If you operate a small business, there is no doubt you’ve come across issues with growth, staff, revenue generation and building systems that are designed to make the business more efficient.
In the first few years of setting up business, small companies tend to come up against a lot of different challenges. Some of these challenges are harder than others to overcome. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, stats that approximately 20% of small businesses fail by the end of their first year. By year five, 50% go out of business and by year ten that number rises to 80%.
These figures alone are quite discouraging to would be entrepreneurs that wish to start their dreams of owning their own business and being their own boss. The good news I want to deliver today is that these challenges can be overcome. I’m going to outline some solutions to you today that solve common problems like lead generation, acquiring customers and hiring the right talent.
So let’s dive right in and discuss 4 challenges small businesses face and how we can resolve these problems.
Getting The Word Out — Brand Awareness
The first challenge I am going to highlight is brand awareness for small businesses. This is the first step in marketing. You’re looking to get the word out about the business and show the world (Or typically the locality you serve) that you exist and you are here to serve a certain audience.
There is a plethora of ways your business can get the word out. Some of these solutions are going to cost a little money and time. Others are going to cost money. It’s a balancing act of what you can and can’t afford. If you’re one of these small businesses that are struggling to get the word out, let me offer some advice.
How To Get More Brand Awareness
Run Facebook Ads –
A great way to get the ball rolling immediately is to start running Facebook ads to audiences and areas you serve. You can create a brand awareness campaign to your target audience letting them know you exist, what you offer and how you can serve them. This will certainly help to get the awareness out and this type of campaign works great for when you wish to follow up with those that engaged with your awareness campaign and re-target them with an offer of some sort.
Video is usually a great way of engaging your audience, so I recommend you use video to get that awareness out about your business.
Take Time To Engage With Facebook Groups –
This is great if your budget is tight! You can join Facebook groups you know your market hangs out in and start engaging in the conversation. A word of advice… don’t just join these groups to start blasting out about you and your business. You’ll immediately annoy people and most likely get banned from the group as you’ll come across as a spammer.
The best way to approach this is to just get involved in the conversations of others in the group. Provide help and valuable advice as much as possible. Earn people’s trust and respect for you. Doing this creates rapport and you’ll eventually be given permission in the group to post something about your business. Provide a unique offer to the group that wows them and shows they are being offered something special by you!
Partner With Other Local Businesses –
Another great way to get the word out about your product or service is to partner up with a business that’s got a similar demographic to yours, but where you are not in direct competition with each other.
One of the best marketing methods you can both offer to get the word out about your business, is to run a giveaway where you both offer up prizes to a few lucky winners and promote this on your social media channels. With the right offer to the right audience, you’re business can benefit greatly and you can acquire A LOT of awareness for your business.
If you’re smart about it… you can generate sales from such a promotion.
Getting The Customers You Want
So now that we’ve talked about brand awareness and how you can create buzz around your business, another challenge a small business can face is acquiring customers. Small businesses are not the only category that worry about this. Every size business pays attention to this idea of acquiring more customers. More customers = more sales for the business. Sales is the life blood of any business and without sales, your business simply won’t survive.
If your business is not well established, lack of customers can certainly be a thing of concern. The good news is that it’s never been easier to find these customers thanks to the technologies that are available to us in this day and age. It’s never been more accessible to acquire customers using platforms like Google, Youtube, Facebook etc etc. These platforms allow us to laser target down to the ideal customer we are looking for and present to them an offer that’s irresistible.
How To Get More Customers
First thing you got to be sure of, is who your idea customer is. Here’s a couple of questions to help you achieve that. –
- What does your ideal customer look like? Are they male/female? What’s their typical age? Do they have a certain income level? Where do they hang out? Are they business owners or family consumers?
- What problems are they experiencing? How does your solution fix this problem they are experiencing? What happens if they don’t fix the problem they are experiencing?
- What pain points are they experiencing? Describe the emotions that come with these pain points. How will their lives be improved if they employ your services? Does it mean more time for them? Less stress? Freedom? Improves their bottom line?
Spending time answering these questions and giving a lot of thought to it will help you in understanding your ideal customer. These questions will help you figure out the buying persona of your idea customer. What their problem is.. and why they need your solution. It’s all about creating a few avatars for your business so you can begin to advertise to these audiences.
Once you’ve built these avatars, you can start creating content and getting in front of your target customers in the places they spend time online and with the messages & offers that they care about. This can be done organically, but for a more immediate impact to drive sales, using paid acquisition is my recommended solution.
Leads, Leads… and MORE Leads Please!
A steady stream of targeted leads is very important to a business of any size. Unfortunately this is a problem experienced by a lot of businesses. Many businesses are failing to produce targeted leads for the sales team to follow up and close.
I read a recent study over at hubspot that suggest that only 1 in 10 marketers feel that their lead generation campaigns are effective. The most important objective for a marketing team is to generate leads that are both high quantity and high quality! A successful lead generation system is what turns cold prospects (online or offline) into warm interested leads and eventually customers.
How To Keep that Lead Funnel Full!
So how does a business keep their lead funnel full? It all boils down to creating a system that generates leads. Systems come in many shapes, sizes and complexities. Whichever the system used, the goal is to always have a steady flow of leads come in so that you can follow up with, nurture a relationship and eventually earn enough trust, respect and rapport to do business with a potential customer.
One of the simple solutions I would offer a client that has a small budget is to offer them contact information on the exact type of customer they wish to do business with. So for example with a recent start up cleaning company I worked with, they asked me to help them out with building a list of commercial cleaning clients contact information. I harvested together data on these prospects such as name of company/business owner, phone, address, email etc so they could follow up via cold calls and email.
Over the course of just a few months, I was able to acquire hundreds of fresh targeted leads each week for them to follow up with. This client of mine went on to close multiple commercial cleaning clients with the average monthly cleaning contract working out at $900.
The other solution I offer is more complex, but a more hands off approach. Leads generated through paid acquisition are more qualified. My team and I do this through social media advertisements, email marketing and in come cases chat bots (The new marketing kid in town!). This system acquires lead contact information such as name, email and phone number and pre-qualifies the lead with an irresistible offer that engages them further toward using your cleaning service.
With this system, all leads qualified are far more likely to convert based on the criteria we have set out to qualify them. These leads are not cold like they would be with the previous system I outlined above, but more targeted, warm and interested in what you have to offer them.
Hiring The Right Talent Pool
Brand awareness … Check!
Figuring out your ideal customer… Check!
Getting leads in through the door…Check!
The next concern small businesses face is acquiring the right type of employee talent. This is definitely an important part of your business that you want to get right, because you need to be sure you have the employee’s to carry out the operations of the business, be able to achieve the results your customers have been sold on by you and your efforts when advertising to them.
Don’t let brand awareness and customer acquisition be compromised by an employee(s) who don’t deliver on the results that are set as standard by you as the business owner!
Perhaps the most intimidating thing about hiring new employees is the complex process of it. The cost of on boarding is an average of $4,000 per new employee for most companies. And if you don’t hire well, employee turnover can be very, very expensive.
You’ve probably heard this quote — “Hire Slow… fire fast!” Well this certainly applies to you and your business. Get to know your prospect of employee well before you go put a contract in front of them to sign. Be sure they have the right skill set in place, but just as important is to make sure they are a good fit for your company. Do they share the same values? Do they see this as an opportunity to grow? Do they genuinely care about your goals as a business? Are they excited to work on the mission and vision of the company? These are things you need to consider before you hire!
How to Fix The Issue of Hiring Bad!
Because of the high costs associated when hiring the correct employee for your business, as mentioned above… it’s important to invest a significant amount of time in the hiring process. Don’t settle for good employees when you can find great ones, even if it takes longer. It’s the great employees that will help your company get to the next level.
Along with their experience and skill set (which they can sell to another company any day of the week), find out if your mission and vision of a company inspires them. Does your goals as a business attract them emotionally? Do you as an organization stand out from the crowd and is that something they want to be apart of?
One of my own examples I personally have experience with is the software engineers and other important team members I have hired in the past to create custom software. All team members were aligned with the mission to change how people are rewarded through shopping the stores they use on a frequent basis. The mission of changing customers experiences that allow them to keep more of their hard earned money when shopping was an inspirational goal to those who worked on the project.
Also the idea of being able to give back to charitable organizations was attractive and people wanted to be part of something greater than themselves. When the going got tough… we always reflected back to our “Why” and got back to that emotional tie that had brought us together in the first place.
Whether your business is cleaning office space, servicing food to the local region, selling a widget online or a consulting firm, you can always have a purpose outside of making money, which leads to more inspiring reasons a talented person may wish to join your organization.
These are just a few of the more common challenges small businesses face on a daily basis. I’ve outlined these above as they are the ones I usually help my clients solve! If you feel that you’re not getting enough brand awareness, leads and sales for your business, why not connect with us and lets have a talk about the growth challenges you are facing in your business today.
