How To Stay In Business
In today’s day and age, while still difficult, it’s easier than ever to start a business of your own. However, staying in business is more difficult today. Many small businesses fail within their first five years of business and there’s now a lot of competition in the market. You may think, why is this business doing so much better than I or how can I succeed? There are many things you now have to take into an account when wanting to stay in business that many businesses don’t do. These include:
Unique Value Preposition
Effective Marketing
Competitor Updates
Legal Compliance
Proper Management
Great Customer/Employee Service
Leveraging New Technology
Let’s dive into each one:
Unique Value Preposition (UVP)
One way to keep your business alive is to have a unique value preposition. Do you offer a product or service of higher quality? More Affordable? More expansive or straight to-the point simple? Customer service? You must decide how you are going to have a unique selling point. For instance, a coffee shop could offer a wide array of products on their menu to appeal to more customers or they could have a select few items to keep things simple. One could potentially appeal to more customers and the other could have a simple menu to appeal to those who want to make fast and easy decisions. Also value brand identity, which is the message you are trying to convey with your business. Make sure to have an appealing logo that tells people what your brand is about, but also share your brand identity with how you interact with your customers and by your values and mission.
Effective Marketing
Another thing that could be holding your business back from success is ineffective marketing. Make sure you know who your target market is and have done your research. While online marketing is essential for running a business today, don’t forget that there are really good old fashioned marketing strategies that still hold up today such as fliers, business cards, local sponsorships, and word of mouth and networking. When you do online marketing, you will want to consider email campaigns, social media, SEO, targeted ads, and multi-channel fulfillment. You will want to have a really good website that’s appealing, easy to navigate, and runs well on mobile. Don’t just stick to online marketing. Make sure to balance it out with effective offline strategies as well.
Competitor Updates
Yes, a lot of businesses don’t do thorough research on their competitors or stay updated on them. The easiest way to stay updated on your competitors is by conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) on them. By regularly staying updated on what they are doing, you can try to do what they do better or make your brand more unique. This connects back to the first point I have made about having a unique value preposition. Where can your business fill in order to satisfy customer needs?
Legal Compliance
If you don’t do your research on the laws you must comply with, you could be fined or arrested, and that’s no good. It’s also a big reason why so many businesses fail. For example, finding out a name that you wanted to use was taken or even trademarked and still trying to use it can get you and your business into a lot of trouble. To stay in business, you should hire a legal professional to help you with all the laws your business must comply with, such as licensing, permits, etc. While not necessary, it’s considered to be worth every penny and a very smart move. It’s important that they can also help you with laws and help your business to still be as scalable as you want it.
Proper Management
Make sure you know how to manage your business well so that you can stay in business and scale. If you're in e-commerce, make sure you’re managing your inventory, which can be done with Shopify for example. Stick to a reasonable amount of business models in your niche that can be successful in and do it in a way that makes sense. This is important as diversifying your business model can help strengthen your business in the market. From the start, you should have your business plan thought out and have done some market research. Not having control over your inventory can lead to supply chain issues like scarcity or overstocking, knowing who to appeal to and the models you use are important.
Great Customer/Employee Service
A lot of businesses fail to properly serve their customers and employees. They have treating people with kindness down, but they often forget to reward their customers and employees. Rewarding your employees with an annual stimulus check that continues to add as they continue to work and your business continues to grow is a great way to incentivize them to continue working for you. As for customers, rewarding them through a loyalty program that offers free merchandise or products is how you can better incentivize them to keep buying from you. Also make sure you accept cards in addition to cash. These points kind of go back to the effective marketing section mentioned earlier.
Leveraging New Technology
Finally, you should be adapting the use of new technology into your business. Whether that is through using AI programs for your tasks or having a chatbot on your online store, adapting to new technology is crucial if you don’t want your business to fail. For example, by 2025, AI costs are expected to go down and already cost less than employees, so it’s one of your best options for when starting out. Of course, one reason people are starting their own businesses is because large corporations are trying to replace us with AI and automation, but AI can never replace human beings.
Conclusion
Staying in business is not easy, but I'm hoping that this article as well as many others will help you to get some advice on how to stay in business, because I want you to succeed. Let me know what you have learned to help you stay in business.
