Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
7 Tips to Grow Your Startup Business
Here’s All the GOOD Bits:
- Growing your startup business takes time, effort and energy, but there are a few different ways to make the process more simple.
- Knowing your audience, where to find them and treating every customer like your only customer is key to growing your startup business.
- Focus your energy on social platforms that best fit your brand for the best results – less is more!
- Automate, outsource and cut costs where possible in order to scale your business faster than your competition.
- You need to know your niche better than any of your competitors to make sure your startup business is the go-to in your area.
We’ve all heard the scary statistic that 90% of startups fail. But that doesn’t mean it should deter you from building your dream business from the ground up.
If anything, doesn’t it mean you should at least try to give it a crack and see if your startup business can be in the 10% that finds success?
Of course, a little bit of luck always helps, but at the end of the day, through hard work, knowledge about your market, and being in the know, you can greatly increase your chances of success. We’ve curated our top 7 tips and tricks for those entrepreneurs who believe with all their heart that they can get in that 10% and sail off into the sunset.
Here’s how to grow your startup and give your budding business the best chance at success.
How To Grow Your Startup
1. Find Your Customers
If you don’t know where your customers are, then you can’t reach them, let alone convert them.
So, how do you find them?
You use any tool at your disposal to find out where your customers are. This could be social media, forums, blogs, competitor sites, trade shows, or your startup business customers, who are everywhere if you just know where to look.
As long as you have a product that solves a problem, you have a market, but – disclaimer – that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed profitability.
For example, here at The Good Marketer, we locate and are located by our customers mainly through Facebook ads, Google Search and referrals, making them important channels for our prospects.
2. Find Out If You Have Buyers
We briefly alluded to it in the previous point, but just because you’ve located your customers, it doesn’t mean that you have buyers knocking at your door desperate to purchase whatever it is you’re selling.
You need to make sure people are actually going to spend their hard-earned money on your products.
They might like your product/service, even talk about how it is going to be used in their daily routine but if they don’t exchange cash for what you’re selling then you’re not going to last long.
3. Find Your Social Niche
There are so many social channels on the market, and how do you know which channel is going to work best for finding (and converting) customers? It’s important that you don’t waste your time trying to have your hands in all the social media pies.
Pick one and do it well.
Unless you have a person dedicated to social media or a team whose sole purpose is focusing on social channels then don’t spread yourself too thin trying to post consistently on every channel.
We’ve found that with some clients, particularly ecommerce, a single focus on Instagram or TikTok, for example, is the perfect social media channel to focus on.
Why?
Because your eCommerce startup business really needs to focus on images and videos to show your customers what they are buying and how it can help them. And what’s the perfect platform for videos or images? Instagram or TikTok.
Do you really need X for your ecommerce store that sells beautiful pieces of art? We’ll leave that up to you to decide…
4. Treat Your Customers Like Family
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos.
The quote above is the way your startup business should be approaching its day-to-day business activity because if you don’t, then your competitor will.
It’s actually surprising that this idea has only caught on with the rise of technology and social media because it should be a given when you think about it.
Eating vegetables is good for your health (obviously), and similarly, being customer-centric is good for the health of your business (obviously).
5. Look Into Automations & Outsourcing
Unless you’re punishing an employee for being late to work because they overslept, there isn’t a good reason why you should be manually doing mundane tasks, especially with the rise of freelance websites such as Fiverr & Upwork.
You could argue that it saves you money, but saves you money in the short term at the expense of long-term growth and profit?
The cost of automation software and AI models is decreasing every year, and there are a plethora of companies that have created software that integrates your data, so you’re focusing on work that is important rather than inputting numbers into a spreadsheet.
Have a look at software or AI solutions related to your startup business and see if you can carve out a few extra hours for you and your business by automating mundane tasks.
6. Be Ruthless With Cutting Unnecessary Costs
This follows on from our previous point about automation. Cutting unnecessary costs should be a priority in the beginning stages of your startup business because wasted spending that you don’t need or don’t use can really make or break your budget.
Go through your business activities and the tools you’re using (and paying for) with a fine-tooth tooth-comb to find those unnecessary costs and cut them – ASAP.
7. Know More About Your Niche Than The Competition
“This is stating the obvious”, you may have just said to yourself after reading this last tip.
Well, if only it were.
It’s not uncommon to see customers or competitors who actually know more about the niche than the business selling the product or service. Ultimately, those with the most knowledge about a topic are going to be the most informed, have the best insights, and be seen as someone people should listen to, which creates a form of social proof.
It’s important to be an encyclopedia for your business and industry, especially when you’re trying to grow your startup in the early days.
When it comes to how to grow your startup, our expert team is able to guide you through the process from A to Z. Get in touch with our team today to find out more about how we can help you take your startup business to totally new heights.