Barriers to entry are inevitable when starting up a business, and if you are an entrepreneur, whether a fresher or a seasoned campaigner, you must be ready to overcome the challenges. The story is the same for all kinds and sizes of businesses, and only the dimension of the challenges can vary. The problems are not only during the startup stage but also keep cropping up during the first few years of business. Some challenges are hard to overcome and are the reason why almost 20% of small businesses fail to survive beyond the first year, as revealed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The propensity of challenges is evident from some other data that predicts 50% of businesses last only up to five years, and 80% of companies could last for ten years at the most.
While the figures might make some entrepreneurs jittery, the picture is not as bleak as it appears. Indeed, things are not easy, but neither the challenges are insurmountable. Eric J Dalius, who has been at the pinnacle of his marketing career for many years, believes that many common business challenges and problems are entirely fixable. Whether it is difficulties in finding customers, building an e-mail list, and generating leads or balancing quality and growth or hiring the right people, there are ways to overcome the problems. It might sometimes necessitate taking a few steps back to re-think your strategy by relooking at the pain points and then bounce back with new energy to emerge a winner.
Here are some common challenges that small businesses face with some easy to fix solutions that should give enough encouragement to entrepreneurs to chase their dreams.
Take a proactive approach like EJ Dalius when looking for customers
Many small businesses are often at a loss about finding customers, which they consider a problem. It seems that they create the problem by expecting customers to walk in on their own instead of being proactive in reaching out to potential customers and nurturing leads to convert them into customers. It is essential to always be on the lookout for new customers by actively pursuing their trails as every company does, including some big names like Toyota, Apple, and McDonald’s.
Well, it might not be that easy for small businesses to draw the attention of new customers, but there are ways of prioritizing the channels by knowing the best ways of allocating resources.
Begin by drawing the correct picture of your potential customers by gathering information about their habits and attitude, online behavior patterns, and how they spend time online so that you can create buyer personas. Creating buyer personas should help to develop appropriate content and get it in front of your target audience by posting it on channels where they spend most of their time online.
Spreading brand awareness
Confusion may arise when creating strategies for spreading brand awareness because of the multiple options that are available for spreading the brand name. It is difficult to focus on which techniques of brand building could be most effective for bringing the brand in front of the audience.
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to create brand awareness. Publishing high-quality blogs regularly do much more than just driving quality traffic to your website and convert traffic into leads because it generates trusts among the audience that establishes your authority in the industry. Many people will reach your business through blog posts, which could be the starting point of creating an email list.
To lend a voice to your business and finding a place for your brand in the market, you must launch a public relations or PR campaign. Partnering with another brand will help to ride piggy-back on that brand as your brand inherits some reputation and creates ambassadors beyond your known circle.
Creating an email list
Although it is easy to start building an email list once you have a steady stream of blogs flowing regularly, the task of maintaining the list can be quite challenging because of the high rate of erosion of the database every year. Considering that 22.5% of the names in the email database become obsolete every year, you must ensure that the list grows by 25% a year to maintain it at a steady level. You must always work for adding new contacts to your email list organically and stay away from the lure of buying email lists.
Work with your consumers and obtain their consent for subscribing to your emails, which would voluntarily come forward to stay in touch with you by being attracted to your blogs and other content that they have found interesting. As more people take an interest in your business, it helps to build online authority and generate a band of goodwill ambassadors for your brand.
Lead generation
Small businesses find it tough to deal with lead generation as the numbers are not always up to the mark to generate good revenue. Almost 10% of small businesses are unhappy with their lead generation efforts. Generating a high quantity of quality leads is one of the most critical marketing objectives. A lead generation campaign consists of creating a steady flow of prospective customers that keeps the sales funnel filled to the brim.
Optimizing the website is the first task in generating leads because the site is the cradle for lead generation. Incorporating CTA or call to action on websites will help visitors to take the action that you want them for generating leads. Choose the high performing pages of your website and, if needed, use it as landing pages to boost the chances of lead generation.
Hiring talented people
Hiring talented people is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses as most small businesses suffer from a feeling of being under-resourced. Hiring new employees is a complex and time taking process. To ensure that you hire the right people, create the candidate’s profile as you would do for creating buyer personas. It should match the role except for some common traits that revolve around the company culture.
These are only some of the common challenges faced by small businesses that are not at all difficult to overcome.
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