Starting a business can be hard work, let alone trying to grow your business to be successful and profitable. So, we wanted to try and take the stress out of knowing what steps to take in order to successfully grow your business and let you focus solely on working on your products and/or services.
Marketing is an essential part of growing your business and one vital part of marketing is being on social media! We know it takes a while to grow your audience within social media but trust us when we say, it is vital and well worth it to be present on social media platforms. Firstly, you need to know your audience and who you are marketing your product or service to. Once you understand your target audience, you can begin to understand their consumer behaviour which makes it easier in determining what messages you want to get across, so as to attract them and it will assist in what will sell.
Create goals not only within your business but within your overall marketing plan. You should always be creating goals for your business that have deadlines and not loose ended goals, that you can reach whenever you want. Another big mistake people make is they make their goals too big and unachievable at the beginning, keep your goals small and achievable so you can reach them quickly and continue to feel the positive effects of your successes and achievements.
As you may have heard before you should be creating SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
Marketing goals are also great to have as you might want to set goals for how many posts you make per week or how many followers you want to have gained in a week or a month and try and attain that and continue to assess different ways to do so.
Both in business and in marketing you should try and stand out from the crowd, what makes you different from your competitors? Hone in on that and make it known. You should be creating a memorable experience for consumers and be a swan among a bunch of ducks.
Always look at the data of your business and your social media to see where you are doing well and where you are doing not so well, see what customers are loving and what they aren’t and work with that. Improve on areas that aren’t working as well or get rid of them all together and enhance the ones that are working really well to create more business and engagement.
Don’t forget to time-manage, this is key as you should really set yourself a schedule of where you want to allocate your time within your business. Is it going to be 2 hours a day working on social media, 3 hours in meetings and then the rest of your day growing your business and working on products? It is vital that you look at delegating your time in areas of your business so you don’t overwhelm yourself and don’t neglect other areas of your business that need love and growth.
There is so much more we could talk about when it comes to growing your business and the skills you need but we think this is a great starting point for those of you starting businesses or thinking about starting a business. It is also great for those that may be struggling to grow their business or feel they need a little more work in areas of setting goals and marketing techniques.