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How To Know If You Have What It Takes to Own a Business

Starting a business comes with its share of challenges. Knowing whether you can overcome those challenges is often the difference between a successful business or closed business.

Unfortunately, any business owner will tell you that it takes more than just a passion to get you to the top. Because 96% of businesses fail within 10 years, it's important to really think about not only what it takes for a business to succeed in your industry, but also what it takes out of a business owner.

So how do you know where you fall? Do you have what it takes to own a business, should you wait a few years, or is it not the right path for you at all?

Are you willing to take risks? Do you have a cap on those risks?

This will be the number one question on every list you read. When you own your own business, you have to be comfortable taking risks, mainly financial risks. Quitting your job and having to put all of your life savings into a space or hiring employees is a common practice all new entrepreneurs go through, and for some the risk is just a little bit too much. 

They try to be smart by saving a certain amount of money and only going so far. While this is a smart move, you can't think that way if you own your own business. You have to be able to plan (and essentially see the future), and give it everything you've got at any point in time.

Can you stick with what you start?

Some people are more free spirits and like to be moving around all the time. Entrepreneurs oftentimes have to have this similar attitude, however, which makes this one tricky. You may seem like you're the right fit to own your own business until this consideration trips up your plans. You have to be able to really stick with what you start, and for some this just isn't in their nature. Be honest with yourself and think about your past projects and how you did sticking with them until the end.

Can you make decisions and feel confident about them?

Plain and simple, you have to be a good decision maker. This one is fairly obvious, but it's incredibly important. When you own your own business, it's ultimately all up to you. You may have people there to help you, but you have to be able to make decisions and feel confident about them. The Wall Street Journal outlined several great decisions you'll have to make right off the bat:

·         Do you want to work from home or lease office space?

·         When are you going to start hiring employees, and what will their jobs be?

·         Do you pursue high-end clients or sell to the masses?

·         Do you want to incorporate? Do you want to advertise?

·         Are you going to borrow money from family and friends? Are you comfortable using your entire savings for the business?

Obviously these are basic questions, but if you're unable to really feel confident about these then it's important to realize the decision-making will only get harder. One wrong decision could cost you a lot of time and money, so you have to be prepared for that fact as well.

Are prepared to commit fully to your business?

Owning your own business will take up the majority of your time if you want to be successful. This means less time going out with friends (and less money to do-so), and even less time with your family (a deal-breaker for many). If you're not ready to commit fully, this may not be the right time. Again, it's all about decisions.

How much can you juggle at once? Are you willing to take on multiple responsibilities?

On that same note, a big reason owning a business will take up all of your time is the fact that you have to take on many responsibilities. At first, you may be your entire company, which means you're the IT pro, the marketing expert, the sales guru, and the boss. Even when you do start to grow your business, as the owner you still need to be familiar with all departments and have at least some expertise in all areas. 

This is also something that is hard to learn on the job, so I highly recommend getting some practice and seeing how you do juggling different things first if possible.

Do you enjoy working with and being around other people?

Another obvious one that has to be mentioned--you have to be good with people. Even if your business doesn't involve a ton of face-to-face customer interaction, you're the owner of the company. You have to manage employees and you have to work with everyone. This is something else that it's tough to learn on the job, so really be honest with yourself about where you stand on the issue currently.

Take a quiz.

When all else fails, there are also several quizzes out there to help generate an answer for you. However, I highly recommend really thinking about some of the points above and coming up with your own conclusion before jumping into a quiz. After all, you need to be able to make decisions on your own, right? Start with this one. You can then listen to others (the quizzes) and take advice and see how you do.

Your Turn

If through it all you still feel confident and ready, go for it. If you don't feel like you're ready right now, that also doesn't mean that you won't be ready in the future. 

As long as you take the time to consider some of the tips above, you should be able to come up with a pretty good idea of if business ownership is right for you. It's not right for everyone and that's OK--the sooner you can weed out ideas that do and don't work the sooner you'll be able to find the right fit for you, and that's really all that matters in the end.

Source : http://bit.ly/1WRrbsU

Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2016

2016 is set to be another big year for the ever-changing digital landscape – with more channels changing or becoming a vital part of the marketing mix. Just last week, for example, Facebook announced an interesting move towards expanding its Messenger platform to businesses, despite the fact it has been quelling organic business reach in the news feed for some time now.

With that said, here are the main digital marketing trends to focus on over the next 12 months:

Mobile

The number of users accessing the internet via mobile devices continued to rise above desktop in 2015 - and to highlight just how much these stats are predicted to rise year on year, in April Google implemented ‘mobilegeddon’ an algorithm update that favours mobile friendly and responsive websites.

For 2016 mobile will be a key focus within the digital marketing arena, where a lot can be learnt about user behaviour from Google’s ‘micro-moments’: the identification of the complex consumer journey for mobile devices.

The STATS

• You can increase unaided brand awareness by 46% simply by showing up in mobile search results
   
• 51% of Smartphone users have discovered a new brand, product or service when searching via their mobile
   
• 30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile phones

Content will still rein as King

In 2016 content will still rein as King and brands will and should continue to develop effective content marketing strategies that really engage their target audiences.

A key focus for 2016 should be to ensure all created content is fully optimised with relevant keywords, whilst appealing directly to targeted web users. Ultimately your content may read brilliantly, but if it fails to engage and attract web visitors it is of no real value.

The STATS

• Posting content with an image on social media is likely to increase engagement. A study found that tweets with images received 150% more retweets than those without.
  
  
• Only 28% of content sharing happens through social media – the remaining 72% happens via email and other private communication methods.
  
  
• According to a study, content shared on Thursdays has the longest link lifespan

Data is there for the taking

Marketers now have access to more personal data than ever before. If you haven’t sat down and really analysed this, 2016 is definitely the year to do it. Understand exactly where your main target audience is located, their gender, their age range and how they engage with your product or service - and then use this to create a marketing strategy that really appeals to your stakeholders, whilst driving results.

The STATS

• Social media insights can support your overarching social strategy, highlighting exactly what type of content, posted at which times, drives the best results
  
  
• The amount of data stored online is set to be 44 times larger in 2020 than in 2009
  
  
• Without the use of online data, marketers would struggle to create a full picture of who their target audience is, and what makes them tick.
• 
  

Video goes viral

Dubbed as the future of content marketing by many, video provides an engaging, informative and shareable platform to promote your brand, message or content in an easy-to-digest format. Its growing popularity has even been felt by social media channels like Facebook, which reported earlier in the year twice as many users now watch videos via the platform.

Video will continue to grow in popularity for 2016 and should be a focal point of all digital marketing campaigns. If created with some innovation and pushed across all relevant channels (based on analytical data of course!), you will be guaranteed great results.

The STATS

• YouTube receives one billion unique visitors each and every month
  
  
• 64% of Smartphone users prefer to watch a YouTube video as opposed to undertaking research or read a product manual.
  
  
• By 2017 it is predicted that video will account for 69% of consumer internet traffic

Source : http://bit.ly/1PbbXMl

7 Budget-Friendly Marketing Tips for Early-Stage Startups

Marketing a startup is not for the meek. There are several challenges to success, and the time, money and resources needed to implement them are often scarce in the early stages. This means it’s crucial to plan ahead and reduce the possibility of making a costly mistake.

As an entrepreneur, you always want to make the best use of your resources. Devising and implementing innovative marketing ideas will set you apart from your competitors and draw more customers to you.

Here are seven low-cost tips to help new startups market themselves effectively.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

As a new startup, it’s extremely important to figure out exactly who your target audience is. Only then can you design your marketing strategy to appeal to the people who will readily pay for your product or service. Think about who is most likely to need, want, or otherwise be interested in what you offer. Based on the answer, you can determine who your target audience should be. Some further tips:

Instead of thinking about who you’d like to sell to, think about who is looking for the kind of products or services you offer. Ask yourself how your offerings can solve their problems. Study your market, competitors, and leads and prospects that you’ve identified. Create customer personas, which should serve as in-depth descriptions of your potential customers’ psychographic and demographic data. You can then tailor your marketing to the specific needs of these personas.

Don’t stop after you’ve identified your audience. Keep the work going to stay on top of current trends in your industry. Create a way to track your sales, networking, customer service, requests for information, etc. so you can continually focus on improvement.

2. Build Strategic Partnerships

It’s easy for startups to get lost in the crowd and go unnoticed. More than 386,400 are founded in the U.S. every year. But by building strategic partnerships with other well-known companies in your field, you can maximize your presence and market your startup more effectively.

One type of partnership involves syndicating your content on other websites, as well as collaborating with relevant sites to create compelling content. To start doing this, identify companies that have users you want to reach, and that could benefit from working with you.

Partnerships have played a key part in helping us build our brand. We’ve developed relationships with popular news and auto websites and work with them frequently to create original, data-driven content that benefits their readers and gives our company more exposure.

3. Share Your Expertise for Free

You’re an expert in your field, so it’s time to share that knowledge with others in a helpful way: a free seminar, webinar, blog, guest post, or even a series of tweets.

One of the ways our company does this is by analyzing millions of data points and discovering interesting, surprising insights about cars. We publish these studies to share what we’ve learned with other people who are interested in cars. This has significantly helped elevate our company’s exposure – more than 100 media outlets, including publications, TV programs, and radio stations have covered our studies!

4. Listen to and Engage Your Social Media Followers

Social media can be used for a lot more than just “advertising” your startup. In addition to communicating with your audience, your social media pages can be used to provide value and genuinely connect with them. Make an effort to find and share useful information to engage your customers. Make them feel like valuable members of your brand’s community. We use our data and content to answer questions and help social media users whenever we think we can add value. If you run into critics, don’t be hostile. Approach complaints with positivity and use them as an opportunity to showcase your startup’s commitment to customer-service and expertise, and you’re sure to win your critics over!

5. Add Value Through Email Marketing

Email marketing is not the same as spamming your customers’ inbox. Joke a side, when used properly to help and provide value to users, email marketing can work wonders for promoting your startup.

Successful email marketing campaigns have a well-planned schedule so that people will know when to expect your emails and can look forward to updates from you. The trick to keeping this going is to focus on your target audience when deciding on the emails’ theme, template and content to ensure what you send them will be helpful.

Our company uses emails to make the process of looking for a car more efficient. Users can sign up for alerts, and we email them whenever we have newly-listed cars that match what they’re looking for. Users who sign up for our alerts are two to three times more likely to contact the sellers of cars on our site than non-alert users.

6. Network, Network and Network Some More

One of the biggest factors contributing to the successful marketing of any startup is networking. Knowing the right people in your industry can put you on the path to success. So be sure to carry your business card with you and be ready with your elevator pitch at all times.

Actively seeking out opportunities to talk about your startup will go a long way in building awareness. Conferences and networking events are great places to connect with key influencers, spread the word about what you’re doing, and learn more about your industry.

7. Start Using Video Today

YouTube has over a billion visitors every month. Facebook users watch 8 billion videos a day. You don’t have to have access to Hollywood producers to create a shareable online video. Look at the audio and visual resources you have, and think about what type of video would be helpful and informative to your audience. Can you make a professional, informative video sitting in your office? With some trial and error, probably yes. There are plenty of free slideshows and video editing software that will help.

Last Words

For a new startup, marketing can feel like a challenging game that’s difficult to master. Using these seven tips will help jump start your marketing efforts with little to no strain on your company’s budget. You’ll have the basics such as social media and networking covered, and your startup will stand out for its focus on providing real value for customers, followers and other industry professionals.

Source : http://bit.ly/1jm1AcZ

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3 Content Marketing Mistakes You’re Making

Let’s take a look at 3 mistakes and the steps for corrective action:

 3 Ways To Do It Right

Content that pitches, rather than empowers.

According to Sirius Decisions, the primary reason content goes unused is that it lacks relevance. Research conducted by The EIU found that 75% of executive buyers want content that speaks to a business idea; only 16% were interested in content that supports a purchase decision. But what marketers know best are their company’s products. So that’s what gets written about. With the percentage of content created that goes unused escalating as high as 70% or more, depending on the research you read, can marketers really afford to create content that delivers absolutely no value to the company? Just say NO.

Corrective Action:

To pivot away from product-centric content toward buyer-centric content, create activepersonas that inform your content marketing strategy by helping your content to become highly relevant and engaging to your target markets. Research from ITSMAfound that 85% of marketers rank their top priority for 2016 as understanding buyers. Why are we waiting?

However, when you do decide to create personas, it’s very important to do external research, including interviewing customers, buyers and those who chose a competitor. In The Power and Potential of Personas [PDF], a survey conducted by B2P partners found that 72% of personas rated ineffective by marketers were merely based on existing data and assumptions. What you need are new insights that help you speak your buyer’s language as related to problems that need solving or opportunities they can pursue to reach successful outcomes with your help.

One-off campaigns that stop momentum in its tracks.

B2B marketers have long relied on a campaign structure for their marketing programs. However, campaigns that stop and start don’t answer your buyers’ needs across the entirety of the buying process. A campaign designed with several touches followed by a sales offer is not effective now that buyers can research and learn about how to solve their problems with a wealth of self-serve content at their fingertips.

Every time one campaign stops, there is “dead air” time that leaves the buyers you’ve managed to engage in the lurch. When a new campaign and theme is launched, it’s the equivalent of saying, “Well, we’re tired of that subject, so here’s a new one we’d like to talk about.”(Notice where the focus is.) When this happens, you give your buyers the opportunity to decide you’re no longer relevant to them, prompting them to go look for someone who is. And that’s not a wise choice.

Corrective Action:

To create the engagement and momentum needed to move buyers from interest to prioritizing change and making a purchase decision, marketers need to develop content marketing strategies that serialize the problem-to-solution story across the entirety of the buying process—end to end.  By addressing the needs and context of the buyer at each stage, your expertise and educational content will help them take next steps and view your company as the “mentor” that can help them reach the outcome they value.

Not helping salespeople to use your content effectively.

In the new book, The Challenger Customer, research conducted by CEB finds that buyers are 57% of the way through their buying process before they reach out to vendors. Other research comes in even higher. This has put the onus on marketers to take responsibility for even more of the buying process than ever before. But the sticky point is that the CEB also found that buying committees reach the height of conflict at 37% of the way through the buying process—meaning they may never make it to the point of vendor outreach.

Research conducted by Richardson several years ago found that salespeople actually do read the content marketing produces, but that they have no idea how to transfer value to the customer. In other words, they don’t understand how to use it, or how to find what they need quickly for a specific buyer’s situation. Let’s face it, as more content is developed, marketers need to think beyond what content to create and how to distribute it externally to how to get it into a salesperson’s hand at the right time and in the right circumstances. Sound familiar? It’s the goal we have for engaging our buyers, so why not apply it to empowering our salespeople?

Corrective Action:

Create a process that helps salespeople find and use the content you create effectively in prospecting and conversations with buyers. This includes tagging content for persona, industry, buying stage, topic, problem, and more. But it is also aided with what I call CliffsNotes for sales. In Digital Relevance, I explain the concept as, “a one-sheet that helps sales quickly understand [the content’s] purpose and how they can use it conversationally, as well as which related content may serve as a relevant follow-up offer to extend the conversation and elevate the prospect’s intent.”

By helping your salespeople to use marketing content more effectively, you’ll also be helping them get into buyers’ conversations earlier, helping to mitigate that conflict that could keep them moving forward to solve the problem with your help.

Correcting these three mistakes with your content marketing will help you achieve the effectiveness and performance goals that have been elusive in the past.

Source : http://bit.ly/1Nr39nm

Simple, Tried and Tested Ways to Be More Creative

Keep an Ideas Bank

The most successful creatives keep an Ideas Bank. Maybe you’re on the train and an advert triggers your thoughts. Or a menu you’ve stumbled upon features an unexpected slogan. Collect them all. I’m constantly updating a private Pinterest board with links and photographs from here, there and everywhere. Sometimes inspiration isn’t going to strike, and I want to be prepared regardless.

Gather your raw material

In the beginning, have a conversation with yourself and outline the basics. Gather your raw material — articles, photographs, conversations, interviews, anything that fuels your imagination for the task in hand — and your initial ideas will follow. Awareness of your industry paired with brilliant research is the fuel that drives great ideas.

Read some poetry, look at a design blog, listen to rap music on blast. Whatever your vice, embrace it. Procrastinate, productively.

Procrastinate, productively

Pencil is a proven way of generating faster, more creative thinking. Swap the MacBook for a Moleskine and get scribbling. Alternatively, engage with the other half of your brain by doing something completely different. Read some poetry, look at a design blog, listen to rap music on blast. Whatever your vice, embrace it. Procrastinate, productively.

Cultivate your inner muse

Even the experts will attest that sometimes it just isn’t happening. So, go for a walk. Clear your mind and make way for new ideas. Charles Darwin had a pathway constructed in his house in Kent for exactly this purpose. One of my favourite techniques is to go into a bookshop or library and browse the shelves related to your industry. You never know what inspiration you may find hidden in a table of contents.

Relocate to create

Can’t leave the office? Move to a meeting room or kitchen table instead of your desk. Try ‘automatic writing’, a technique where you keep scribbling about your subject non-stop, without repetition for a few minutes. Talk to an impartial colleague — speaking about it out loud is often the first step. And then, forget about it. Do something else. Distract yourself. Let all of your thoughts cement in your sub-conscious.

Ultimately, generating great ideas is less about light-bulb moments, and more about the process. Structure can breed creativity. As Jean-Luc Godard said, “it’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”

Source : http://bit.ly/1JOoNNW

Simple, Tried and Tested Ways to Be More Creative