Think your business can pass on strategy? Think again.
One of the stats that we’ve held onto at NOAN since we launched is that small businesses make up 99.9% of all businesses globally, and they are responsible for the majority of global revenue - 90%. It’s easy to have a default perception of who those businesses are – mom-and-pop retail is where most people’s brains go – but we’re talking a much wider range than that. At NOAN our current testing cohort is a mix of architects, fitness coaches, physios, DTC brands, creators and startups with revenues from $100k to $6m.
Smaller businesses can fall into the trap of thinking that Capital-S Strategy is something that only big companies can afford to spend time on. One of the truths of the new economic order is that strategy is now something that no business, regardless of size, can afford to ignore.
What makes a small business these days is much more expansive than it used to be, because the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered. Digital technologies have made it possible for anyone to launch a business, all you have to do is create your website using a platform like Squarespace or Wix, integrate Stripe to take payments, build an ecomm store with Shopify, connect Mailchimp for email and you’re good to go.
It might sound easy to get a business out the door, but the reality is that consumer expectations have also changed. Your business and brand needs to be connected seamlessly across all those platforms - and that’s not easy, even the biggest companies struggle. Despite having all the same ingredients: a site, e-comm, CRM, content, membership, many still have a disconnected experience.
We’ve all come across examples of this daily, where as a user or customer you think ‘how do they get this so wrong?’. The answer is simple: they don’t have the right strategy. They’ve probably paid little attention to how all the elements of a digital business connect for their target audience and deliver their brand experience. These brands often have high customer acquisition costs, low retention and poor referral rates.
World-class companies – big AND small – that put strategy first and apply it evenly stand out, they immediately garner high Net Promoter scores, their users talk positively about them in reviews and social media and they have high engagement rates and growth across their products. They often, if you look at the likes of Airbnb as an example, also have low customer acquisition costs and revenue to marketing expenses.
What separates these large scale companies, the great from the poor, is connected strategies that put the user at the center of the experience right from the beginning. This is the missing link for most smaller businesses, they now have all the elements at their disposal to create a connected customer experience - but they lack the knowledge and strategy of how to do it.
That’s what we’re aiming to fix with NOAN, we have a singular focus of delivering world-class strategy and knowledge to small businesses - whether that be startups, DTC, architects, fitness coaches, physios, retail.
We’re building a seamless strategy platform that enables them to deliver a connected brand experience. So that the 90% of global business that power the global economy have the knowledge engine they need to grow.
