Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
7 Tips To Grow Your Startup Business
- October 3, 2019
- , 11:39 am
We’re all aware of the stat common among startups which is:
“90% of startups fail.”
But doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a crack and see if you’re business idea is ready for the market.
You need a bit of luck but at the end of the day, you create your own luck through hard-work, gaining knowledge about your marketer and being in the know.
We wanted to create a 7 tip blog post for those entrepreneurs who believe with all their heart that they can get in that 10% and sail off to the sunset.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the following 7 tips:
Locate Your Customers
Find Out If You Have Buyers
Find Your “One” Social Channel
Treat Your First Customers Like Royalty
Automate or Outsource The Mundane Tasks
Be Ruthless With Cutting Unnecessary Costs
Know More About Your Business Than Your Competitors
1. LOCATE YOUR CUSTOMERS
If you don’t know where your customers are then you can’t reach them let alone onboard them.
So, how do you locate them?
You use any tool you can to find out where they are such as social media channels, forums, blogs, competitor sites and attending trade shows for example.
As long as you have a product that solves a solution, you have a market, but that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed profitability either (disclaimer).
For example, here at The Good Marketer, we locate and are located by our customers mainly through Facebook ads, Google Search and referrals.
2. FIND OUT IF YOU HAVE BUYERS
We briefly alluded to it in the previous point, but just because you’ve located your customers, it doesn’t mean that you have buyers knocking at your door – far from it.
You need people to pay you money for what you have to sell.
They might like your product/service, even talk about how it is going to be used in their daily routine but if they don’t exchange cash for what you’re selling then you’re not going to last long.
3. FIND YOUR “ONE” SOCIAL CHANNEL
Don’t waste your time trying to have your hands in all the social media pies.
Pick one and do it well.
Unless you have a person dedicated to social media or a team whose sole purpose in their job is focusing on social channels then DON’T.
We’ve found that with some clients, particularly ecommerce, that a single focus on Instagram, for example, is the perfect social media channel to focus on.
Why?
Because ecommerce will focus predominantly on images/video content to give the customer an insight into what they are buying, Instagram couldn’t be better to use.
Do you really need Twitter for your ecommerce store that sells beautiful pieces of art?
We’ll leave that up to you to decide…
4. TREAT YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS LIKE ROYALTY
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos
The quote above is the way all businesses are approaching their day-to-day business activity because if they don’t then their competitor will.
It’s actually surprising that this idea has only caught on with the rise of technology and social media because it should be a given when you think about it.
Eating vegetables for good health is a given and being customer-centric is good for the health of your business.
5. AUTOMATE OR OUTSOURCE THE MUNDANE TASKS
Unless you’re punishing an employee for being late to work because they overslept, there isn’t a good reason why you should be manually doing mundane tasks – especially with the rise of freelance websites such as Fiverr & Upwork.
You could argue that it saves you money, but saves you money in the short-term at the expense of long-term growth and profit?
The decrease in cost for software is decreasing every year and there are a plethora of companies who have created software that integrates your data so you’re focusing on work that is important rather than inputting numbers into a spreadsheet.
For example, we use a software called agencyanalytics.com, that links up to our Facebook, Google and SEO data to create fantastic spreadsheets which we can analyse and send to our clients.
Have a look software related to your niche and see if you can carve out a few extra hours for you and your business by automating mundane tasks.
6. BE RUTHLESS WITH CUTTING UNNECESSARY COSTS
This follows on from our previous point about automation…
Cutting unnecessary costs should be a priority in the beginning stages of your startup because wasted spend that you don’t need whether it’s automating manual work or ending that software subscription that you don’t use can be a deal-breaker.
We experienced this ourselves with the software we downloaded that we could have done ourselves or didn’t use.
Go through your business activities and tools used with a fine tooth-comb to find those unnecessary costs.
7. KNOW MORE ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS THAN YOUR COMPETITORS
“This is an obvious”, you may have just said to yourself after reading this last tip.
If only it was.
We’ve seen customers that know more about the industry than the business selling the product/service.
Ultimately, those with the most knowledge about a topic are going to be the most-informed, have the best insights and be seen as someone people should listen to which creates a form of social proof.
So, if your competitor is ahead of you, you can be safe in knowing that they probably know more about the industry you are both competing in whether it’s that they’ve been in the industry, have a bigger team or because they’re working hard than you.
Be an encyclopedia for your business and industry.
