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Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business
Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business
Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business
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Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business

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Are you ready to launch your business and maximize your profits?

Entrepreneur Quick Guides were specifically created for modern-day entrepreneurs on the go, providing practical tips and actionable steps that can be swiftly and effectively implemented. Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business will teach you how to establish an online presence, attract your ideal customers, and maximize your profits. 

This guide offers invaluable insights and solutions to questions such as:

  • How do I build my web presence? 
  • What type of equipment and software will I need?
  • Can I use advertising and marketing to build my brand?
  • How can superior customer service create lifetime customer loyalty?
  • How to pay yourself, employees, and manage your taxes?

This guide will take you through the final steps towards launching a successful business. Get your business off the ground and start making money today!

LanguageEnglish
PublisherEntrepreneur Press
Release dateAug 6, 2024
ISBN9781613084786
Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business
Author

The Staff of Entrepreneur Media

For more than 30 years, Entrepreneur Media has been setting the course for small business success. From startup to retirement, millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners trust the Entrepreneur Media family—Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur.com, Entrepreneur Press, EntrepreneurEnEspanol.com, and our industry partners—to point them in the right direction. The Entrepreneur Media family is regarded as a beacon within the small to midsized business community, providing outstanding content, fresh opportunities, and innovative ways to push publishing, small business, and entrepreneurship forward.

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    Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business - The Staff of Entrepreneur Media

    Introduction

    ARE YOU PREPARED TO BUILD, MARKET, AND SCALE your new business? It can be a challenging and exciting journey that requires your full attention. With your purchase of the Entrepreneur Quick Guide: Building, Marketing, and Scaling Your New Business, you’ve taken a positive step toward making success happen.

    Consider this book your essential toolkit designed to guide you through the early stages of growing your business. The information is broken down into manageable steps, so if this information is new to you, this guide will help you build a solid foundation.

    Some of the topics covered include:

    Building

    Boosting your productivity with technology: Whether on the go or tethered to a desk, you can be more productive utilizing the latest technology. For example, you can hire a virtual assistant to assist with daily tasks and store content in the cloud for 24/7 access. Choose pared-down hardware and software tailored to your specific needs—no need to pay for pricey extras you won’t use. With costs falling, you can get great deals on the basics.

    Establishing your web presence: Building a website that promotes your business is critical to your success. You need to ensure that you have a well-designed site that’s easy to navigate and has persuasive copy. Get the design, navigation, and compelling copy right from the beginning. Also, research before choosing a hosting platform, and don’t hesitate to pursue certifications to establish customer trust and credibility.

    Staying connected with technology: Keeping in touch using technology such as broadband, Fios, and mobile devices continues to drop in price. Choosing the right carrier and determining your data needs becomes an important decision. In addition, texting to stay connected in real-time has become a ubiquitous form of communication. There are many options and things to determine, like how often you travel and whether you have access to hotspots or choose to use prepaid phones. Choose what keeps you seamlessly connected and on budget.

    Marketing

    Focusing on brand-building: Consider how customers perceive you to create a solid brand. Project a consistent identity across touchpoints to stand out. Your primary goals are to set yourself apart, know your target customers, and project the personality you want them to remember you by. And make sure to leverage social proof—your advocates are your best asset.

    Advertising and marketing your business: You should continually focus your marketing plan on getting and keeping customers. That means you need to clearly understand where your company stands (called situational awareness) and how you will reach your marketing goals. Digital ads offer unmatched reach and analytics—make them your priority. Consider bringing in professionals for advertising, copywriting, and design to project a professional image. This will help you accelerate results.

    Promoting your business: When deciding how to spread the word about your business, you’ll need to think about creating a publicity plan. Advertising is good, but publicity generated by word of mouth and attention from the media is always more powerful. Schedule special events or stage a brick-and-mortar store grand opening to create excitement and kickstart buzz. You may feel a bit uncomfortable tooting your own horn, but you’re the one who must step up and make things happen. Perhaps you can co-sponsor an event or be part of a local contest or charity event. There are many ways of promoting your business; you just need to network and see what is happening in your community.

    Selling techniques: As an entrepreneur, you may feel you are not equipped (or don’t have the personality) to play a sales role, but you might be surprised by your expertise. As the creator, you are the expert on your product or service. Therefore, it’s your job to lead the development of your ‘unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP sets you apart from your competitors. You are just another faceless company trying to sell something without defining your USP. To nail it down, consider putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and be clear about what motivates them to buy.

    Providing excellent customer service: After you make the sale, you still have work to do. Repeat customers are the key to a successful ongoing business, so you must continue building customer relationships. You need to stay on top of new trends and listen to their comments. Determine how to surprise them with a discount or a free service. Also, make sure to motivate your staff to provide excellent service too.

    Scaling

    Tackling online advertising and marketing: Your website should serve as your prime asset. It gives you complete control over your messaging, branding, and content. The challenge is driving targeted traffic to your site due to the heavy volume of competitors. Search engines are your essential tool for solving this problem; optimizing for relevant keywords improves your visibility. Consider leveraging artificial intelligence and specialized tools like SEMrush or BuzzSumo to outperform your competition in search rankings. Additionally, don’t overlook the power of local search to connect with your immediate community.

    Spreading the word using online platforms: Social media platforms have become indispensable when building and sustaining a brand. A consistent content strategy, including blogging, is also crucial to your marketing. You can extend your reach by cross-promoting blog content on social platforms. In addition, establish your brand as a thought leader by strategically publishing expert articles on platforms frequented by your target audience.

    Networking on social media: Businesses recognize the crucial role that social media plays in connecting with key business contacts. Platforms like LinkedIn are essential for connecting with two critical groups: (1) high-level networkers (HLNs) who are active and influential in their industries and (2) target market connections (TMCs) who are information seekers engaged in groups relevant to your business. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are foundational for initiating these connections. Remember that it’s wise to keep your personal groups separate from your business groups when making connections.

    Tips and Warnings: Many business resources and tip boxes (see examples below) are included in this book.

    AHA!

    Here you will find helpful information or ideas you may not have thought of before.

    TIP

    This box gives you ideas on how to do something better or more efficiently, or simply how to work smarter.

    WARNING

    Here we remind you to heed the warnings to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls that others have made before you.

    FYI

    This box points you to current and often comprehensive websites that you might seek out for business information.

    SAVE

    Look for this box to provide valuable tips on ways you can save money during startup.

    Entrepreneur Quick Guide: Building, Marketing and Scaling Your New Business is a timely and essential book for committed entrepreneurs like you. It addresses the genuine joys and challenges of business ownership.

    Use its guidance as your road map to success, and make sure to enjoy your exciting business adventure!

    PART 1

    Building

    CHAPTER 1 BUSINESS 24/7

    USING TECHNOLOGY TO BOOST YOUR PRODUCTIVITY

    CHAPTER 2 YOUR ALL-IMPORTANT WEBSITE

    BUILDING YOUR WEB PRESENCE

    CHAPTER 3 KEEP IN TOUCH

    USING TECHNOLOGY TO STAY CONNECTED

    CHAPTER 1

    Business 24/7

    Using Technology to Boost Your Productivity

    IF YOURE LIKE MOST BUSINESSPEOPLE, you probably have a main base of operations you call your office, home base, or headquarters. It could be a retail store, a factory floor, or a trailer on a construction site. It could also be a room in your home or a cubicle within a larger office complex. It is where you can usually be found 9 to 5 or whatever your typical office hours might be.

    These days, thanks to mobile technology, your exact location could vary widely. Nowadays, entrepreneurs and employees alike are just as likely to be found working from home, at a client’s office, from a hotel room, at the airport, at a Starbucks, or while traveling on board an airplane or train. Widespread use of devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops means your office can be virtually anywhere, and you can stay connected to your co-workers, clients, and customers anywhere, anytime. Cloud computing has also allowed data to be stored remotely, in the cloud, and be accessed from any of your devices, from anywhere at any time.

    Business that’s conducted away from the traditional office goes by a lot of names, such as mobile working or telecommuting—the latter term underlining the importance of telecommunications in enabling this activity. Another way to think about it is that, in reality, the office is you—or, at the very least, it becomes whatever work space you happen to be occupying at the moment. Work is now something you do rather than a place you go to.

    Today, most businesses have moved far away from desktop computers and landline phones. Internet connectivity, powerful mobile versions of office tools, smartphones, and wireless tablets have changed the face of business technology, making the physical location for many businesses (other than restaurants and retail businesses) less significant than ever before.

    Many entrepreneurs have the equivalent of fully equipped virtual offices in the laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other devices they carry around. Some enterprises have even become virtual companies with employees spending most of their time at separate locations and meeting only occasionally, often via Zoom, or some other online meeting provider. Basically, you’re in the office whenever you’re telecommuting.

    The goal isn’t always to do away with the traditional office; it’s to use networking and communications technologies to create your extended office. Your extended office isn’t a real, physical location; it’s virtual just like the internet.

    People have been teleworking for decades, but our current degree of mobility is a direct outgrowth of the internet and the mobile devices that allow us to easily connect to the internet from anywhere.

    Virtually on the Road

    Thanks to the latest technology, there’s a wide range of products and online services to help you become more productive. The Apple iPhone and iPad, for example, offer thousands of business-oriented applications that allow users to truly customize their phones and transform them into the ultimate time management, contact management, and personal productivity tools.

    For the on-the-go entrepreneur, the trick is to choose technology-based tools, whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Microsoft Surface, Chromebook, netbook, or laptop, that best fits your work habits and style, and that you’re most comfortable using.

    After all, you want to boost your productivity—not drown yourself in technology that’s not appropriate or overly complicated for what you need it to do.

    Equipping Your Virtual Office

    Even though you may be starting your first business, you’re probably fairly experienced with desktops and/or laptops, tablets, and smartphones as well as other productivity equipment needed to get your enterprise off the ground.

    One unfailing characteristic of consumer and small-business technologies is that each new iteration delivers more for less. Depending on how much mobility you need, you may find yourself buying more individual pieces of equipment than in years past, but the price tag on each one is typically lower than last year and the year before that. It’s not that they’re shoddy—quite the contrary. But their resale values are continuously being undercut by cheaper and more powerful successors.

    Need an Assistant? Go Virtual

    There’s a lot of busy work that comes with being an entrepreneur—or an executive of any kind. But are you making the most of your time doing a lot of this work? Not always. That’s where a virtual assistant can help. A virtual assistant can be a great first employee for your business—one you needn’t hire full time unless necessary.

    Hiring a virtual assistant will give you a chance to see the real challenges of task delegation and a glimpse into managing people. Make sure you have a clear list of tasks you will delegate—and communicate exactly what you want done. This can take some time to get right, but in the end, you’ll free yourself from time-wasting tasks.

    You should hire a virtual assistant when you realize you will soon be overwhelmed by your workload and can’t move forward without some help.

    Here are several tasks that are perfectly suited for virtual assistants:

    SEO and social media. An assistant can research trending topics, keep on top of popular keywords related to your business, do research for your site’s content, help make sure you are aware of trends, create and maintain a social media calendar for postings, and even suggest social media content (and tweaks as you go) to help make your social presence stronger.

    Repeatable or template tasks. Repeatable tasks are those items on your to-do list that keep popping up week after week. These tasks follow the same process each time, which means that a little training can empower a virtual assistant to successfully complete these tasks and make more time for growing the business.

    Creative, but time-consuming. Other tasks for the right virtual assistant could include blog posting, creating simple workbooks and materials for clients, and developing email templates for future use.

    Before you hire a virtual assistant, track your time for a few weeks and notice how much time you spend on each task. Then find the average time that each task takes. Next, make a list of the most time-consuming tasks, that will not require a lot of detailed training and create a specific virtual assistant job description. Include the tools, apps, and software that you are planning to use. And to make training easier, use screen capture technology to record yourself completing a task from start to finish—to be shared with your new assistant.

    FYI—when it comes to financial tasks, do them yourself or leave them for the bookkeeper or accountant. You can’t risk handing over such tasks, or those with personal information, to a virtual assistant.

    Therefore, you should think about office tools and technology slightly differently than you do other durables. Here are a few truisms to consider when buying hardware (although they don’t necessarily apply to software):

    • Even the most expensive office item—the desktop or laptop computer—is dirt cheap by historical measures.

    • Whatever you buy and whenever you buy it, it will appear expensive and underpowered compared to succeeding versions. New computer technology is available every three to six months. The computer you purchase brandnew today will be outdated by more powerful equipment within months and will probably need to be replaced altogether within two to three years if you want to stay current.

    • Theoretically, office equipment pays for itself in a short period by enhancing your productivity; it then helps you make money by letting you do whatever you do faster and better.

    Treat your current technology-related purchases as a simple business expense rather than investment in capital equipment it actually is. Irrespective of how you treat these items on your tax return, don’t try to extract the value of this equipment over years. Yes, the products will work just fine and continue to deliver productivity for years. But their costs are likely recovered within weeks or months—no depreciation calculations required.

    That’s not to say you shouldn’t get the best buy you can. Cash is always precious. But so is your time, and price tags are usually overshadowed by the return on investment from most office products. The real issue when shopping for office equipment is whether the new machine will deliver a higher rate of productivity than the old. It’s a mistake to try to squeeze the last bit of usefulness out of older equipment when an update could result in higher levels of moneymaking. Conversely, don’t buy new products just because they have more bells and whistles. If your cell phone serves your purposes, hang onto it longer. If your computer meets your needs and the software is sufficient for your business, don’t spend more just because there’s a new model available. Remember, you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses unless they are competing for your business. Each time you get new equipment, there’s a learning curve that can slow you or your employees down. New versions of products are great if they benefit your business, but not necessary if they don’t.

    TIP

    While computers and mobile devices run using a wide range of different operating systems, most are designed to operate seamlessly in a work environment. So if you’re using an Apple MacBook Pro laptop, for example, you’ll have no trouble transferring data and files with co-workers or clients using Windows-based computers. You can run Windows-based software on the latest Macs, and Microsoft Word for iPad has gone a long way in making the iPad a virtual office, too. There are also multiple apps created for easy storage and transfer of documents between operating systems.

    Being Well-Connected

    The first concern when equipping yourself and your office (virtual or otherwise) is connectivity. You have an expanding constellation of stuff, and it’s more important than ever that it all works together for maximum effect. Efficiency today means being well-connected—both inside and outside the walls of your company.

    Even if you start as a solo operator working from a home office, you’ll want to connect electronically to clients and suppliers and possibly share proposals, spreadsheets, and other data files. This not only requires a phone and texting but usually some level of compatibility among productivity software and wireless devices. That used to mean sticking with only the most popular operating systems and applications for seamless data transfer among employees and business partners.

    SAVE

    Depending on your needs, you might not need to invest $1,500 to $2,500 for a state-of-the-art laptop. If your main tasks when traveling include surfing the web, word processing, and spreadsheet management, for example, a less cumbersome, smaller, and lightweight netbook may work for you just fine. The latest netbooks cost only around $350. Or you might find that a tablet, like an iPad, Microsoft Surface, or Samsung Galaxy is all you need for the office. Those run between $400 and $1,200.

    Today, however, PCs can usually communicate more easily with Macs, Androids, and iPhones; in fact, any peripheral that connects to a computer via a USB connection will most likely work with all computers on a network. Sure, you may still encounter minor compatibility issues, but for the most part, exchanging data and files is easier than ever regardless of what types of computer equipment are being used.

    What’s more, Google’s rise in the shared document space has been tremendous. It’s easy to selectively share—and set parameters around who can edit and who can simply view—spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and many other kinds of documents through Google Drive. Many large companies even use Gmail’s business services. Free or low-cost services like Dropbox, WeTransfer, and Box.com have also made it possible to skip the USB and thumb drives altogether by acting as a transfer and file storage and collaboration service—with the added element of tight security for transferring and storing files.

    At your office, it’s the network that helps you coordinate your tools—both those inside the office and out—and share them and the data on them among co-workers and partners. Networks include your local area network, Bluetooth connections between devices, cellular connections over a wide area, and of course, the ultimate

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