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How to Grow Your Startup Business in 2018

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleNothing can be more exciting for an entrepreneur than watching their business attract many customers, increase its profit margin, and develop a positive reputation. However, business growth can prove a challenge if you do not have the knowledge, tools, and experience to scale your startup.

While enjoying fast and substantial growth can be overwhelming, there are some tactics you can undertake to help you turn your small company into a big brand. Learn how to grow your startup business in 2018.

Maintain Your Core Vision

It can be easy to lose your company’s message when scaling your business. However, you must stay true to your core vision when promoting your brand to a larger audience. Ensure your employees have a thorough understanding of what your brand stands for and its goals, which will help them to retain the same company image in every sales and marketing strategy they undertake.

Be Selective with New Opportunities

There will be many opportunities coming your company’s way as it starts to grow, and you must choose from them wisely to avoid making a big mistake. Your sole goal must be to attract and satisfy your customers. Focusing on too many opportunities and projects could result in your business neglecting its customers, which could reduce consumer satisfaction and your profit margin. Never embark on an opportunity that fails to align with your current and potential customers’ needs.

Scale Your Business with the Right Technologies

Technology can help to quickly and easily scale your startup business. Don’t hold your business back by sticking with entry-level systems. Instead, you must invest in the right technologies to streamline your operations. For example, a reputable Netsuite Partner Provider can offer an Oracle NetSuite solution that can help your business say goodbye to manual processes, limited software, and expensive IT costs.

Hire Candidates That Complement Your Vision

Your employees will help to shape your company culture. While hiring employees based on their knowledge and experience is essential, you must also ensure they have the right personality for your business.

Look for candidates who are not only friendly and intelligent but who are passionate about both your brand and industry. As a result, you can develop one unified team who will work hard to meet your vision and goals.

Review Your Company Priorities

As stated, enjoying rapid startup growth can be a little overwhelming. During this time, you must take a step back to assess your company’s priorities. Review whether your performance aligns with your company’s ultimate purpose.

For example, your current company goal might be to retain your customers, but you may be focusing too much of your time on attracting new ones. If your performance and processes don’t match your core mission, you might need to make some big adjustments to your business.

Don’t Focus on Too Many Acquisition Channels

It is common for many startup owners to try to do a bit of everything to attract customers, rather than focusing on one main channel. However, doing so will result in multiple marketing experiments and can detract from a primary sales channel. It’s better to master one channel at a time, such as SEO, before moving onto the likes of social media, email marketing, app stores, and affiliate marketing.

How to Maximize Your Small Business Success

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleStarting or maintaining a small business is challenging and risky: your limited resources mean that your company is more susceptible than most to the tosses and turns of torpid financial tides. However, with the right planning towards optimal efficiency, you’ll be able to turn your small business into a profitable and risk-free enterprise that’s based on savvy decision-making and mature financial planning. This article depicts such a strategy for small businesses hoping to absolutely maximize their potential is often busy and turbulent marketplaces.

Cash flow

One of the major obstacles to business efficiency is a blockage in your cash flow. In plenty of scenarios, this means you’re unable to reinvest the money you’ve made through sales of products or services, which means your business plateaus on a certain level of business that prevents its exponential growth. To help avoid cash flow blockages, consider using Peerform peer to peer loans for speedy and well-established loan arrangements, up the $25,000 mark, which are provided with a competitive interest rate and with the benefit of your being able to adjust the loan amount and repayment schedule on a sliding scale, as it suits you and your business.

Marketing

Successful companies aren’t just good at what they do: they’re good at telling the world they’re good at what they do. To increase your visibility and draw in more customers, it’s therefore a crucial part of a small business’s strategy to plan marketing campaigns aimed at encouraging repeat customers and enticing new clients. You’ll be able to outsource this if you don’t have the capability to manage this in-house, or otherwise hire a digital-savvy employee to cover your branding, website, social media and marketing initiatives, with measurable data analysis showing you the success of your marketing endeavors.

Staff

The crux of a successful business is the staff that work the inner cogs of your intricate business plans and market penetration strategies. If your staff are unhappy or demotivated, you’ll be far off maximizing your potential as a company. In this sense, it’s well worth the investment of your time and occasionally of your money in order to boost morale, encouraging a more enthusiastic working ethos within your staff. Staff reward days and incentives will help you motivate your staff, as will personal meetings and benefits set-ups that will help your workers feel valued and cared for.

Strategy

The final component that contributes to a sound small business that’s using maximal efficiency to drive up its profits is the establishment of both long-term and short-term strategies that are aimed firmly at future growth. It may take weeks to draw up a sound strategy, and some small businesses like to use financial advisors and business strategy consultants to help formulate their ideas. However, on the whole, your strategy should guide all the efforts you make to become a well-performing, efficiency-saving and smart business with a model that maximizes your ability to profit and accrue new custom.

These four tips should be useful for any small business owner looking to further maximize their potential for sales, profits and growth.

Nathan Ives Listed as a StrategyDriven Trusted Services Partner

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StrategyDriven Service Provider NetworkStrategyDriven is proud to introduce Nathan Ives as our newest Trusted Services Partner!

Having completed our rigorous certification process, we found Nathan Ives to be a market leading service provider with proven client results.

Nathan Ives’ flagship website, www.StrategyDriven.com, hosts hundreds of digital products – ebooks, videos, podcasts, articles, and full-scope training programs – and is accessed by over 31,000 unique visitors viewing over 1.8 million webpages every month.

Nathan Ives provides services in the following areas:

  • Market: Marketing and Sales
  • Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship

About Nathan Ives

Nathan Ives’ creative genius drives the elegant professionalism of numerous online businesses and digital product platforms. His flagship website hosts 100s of digital products and has been visited by millions of people.

Learn more about Nathan Ives at: https://nathanives.com

About StrategyDriven

StrategyDriven provides executives and managers with the planning and execution advice, tools, and practices needed to create greater organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior bottom line results. At StrategyDriven, our seasoned business leader experts deliver real-world strategic business planning and tactical execution best practice advice – a blending of workplace experience with sound research and academic principles – to tens of thousands of business leaders worldwide.

StrategyDriven Service Provider Network Provider Network Disclaimer

8 Reasons Your Business Should Have a Podcast

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticlePodcasts have become incredibly popular in recent years. Consumers can access files they want via the internet, whether downloading them (like downloading videos) or streaming them and listening to the podcasts on their chosen device. Podcasts are not just a way to entertain the public – they are an invaluable tool for small business. Here are eight reasons your business should be considering podcasting as a marketing solution.

It Is the Best Alternative to Video Marketing

Video marketing has a high return on investment because it is so engaging. However, not everyone wants to shoot a video.

They may not have the right equipment. They may think the output won’t meet customer standards. They may not be comfortable in front of a camera, or they know they aren’t experienced dealing with lighting, sound, and backgrounds and know that mistakes here could ruin the shoot. The solution then is to go with a podcast, essentially the audio portion of a presentation.

Podcasts don’t have to be a lot of work. You could work with a company like AudioFile Solutions; they offer transcription services but specialize in podcast production. You could give your narration over the phone or in their studio, and they’ll do all the work from recording to editing, sound effects, and music.

It Gives You the Ability to Reach New Audiences

Podcasts are readily shared among those with similar interests or demographics. If you create an engaging podcast on a topic, it will get shared widely. People who haven’t seen your advertisements may hear your podcast as it plays on someone else’s speakers or see others mentioning it on social media. This can lead to increased traffic to your website.

You Generate Qualified Lead

A podcast is one of the most effective ways to get high-quality and organic leads. Podcasts that demonstrate your professional expertise or knowledge about a given area will generate far more qualified prospects. You’re essentially having a one on one consultation with a thousand potential customers, and a modest share of them could come to you for a paid consultation. The prospects that do arrive need less time to onboard. Those who are already customers remain loyal to you because of the podcast and are less likely to leave, so you don’t have to work to replace them.

It Is Affordable

Starting a podcast doesn’t take a lot of work. You’ll need a good quality microphone, though the one in your phone could be enough if you’re working with a third-party service. Editing software is cheap and generally easy to use, but you can also work with services that will edit, polish and package the final podcast into something you can upload to your website. If you don’t want to host the podcast files on your website, there are plenty of services that will allow you to host your podcast and promote it to your subscribers. And there’s always the possibility of your podcast getting sponsorships, making it not only affordable but turning it into another revenue source for your business as well.

You’re Adding Depth to the Relationship

Listeners often subscribe to a podcast series. They’ll regularly listen to new content, and they may peruse older podcasts. As long as you keep offering good content, your audience will probably keep listening.

Every session builds familiarity with the speaker and the brand. Because they’re listening, they feel like they’re part of the conversation. This helps build trust with your audience and increases the odds they’ll convert to a paying customer. They’re more likely to buy something from a friend, and after listening to your content for hours, they feel like you’re more a friend than a stranger. This explains why nearly two-thirds of respondents on a survey of podcast listeners said they’d bought something the host promoted.

You’ll Improve Your Public Speaking Skills

One of the benefits of doing a podcast is that you’re practicing your public speaking skills. You’ll develop a natural, easy going flow while speaking. You don’t need to be afraid of mistakes since they can be edited out, though you can also re-record the session. This practice will allow you to do much better in public speaking opportunities such as sharing a sales presentation.

No can Go Much more in Depth then Text

The average length for a blog post is around 700 words. That doesn’t seem a lot to go in-depth on any subject, but shorter blogs reflect the short attention span of most people when reading online posts.

On the other hand, the average podcast will have over 4,550 words of content. And if you asked a lot of people, most would probably answer that they would rather listen to a podcast then sift through 4,550 words of text. And that’s one of the reasons podcasts can be so powerful. They allow you to dig a lot deeper and cover every aspect of your topic while delivering it in an easily digestible way. This also allows you to showcase your knowledge better by speaking about various aspects related to the main topic as well.

Awesome Tool for B2B Businesses

According to a recent survey by Bredin, over one-third of small business owners listened to podcasts. And among that percentage, over half said that they listen to at least one podcast per week.
But this isn’t limited to small business owners. As a matter of fact, the percentage was even higher for bigger companies. The study found that over 70% of all business owners with 100 to 500 employees also listened to podcasts.

If you’re in a sector with high consumer value, podcasts are a sure bet. Podcasts seem to be especially effective in the legal, business, and financial field. It can also work in sectors like real estate as well, especially when showcasing a particular area or promoting high-end services, for instance.

Conclusion

Podcasts are an excellent marketing tool accessible to businesses of any size. Anybody can afford to start a podcast, but no one can afford to ignore their potential.

4 Ways to Safeguard a Company from Failure

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleWhile the abundance of tools and resources available online mean that this generation is arguably the best time in history to launch a new company, many startups are still sinking within their first few years of operation. Regardless of which industry you operate in, there are going to be expenses and risks that contribute toward the possibility of going under. Some business models carry fewer risks than others, but any time you go into business you’re taking on the fundamental risk that things might not go as planned. With that said, here’s a short but powerful list of four steps every company can take to ensure continuity and avoid closing down prematurely.

1. Study Safety and Redundancy

Occupational safety and operational redundancy are two factors that can cause serious financial, legal, and informational issues in the event of a mishap. Startup founders should immerse themselves in the research process and maybe even attend educational events like SeminarFest before officially launching any kind of business. Doing the research beforehand will ensure that you’re not surprised and overwhelmed by problems during the early stages of company operation. Of course, if your company is already doing business, it’s not too late to go back to the drawing board and make precautionary revisions.

2. Diversify Revenue Sources

Diversification is a classic concept that’s often pushed by successful entrepreneurs, and for good reason – it helps to have your eggs in many different baskets. Even within the confines of a single niche or industry, you can still diversify by obtaining more clients and pursuing more projects. You can also diversify your marketing efforts by targeting additional keywords, intersecting topics, and new demographics. Taking a multi-faceted approach will prevent your company from losing big when one source of revenue starts to dwindle or dry up.

3. Practice Stringent Hiring Techniques

Unless you’re running a one-person show, the success of your company is going to depend entirely on the skills and effort contributed by your employees. Thus, it’s imperative to create a strong foundation in the beginning by building the business around a staff of competent, experienced, credentialed, and collaborative individuals. Take time to screen plenty of candidates and consider offering appealing salaries and incentives to attract premium talent.

4. Use Performance Monitoring and Analytics

It’s possible to hire an all-star staff and still face operational deficiencies and suboptimal results. People don’t always live up to their track record, so it’s important to monitor or review employee performance and correspondence to ensure that everyone is carrying out their job duties in the most effective and efficient manner.

Taking Steps to Reduce the Probability of Failure

Ultimately, all of the tips suggested above should be thought of as core components to a much larger risk mitigation and prevention plan. Start by identifying the biggest risks your company faces, and then implement strategies to proactively address those potential issues. By operating with the “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” mindset, you can create backup plans that account for almost every possible cause of company downfall.