When starting a small business companies face a number of challenges. Not knowing how to combat these challenges and work towards a solution can create a lack of motivation and passion in business efforts. Below are the top 6 challenges that small businesses face and a solution to combat these challenges.
6 Small Business Challenges
1. Finding customers
Finding customers is not a problem that only small businesses face, even the market leaders have people and teams working hard to acquire new customers everyday. Finding customers can be more difficult for small business however as they are not a well-known name.
Solution
The first step is to identify your ideal customer in order to ensure you are spreading the word to the right people. Identify your target customers by creating buyer personas. Creating specific buyer personas can drastically improve business results as you will be able to create content and target your customers in the places they spend their time online and with the content they will care about.
Links to creating a Persona:
https://venngage.com/persona-guide
2. Hiring talented people
Hiring is one of the more prominent challenges small businesses face, primarily because small business executives feel under resourced in the hiring process. If you don’t hire well, employee turnover can be very costly. Finding the right people who are as passionate in your efforts as you are is essential.
Solution
Begin by hiring with a long-term mindset. It is important to invest your time in the hiring process and to not settle for just good employees, hire employees that will help your business grow and excel. Create candidate personas for your potential candidates. Your personas should represent what character you are looking for in each position at the company, but will share the company values and culture you want everyone to have.
3. Spreading Brand Awareness
It may seem like the largest brand names have always been around and you won’t be able to grow your business in comparison with them. There are a numerous amount of strategies to spread your brand awareness and build a strong reputation.
Solution
Public relations. Focus on finding your place in the market and focusing your voice. Work with reporters and build relationships. Co-marketing is another solution. Partnering with another reputable brand will allow you to share some of their reputation and image. It is a great way to gain contacts and organic customers. Blogging is another great way to build brand awareness. Blogging drives traffic to your website and additionally helps establish trust among your prospects.
4. Building an Email List
Never buy an email list. Rather than building an email list, people buy an email list. Buying an email list is not a good idea as your email deliverability and IP reputation will be harmed.
Solution
Rather then buying or renting an email list, create opt-in email lists. Opt-in email lists are composed of voluntarily subscribers who are willing to share their email address so they can receive emails. A great and convenient way to create an opt-in email list is to create a blog with valuable content and give readers the option to subscribe. Offering free content to customers is another great way to obtain emails, offer free guides and booklets in exchange for an email address.
5. Lead Generation
Generating leads that are high in quantity and quality can be a challenge for a small business.
Solution
Optimize your website for leads to make the lead generation process work for your business. Your website is a key tool, it has the power to turn prospects into customers. Make sure your website checks off in all the following boxes:
- Do your webpages guide visitors to take action?
- Do you use a tool that automatically pulls the submissions from your forms and puts them into your contact database (eg. Hubspot’s free lead generation tool https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/free?hubs_campaign=hsmf-acq-blog-post&hubs_content)
- Do you have lead generation call to actions on each of your blog posts
6. Balancing Quality and Growth
Many businesses want to further growth very rapidly, however the speed of growth and pushing it too fast can cause a decrease in the quality of services/products. For example a company trying to expand and hire very quickly can overwhelm and under train staff resulting in poor quality services.
Solution
Shift your focus towards your customers, by providing your customers with quality services you will automatically see drastic growth as you are keeping customers happy. Your customers will then further go on to spread good reviews and recommend your service, and additionally will stay loyal to your brand.
Visit: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/small-business-challenges to read the full article
