4 Routes to Map Out Your Yearly Business

Strategy
https://www.mindmeister.com/blog/4-ways-to-create-a-business-strategy-mind-map/

Each year brings new opportunities, as well as potential new challenges.

In order to make the most of the next year, it’s important to come up with cohesive
strategies that will allow you to prepare for the best, as well as the worst.

To support you with this, we’ve created four (free!) mind map strategies. These will
help you to plan out your business progression, pre-empt potential problems,
preserve collective knowledge, and hopefully, ultimately boost company or
organizational growth.

1. Plan an Annual Roadmap

It’s important that you have a clear vision for your company or organization. It’s
equally important that your team are just as clear about these goals too.

To achieve this, try creating a visual roadmap, mapping out your key goals and
planned steps onto a strategic mind map. Once you’ve made your mind map, you
can share your strategy with employees internally via a shareable link.

We’ve created a strategy template for a SaaS business below. The following
template can of course be edited to be made relevant to other business models.

To use the mind map, simply sign into MindMeister (or sign up free) and maximize
the map via the ‘map actions’ icon. Once maximized, click again on the ‘map
actions’ icon and choose to clone the map.

From there, edit or embellish the topics to make the map suitable for your
business, covering topics such as:

 What you plan to achieve in each quarter

  Which KPIs you’ll be focusing on (Churn, MRR, CMRR)
 What your financial projections are
 Which resources you require to achieve these goals
 A competitive analysis

We recently held an ‘all hands meeting’ here at MeisterLabs. During the meeting
our Founders presented their vision for the next year, taking the team through their
roadmap via the MindMeister presentation mode.

The roadmap gave a great overview of company progression. To provide your team
with the same direction, make sure to disseminate your roadmap to your team,
once created. One recent survey found that on average 74% of employees feel
they’re missing out on key company information and news. Ensure your whole
team feels in the loop by making your strategy available to all staff, via a cloud-
based tool.

2. Brainstorm Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing campaigns and efforts need to be both strategic and timely. In order to
get started with your annual marketing plan, begin by planning out what you’d like
to cover, month by month or quarter by quarter, via a marketing team brainstorm.

Generating ideas while mind mapping has been found to boost creativity by up to
23%. To help come up with the next big idea, spend your next marketing meeting
collaborating on a marketing mind map.
Clone the above mind map to use as a template for your own marketing strategy,
including topics relevant to your business. These could include:

 Conversion strategies
 Target customers
 Pricing and seasonal offers
 Positioning and PR
 Influencer marketing opportunities.

You can also include links to additional resources, such as your editorial
calendar or newsletter drip campaign Google Sheet.

We recently held a marketing team brainstorm here at MeisterLabs to come up

with new taglines for social media campaigns. Having shared a collaborative mind
map before the meeting, we all added our initial ideas and sources of influence e.g.
existing campaigns and imagery we liked. We then projected the mind map during
the meeting and each added to it in real-time via our laptops, to come up with text
we’re all happy with.

This strategy can also be applied to planning growth experiments. As a team, try
brainstorming potential growth hacks in the form of small but influential changes
to your product, service or website. Once you’ve brainstormed your first growth
ideas, follow the tutorial from MeisterLabs’ head of Growth, in order to turn these
experiments into actionable tasks, via the MindMeister and MeisterTask
integration.

3. Undertake a SWOT Analysis

A vital part of your yearly strategy will rely on you first establishing the potential
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that your business or
organization could be facing this year. In order to prepare, begin with a SWOT
analysis via a mind map.

Your SWOT analysis could include potential opportunities, such as which

customers you want to be focusing on most and how you plan to tailor your service
to these clients. It should also help you to look out for potential problems. Threats
and weaknesses might include emerging competitors and existing bottlenecks.

In order to pre-empt and plan for these scenarios, try using the free SWOT analysis
template below. Embellish the mind map to ensure you cover the key features,
goals, risks and hurdles you expect to face and overcome.
4. Create a Knowledge Map
Finally, try creating a mind map which will act as a knowledge map for the
collective ideas, plans, and knowledge of your team.

LiveBy, the team behind a fast-growing technology tool for real estate companies,
are always looking for ways to capture the creative ideas of their team, to then
streamline these ideas and decide which are feasible to pursue.

To collate all of their product information, the LiveBy team created one very
intricate mind map on MindMeister, listing every feature and sub-feature within
their product.

LiveBy’s CEO, Cory Scott, explains:

“It’s a collaborative mind map shared with every team member, so they’re able to
login and add their ideas for a new feature or sub-feature straight into the map. New
ideas are labeled with a light bulb emoticon so the rest of the team can spot them
and provide feedback.

The product mind map acts as both a knowledge map, including all existing
company information on the product and a home for new ideas. These ideas can
then be discussed within the mind map and followed up in meetings when deciding
which ideas to take forward for product improvements or experiments.”

Knowledge management expert, Manel Heredero, explains that it’s vitally

important for teams to preserve collective company knowledge as it arises, bit by
bit.

By having an incredibly intricate map, where all product ideas can be captured and
assessed, your team will be able to preserve these thoughts and decide on which to
take forward.