All industries evolve. And each company’s leaders have a choice: to keep up with (and perhaps play a role in) these changes, or overlook these changes and get left behind. To help you avoid the latter, here, Mahmoud Khattab, Elk Grove, California, shares 10 tips to help you identify and stay at the forefront of trends in your industry.
As the CEO of Precision MD, Mahmoud Khattab must stay on top of the rapidly changing cosmetic surgery space, where new technologies and techniques are always emerging. “There’s always something new in cosmetic surgery,” he says. “It has a lot of technology, and I like technology. I like lasers. I like new science. It’s a very exciting field of medicine.”
1. Stay Afloat of Industry Research and Reports
One of the best places to start when it comes to recognizing industry trends is to read up on research and reports in your field. Reading a variety of industry materials can help you develop a good understanding of the current landscape in your sector and gain insights into what the future could hold for your niche. You might even conduct research and compile your findings in a report of your own.
“The learning process in this business or in this type of medicine [cosmetic surgery] never stops,” Mahmoud Khattab says. “You need to be ready to always learn about the new science, the new technology, and the new procedures.”
2. Follow Industry Influencers
Keeping up with the latest industry research and news may sound like a time-consuming task. But you can stay atop these developments by simply spending 15 minutes reading through the top blogs and publications in your field each day. Plenty of these blogs and publications will reference key data from longer reports, so you can consume this information quickly and easily.
3. Surround Yourself With Smart People
The saying, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”, is particularly true when it comes to identifying industry trends and evolving your organization in line with these. When you seek out industry specialists, whether in person or by following them online, you can pick up key insights that will allow you to grow your industry awareness.
4. Build a Group of Advisers
We all perform better when surrounded by those who teach, inspire, and motivate us. But these people don’t have to be on a formal board of advisers. Often, a close group of friends, peers, and/or partners can offer the most useful perspectives. And you can do the same for them.
5. Talk to Your Customers
The people who know your customers’ needs best are your customers themselves. These individuals are often well-positioned to let you know how organizations like yours can evolve to best meet their needs. This way, not only can you develop specific plans to develop your company, but you’ll also pick up on overall industry trends.
6. Accept and Embrace Change
Although evolving industry trends should lead to modernization in any organization, many leadership teams are reluctant to accept change. It can be difficult to embrace developments when you’re in your comfort zone, but failing to move forward in line with industry trends can see competitors race ahead of you.
“You need the courage and the energy to go after new technology and learn new things,” Mahmoud Khattab says. “I have experience with big groups that have plastic surgery sections, and they don’t always keep up with new technologies. If they want to buy new devices for all of their branches, there are a lot of decision-making processes and then financial aspects for them. So, they take a long time to update their devices or add more devices.”
7. Research Your Competitors’ Strategies
Spend some time evaluating your competitors’ websites and social media presences to identify what is and isn’t working in their marketing approaches. Online trends move quickly, and you might spot an emerging trend that you too can make the most of.
8. Use Google AdWords
Professionals in all sectors find themselves asking: What are industry trends in marketing? They need to leverage these trends to spread the word about their businesses effectively. Fortunately, depending on your industry, audience, goals, and company size, there are a variety of marketing tools and metrics you can employ to identify trends. When you combine carefully selected tools and analytics systems to monitor your ideal customers’ behavior, you can identify correlations among these consumers. As a starting point, Google Adwords is a good tool to help you identify the keywords and queries that consumers are searching for online in your space.
9. Use Moz
Moz is another analytics tool that can help you gain insights into your organization. Moz offers inbound marketing and analytics software subscriptions and is popular for its search engine optimization (SEO) and analytics tools, which can help you increase traffic, rankings, and visibility in search results.
10. Use Excel
While there are many online analytics tools that you can make the most of, don’t overlook the power of Microsoft Office’s Excel, which you can use to collate your own data and records and learn how to identify trends in data. You can use Excel to summarize, visualize, and manipulate basic data so you can track your customers’ behavior and your predicted turnover. And there are loads of free tutorials online for those who aren’t experienced in Excel.
About Mahmoud Khattab
Mahmoud Khattab, Elk Grove, California, is the CEO of Precision MD, a cosmetic surgery center that works to help all clients look and feel their best. Not only has he dedicated over 30 years to the medical industry since studying medicine in Syria and the United States, but he has also served the Syrian American Alliance as its chairman, where he supported various philanthropic causes to help Syrian refugees.
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