Becoming an entrepreneur is not easy, but you can certainly make a lot of progress in your niche if you know the right tactics to scale up your business.
Entrepreneurship is hard because you need to manage a lot of functions like management, HR, finance, marketing, etc. but the returns that you reap at the end is worth it.
Most new businesses fail within the first year of their launch. You certainly don’t want that to happen to your business. I have listed the top steps that you need to take to have a successful business. Let’s start!
1- Choose a Niche Market And Follow Your Passion
‘Niche’ will rule the business world in the coming years. For a new business owner, it is not easy to compete with bigger brands because they have a limited budget. Targeting a niche in which you are passionate enough will give the best returns in the longer run. Follow the below steps to choose your niche:
- List down your passions and write down the main competitors in that area.
- Identify the problems faced by the people in that niche.
- List down the methods through which you will solve the problems of your customers. This will become your USP.
- Research your competition and note down their negatives and positives. Tools like SimilarWeb are extremely handy while carrying out any form of comprehensive competitor research.
- Carry out a survey to determine the profitability of your niche. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey and SogoSurvey to conduct your survey.
2- Create A Great Website and A Chatbot App
Once you have decided on your niche, the next step is to create a great website. Obviously, the trends for website designing has changed in 2019, so you need to carefully consider the latest trends while designing a website for your business. Here are some of the latest web design trends that you need to follow:
- Your site should load in less than 3 seconds because people don’t want to wait much longer. Site speed is one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to website designing. Ditch all the fancy fonts, images, videos and themes that do not contribute to a better user experience.
- Create a minimalistic design that can provide an exact solution to the customer. Remember, your potential customer would be visiting your website to find a solution to their problem, and this is what you need to focus on.
- Adopt a mobile-first approach because mobile visits are certainly going to surpass than those of desktop.
- Use single page designs and video backgrounds because they are immensely popular among the millennials.
- Add a chatbot to your website. A chatbot acts as a helper and answers all the common queries of the visitor, and this can prove to be a game changer in terms of leads and conversions.
Designing and maintaining a website is not easy especially for a new business owner because you need to constantly shed out funds every month for the maintenance of your website. But, nowadays, there are several website builders available that can help you design and maintain a great website and costs a few dollars each month.
Moreover, artificial intelligence powered chatbot apps can play a decisive role in improving the user experience. You need to seriously think of designing a chatbot app for your business because it will help the user 24×7 and take your business to the next level. Lark and Digit are two great examples of chatbot apps in action.
3- Hire The Right People
Your employees can make or break your company. Therefore it is extremely crucial to hire the right people in your company. By devoting a good amount of time in hiring the best people, you can reduce your chances of making costly mistakes in the future. Follow the below tips to get started:
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- Create detailed job descriptions and list down the skills that are important. Here is a great cheat sheet that can help you choose your dream employees.
- Use behavior-based interview questions where a specific situation is presented before the candidates and how they will handle that situation. This will judge the behavior of the candidate.
- Present a set of a questionnaire in order to test the knowledge of the candidate.
- Always ask for references and look beyond the CV.
- Get your current employees involved in the recruiting process.
- Give preferences to quality over quantity because a skilled person can be three times more productive when compared to an unproductive person.
Hiring is a tough process but you can make it easier if you take the help of other people in your company and create a detailed hiring process. You only need to follow that process for hiring new candidates.
4- Take The Help of Interactive Content Marketing
Content marketing still remains one of the most ROI friendly strategies for new businesses to generate good leads. Interactive content marketing is set to witness a major boost in 2019. More and more businesses would be actively adopting this new content marketing strategy to generate leads.
The following types of interactive content can play a huge role in user participation and engagement:
- Interactive graphs
- Quizzes/Games
- Webinars
- Augmented or virtual reality
- 360-degree videos
- Interactive maps
- Facebook live
- Virtual tours
5- Listen To Your Customers
Listening to your customers is the key to business success. Believe it or not but customer listening is an art. Successful salespeople are the ones who are good listeners. If you want to see your business achieve success then you need to adopt a strategy that makes customer listening easy and a regular task.
Nowadays, social media is the best place to interact with and listen to your customers. Sparkcentral is a customer-centric tool that lets you communicate and listen to your customers in real-time.
Besides, conducting surveys still remains one of the best options to gather customer feedback but it is important to keep the feedback interactive and easy to fill. You can also send emails from time to time to gather relevant data about a specific product or service. This will help you to serve your customers better.
Final Thoughts
2019 is certainly a year for budding entrepreneurs. If you have made up your mind to start a new business then don’t waste your precious time waiting to start! Just go ahead and do it. Customer experience is the only factor that can distinguish your business from your competitors so it is extremely crucial to provide the best experience to your customers. The above 5 tips will certainly help you to give a jumpstart to your business in 2019. Happy entrepreneurship!
