Startups are not just a tiny cluster of people to be ignored. They create jobs, boost a country’s economy and introduce creative ideas for overturning current practice methods. Hence, they play a significant and important role in augmenting a nation’s economic growth and in introducing innovation to the industry they are associated with.
Unfortunately, the majority of the startups struggle to sustain themselves due to a variety of inefficiencies. Below are eight secrets to help startups achieve their desired goals:
1. Set Goals and Track Results.
Setting goals are fundamentally important for any business because, without a destination, there’s nowhere to go. A clear and particularized goal can astutely control the direction of the business’ progression; and introduce cohesiveness between employees, both ensuring great teamwork.
For positive results, the goals need to be relevant to the business with a realistic completion deadline. One can only do this by knowing the unique needs of the business. To do this, assess the following aspects:
- Who are your customers? Why do they need you?
- What are the potential business problems and what strategies can be used to overcome them?
- What are the collaborative needs of the business?
- Do the employees’ and business’s goals align?
Unfortunately, simply setting a desirable goal doesn’t assure success. These plan & progress needs to be tracked to ensure its progress towards the goal. This can be done by periodically monitoring the revenue, customer services, and customer satisfaction through surveys, feedback, and reviews.
2. Think Globally, Act Locally.
Every potential customer, regardless of region, has their own preferences. Serving them can greatly enhance your business. But businesses cannot please everyone. For this reason, the marketing and customer service departments should be specifically aligned to the tastes of smaller, individualized groups.
Many established businesses have utilized this approach and achieved major success in the new markets they moved into. In India, for instance, McDonald’s did away with their prominent beef-based burger and introduced the Chicken Maharaja Mac.
To leverage the value of customers’ perspectives, businesses must be flexible with their products/services, in accordance with their desired region. To appraise the targeted area, you can analyze the demographic info, like ethnicity, race, age, gender, profession, and income, as well as competition research.
3. Consider Obtaining a Loan or Additional Funding to Secure Working Capital.
Working capital represents a fundamental importance, in any business. It displays the strength of a business dealing with day-to-day operations. All businesses will need an aide for working capital, at some point or another, especially when emerging as a startup.
Most startups are funded by family, friends or unrelated investors, who are unaware of market recessions or delayed account receivables. As a result, they are overwhelmingly susceptible of crippling due to financial insufficiency. For this reason, one must seriously consider asking for assistance to fuel the business with sufficient working capital.
This is when budding entrepreneurs must put time and effort into deducing when they could achieve the expected ROI. Various options exist for obtaining a working capital loan and for learning how the options work. This helps to draw them toward a legitimate lender and avoid underlying risks.
4. Get Ahead of the Competition by Knowing it Well.
Staying ahead of your competitors comes from knowing their detailed strengths and weakness. You can learn a lot from your competitors since they’re on your domain. And as aggressive as you are, for success. Here are a few points to help understand them, and to stay ahead of them:
Google search isn’t adequate - Google search has gone local, but it isn’t enough. Check local listings, ad banners, and the general audience, to identify the prevalent competitors.
Generate reports – Routinely record various data about the competitors. This helps keep track of what is happening in your domain, as well as the intensity of the completion of it.
Comprehend their strategy - As mentioned, a business’ competitors are as good as they are. Thoroughly analyze their strategies. For instance, if putting up an offer, dissect the competence of and reasons for the offer. It’ll help you unlock a variety of grounds for your business.
5. Create Powerful Digital Content.
As emphasized by various industry dignitaries, an online presence is vital for today’s businesses. It assists their sales and marketing initiatives, regardless of whether they’re selling online or not. In the web world, success depends upon two things - visibility and reputation.
Creative and persuasive content can achieve heightened visibility and credibility online, which helps in your online hunt.
There are three types of content:
Text - Content that carries significant online importance because search engine rankings are aligned to it. Try publishing featured blog posts, advanced guides, and e-books. These items will help your customers with various domain clarifications and will transmit your brand value to them.
Pictures - Highly-engaging content that receives instant attention. Post infographics to convey your statics and memes to relate your brand to current affairs and screenshots, to exhibit one’s success on their social media channels.
Videos - Videos are well-liked online by people. You can showcase your business’ wide range of usage and importance through whiteboard videos, animated videos, seminars/webinars, how-to instructional and much more.
6. Keep Customers Engaged with your Brand.
Finding new customers is a weary process. You need to retain every customer you’ve already earned. Since there are too many options for your customers to go with, they’re very much prone to switch brands. But, keeping your customers engaged with your brand, requires the utmost customer retention.
Utilize social media to its best - Social media is the prominent medium with which to connect with your customers. Develop a community forum through it, answer customers’ questions and broadcast your amendments, based on their reviews and feedbacks; and hold contests often, with exciting rewards. All these things will assure a prolific customer engagement.
Connect customers via Email marketing - Email marketing is still one of the best tools to establish customer engagement because, one-to-one personalization is viable here, so you can connect with customers personally; you can create compelling call-to-action in email; and you can measure the customer engagement, with various metrics like, open rate, CTR, unsubscribes, etc.
Throw an event - Organizing a webinar or a local meet-up can form a congenial base for customer engagement. You can also listen to the customer reviews and their expectations during the events. You can also put forward some fun activities to make them feel good about the event.
7. Test everything Until Success Reaches you
You can just wait for success. You must build opportunities for success to reach you; and for it, you need to put all your endeavors to constant evaluation.
Calculate the reach and efficiency of your attempts on the marketing, sales, customer service and business operation sectors, periodically. List out the various inefficiencies found in each domain and devise proficient plans, strategically to overcome it.
Some of the significant entities that should be strategized and improved deliberately are:
- Employee co-ordination
- Sales & revenue
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Customer response
- Competitor response
8. Three Rules for Assured Positive Outcomes
There are basically three main rules that help start-ups to stay competitive and to gather enormous success.
Be simple - Simple is effective. People don’t want to indulge or invest in complex affairs. Keep your units like the website/app design; projects proposals; product/service descriptions; terms & conditions; and so on, simple and clear. Make sure that your customers receive definitive ideas, on your attempts.
Be consistent - As a startup, not engaging or communicating with the customers, after the sale is done, should be considered a sin. People love to know that brands are of concern to them and their experience with the product. Review your product, providing them with any issues on the product; and let them know about your new products and services.
Respond to feedback immediately - Responding to customer feedback renders a strengthened credibility to your brand. But, to make sure you do it fast enough. Today, there is a massive competition out there, in almost all the industries. Your competitors are aggressively active to learn from your mistakes and to accommodate every dissatisfied customer.
Wrap up
Thus, when it comes to business, startups need to allow certain comportments that are normally overlooked. Perceiving the secrets disclosed above will invariably help startups to overcome several hassles and miscalculations that they are susceptible to.