce Tools – And if you are thinking about diversifying you have to set up the right tools so you can scalibly grow your business.
   1. E-commerce Backups – You always need to make certain that you are backing up your site off-site. Even if you are using Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc. If you are don’t have a copy of your site off-site, you don’t have control of your business. Look at tools like Rewind, VaultPress, Amazon S3, etc. You only back up as much as you can afford to lose.
   2. Website Security – In today’s world, security is a must. You have to have one site and traffic firewall and real-time malware scanning with automatic removal.  You have to prepare for problems.
   3. Inventory Management – Having an inventory management system that will update your inventory on all your sales channels every 15 minutes or real-time is a must have. You can look at tools like com, EcomDash.com, SellerBrite, Skubana, ChannelAdivsor.com, etc
   4. Order Management – When you plan for success, you have to make order management fully streamlined and manageable. It does not matter if you have one or twenty marketplaces, they are all in one place. And with everything, you always have plan B just in case. All the above will do order management, but you can also look at ShipStation.com, OrderHive.com and more.
   5. Review Management – Getting a bad review on Amazon happens, but you need to make certain you are doing everything you can to manage them. That is why we recommend getting a review manager as a   You can look at FeedbackGenius.com
   6. Return Management – You most make returns quick and easy with no questions asked. See Returnly.com, Skubana.com,  Amazon automatic RMA.
   7. Customer Service – Customer Service is the most important part of e-commerce. You have to have tools like ZenDesk, Freshbooks, or  Xsellco, to get all your marketplaces and website customer service in one place.
   8. Product Management – If you have a lot of products, you are listing to all sites quickly. ListingMirror.com, GeekSeller.com, EcomDash, and Channel Advisor
   9. Influencer Outreach – Get the tools to find new and relevant influencers. Look at tools like Ninja Outreach, Scrunch, BuzzSumo

So contact Harnessing Strengths and learn more about our diversification strategy and how we can help you have to stable and long term growth.