Being a small business is tough to say the least and being a new, small business is extra tough. During the first few years of business, small companies have a lot of challenges to overcome. The success rate can sometimes be very low for these start-ups—where the statistic say that about 20% of small businesses fail by the end of their first year, by their 5th year around 50% go under, and after 10 years that number increases to 80%.
With statistics like that, it is understandable why business-owners go into their first year being scared and overwhelmed. When you look into the issues that many small businesses are dealing with, many of them actually have solutions. You may need to take a step back and re-think your strategy, but these problems can be overcome.
We are going to walk you through 5 of the most common problems small businesses deal with and how to potentially solve them as well.
1. Finding Clients
This isn‘t only difficult for small businesses: even large cooperations have individuals designated to finding new clients and customers every day! To solve the issue of finding new clients, first you will need to start thinking about who your customer actually is. All of your time spent on marketing and advertising needs to be directed towards the right people. After you have decided on your target audience, then you are able to craft your content towards when your audience is online and what they are going to love.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness
If your clients and customers don’t know who you are, then how are they going to be able to subscribe or purchase your product? It can seem like some brands just get famous over night, but their hard work has behind the scenes make it so they can get to where they are today. Their brand awareness models are great tools to use for growing your personal brand awareness. Some tools you can use to your advantage are co-marketing and blogging. Co-marketing consists of partnering with another brand to inherit some of their traffic and is a great way to gain a large volume of new contacts. Blogging is a great way to create a voice for your brand and keep your clients and customers involved in what is going on with your brand and products.
3. Building An E-mail List
In order to move potential clients and customers along their buyer's journey to eventually become an actual client/customer, you need to build trust by staying top of mind. That starts with getting potentials into your email list. It can sometimes be super difficult to create an email list, plus the average by statistic, e-mail marketing degrades by about 22.5% every year. So to solve this issue, create an opt-in feature for potential customers that visit your website or social media. Create something that forms some sort of demand, such as a newsletter or blog for potentials to gain interest in. This is a great, organic way to gain e-mail traffic.
4. Customer Experience
Satisfied customers and good, but elated customers are ideal. These are the customers that will write reviews, recommend your service or product, and purchase from you again. In order to achieve this, you will need to understand why your clients and customers are choosing you—what makes you stand out to them? Set expectations for delivery and then actually deliver to the client and customer. Create unexpected experiences and extras for the client and customer that shows your business goes the extra mile to ensure they are elated.
5. Managing Workflow
Having a great team is just as important as generating clients and customers. Ensuring that everything is flowing cohesively, creates a smoothness in your business model. As a leader in the business, you can’t be everywhere at once—so how do you ensure your employees are happy and have the tools they need? Some ideas to solve this issue are to hand out employee satisfaction surveys, one-on-one meetings, asking about things that ”pain” them in their role, and finding commonalities to then solve the issues.
Being a small business owner is nothing short of difficult, especially during this unprecedented time in the world. These are just a few tools that can help your success rates when you feel you are struggling as a small business. We are a small business and we join you, hand-in-hand, on the road to success together!