Low Hanging Fruit: Minimum Effort, Maximum Success for Your Business
Last update: 4 July 2024 at 03:42 pm
5.00/5It doesn’t always take a lot of effort to achieve a sense of achievement. Sometimes a few simple steps are enough to significantly increase the company’s sales, for example. Strategies to get a relatively high benefit with little effort are also called low hanging fruit.
In this article, we will show you what low hanging fruit is all about and in which areas you can benefit from it.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Simple actions with excellent cost-benefit ratios that yield quick success.
- Sales: Offer complementary items to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
- SEO Optimisation: Improve meta information, keyword usage, and URL structure for immediate search ranking benefits.
- Employee Involvement: Engage staff in brainstorming and categorisation to identify and prioritise easy, impactful strategies.
What are Low Hanging Fruit?
Low hanging fruit means nothing other than a low hanging fruit.
In a figurative sense, this refers to measures with an excellent cost-benefit ratio. There is no narrower definition of the term low hanging Fruit.
For a business plan, it therefore makes sense to focus first on possible low-hanging fruits, as these promise quick success.
Areas of Application
The areas in which low hanging fruit are used can be of various natures but are mainly concentrated in marketing and business.
In sales, a simple measure can be to offer complimentary items (complementary goods) to the main product. A practical example would be a bicycle store where, in addition to the main product, helmets, lights, panniers, and other accessories can be purchased.
This easy-to-implement step will not only increase the company’s sales, but also improve customer satisfaction.
Besides the financial aspect, low hanging fruit can also be used for other practical benefits such as better organisation. An example of this would be categorising incoming emails by subject line. This way, they are automatically sorted and can be processed faster.
Low hanging fruit can also be used to quickly and effectively influence your search engine rankings. There are a few tricks to OnPage optimisation, which we will now discuss in detail.
Low Hanging Fruit in SEO Optimisation
In this day and age of online marketing, the indexing of a website plays a very important role. If your website appears among the first entries after entering appropriate search terms, this is worth its weight in gold for your company.
Often, even small changes are enough to move up the rankings – which brings us back to the low hanging fruit.
In search engine optimisation (SEO), a distinction must be made between off-page and on-page optimisation, while the former usually involves considerably more work.
OnPage Optimisation
The key to OnPage optimisation lies in the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Among other things, this includes how often your page is called up and how much time users spend there on average.
A simple method to increase the clicks on your URL is to improve the density and positioning of keywords. Especially in the meta title and meta description, keywords have a significant influence on the indexing by the search engine.
A corresponding optimisation of the metadata can lead to success in a short time. Within the body text, long-tail keywords should also be included in any case, if they are rather scarce with the competition.
If you are still in the process of creating the website, it is recommended to take a good look at the URLs. An easy-to-read URL structure without jumbled numbers and special characters is user-friendly and thus has a positive effect on the ranking.
Viewers can quickly read the information contained in the link, making it easier to navigate through the website.
Classic low hanging fruit at a glance:
- Optimisation of meta information (title and description)
- Keyword analysis and improvement; if necessary, addition of long tail keywords
- Easy to read URL structure
OffPage Optimisation
Offpage optimisation is primarily about natural link building or netlinking. This is definitely not a low hanging fruit, as building links to quality content takes a lot of work and effort.
Relevant backlinks have a positive impact on domain authority. To anchor them, you could rely on collaborative partners. It is not an easy and fast process to integrate such backlinks in good places. It is possible to hire agencies specialised in SEO for this challenge.
As you can see, there are many low hanging fruit in SEO optimisation just waiting to be picked. Specialised SEO agencies can help you identify and make the most of them.
How Do I Obtain a Low Hanging Fruit?
We have given you some examples of which low hanging fruit lend themselves to which areas to achieve quick success with little effort. There are methods that are equally suitable for most companies, but of course every company is individual and therefore needs adapted strategies. So how do you get the individual ideas?
- Involve employees
- Visual brainstorming
- Categorisation
Involve Employees
Use the resources that are available to you. Many heads have more ideas than just one and the probability of finding one clever idea among many is higher. We therefore recommend getting your employees on board early on.
In many companies, some employees are bubbling over with ideas on how processes/workflows or sales could be optimised with little effort – if you would only ask them.
Don’t make the same mistake. Every employee knows his or her specific area best and can therefore provide constructive ideas for improvement.
Visual Brainstorming
True to the low hanging fruit motto, you could gather the ideas that come up during brainstorming on a crafted tree. Having the different contributions right in front of your eyes and tangibly close encourages further ideas: A creative dynamic is created.
Of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tree on which the fruity ideas are attached. What matters is the visualisation of the contributions on.
Categorisation
Just because you have now collected a lot of ideas does not mean that they are all easily implementable or promising. Therefore, it is important to categorise them according to effort and expected success of the expenses. To do this, you can make use of the four-field low hanging fruit matrix:
- “Low Hanging Fruit” are characterised by low effort and high success.
- With the “Cream of the Top“, great success can also be expected, but this also comes with a lot of effort.
- The “Harmless Weed” is associated with little effort, but the yield is low.
- The “Rotten Tomatoes” are almost self-explanatory, because what can you do with rotten tomatoes? This term describes strategies that cost a lot of work and yet pay out little yield.
Filter Out the Good Ideas
You now have many ideas, clearly arranged by categorisation. Since the low hanging fruit require little effort and resources but are still promising, it is obvious to start with them.
Often, however, a business strategy cannot consist exclusively of low hanging fruit measures, but of a mixture. This must be examined on an individual basis.
Conclusion
Low hanging fruit are perfect measures to get fast and big returns with little effort. They find application in the fields of business and marketing and should not be missing in any business plan. Use your employees as a resource to get area-specific ideas.
