StartupNation |
- The Importance of a Having a Business Mentor When Starting Up
- Your First 6 Months in Business: A To-Do List
- Harness the Power of Conflict to Grow Your Company
- WJR Business Beat: These Companies Top the 2022 Brand Intimacy Survey (Episode 397)
- How the Metaverse Is Going to Revolutionize Retail Business
- Underrated Marketing Techniques Your Business Should Be Using
| The Importance of a Having a Business Mentor When Starting Up Posted: 25 Apr 2022 09:00 PM PDT
As an entrepreneur, you have a fierce independent streak. It's how you got your business off the ground in the first place. However, there will come a time where you hit a wall when it comes to growing your business. When you reach that point in your journey, it's important to have a business mentor to help. A mentor is anyone in your industry with more experience than you. They don't necessarily have to be older than you, but they do need to have a deep understanding of your field of work that you don't quite have yet. Here are a few reasons why entrepreneurs need business mentors, and how you can find one: Learn from past mistakesThis is one of the top reasons to have a business mentor. As an entrepreneur, you're inevitably going to make mistakes, and that's OK. You should always be adapting and learning, but if you can avoid some common pitfalls, you'll be ahead of the competition. Having a business mentor to guide you along the way will help you work smarter, not harder, which should always be your goal. Related: How to Find the Right Business MentorCultivate community to really succeedEntrepreneurs often reference their hustle and grind, in which sleep is a luxury and working all hours is the norm. However, this is a huge mistake for long-term success. It’s important to be surrounded by like-minded individuals to truly grow your business and achieve your goals. If you don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of, you'll get stuck in an echo chamber. Being around other, more experienced entrepreneurs will inspire you to achieve your dreams, instead of that empty “hustle” that many entrepreneurs constantly find themselves striving for. Master mindful networkingYou know the saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know"? You guessed it; this applies heavily to entrepreneurs.
Your next business connection, the key to finishing a project or a skilled freelancer is out there, and if you're not out there with them, they will meet your competition. This is where your mentor comes in. When you gain a trusted business mentor, you also gain their circle of connections. They can introduce you to important people, get you into events you didn't have access to before, and show you a new side of entrepreneurship. Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!How do you find a mentor?Hearing all the benefits, you're on board to find yourself a business mentor. Great! However, quality mentors are not just hanging around, waiting for you to message them on LinkedIn. Here’s how you can start your outreach: Make sure to demonstrate your value
Reach out to past connections
Go to networking events frequently
Sign up for a mentorship program online
Moving forward with a business mentorFinding a mentor is an investment in your business and your personal development. You will avoid common industry pitfalls, excel over your competition and develop important connections. Hopefully, the skills you learn as a mentee will allow your business to flourish, so someday you can pay it forward. Originally Sept. 7, 2018. The post The Importance of a Having a Business Mentor When Starting Up appeared first on StartupNation. |
| Your First 6 Months in Business: A To-Do List Posted: 25 Apr 2022 09:00 PM PDT
Getting your business off the ground is an exciting journey, but it's not without challenges. There are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of decisions need to be made and a lot of money needs to be spent. If you're not ready, it's easy to be overwhelmed. So much of getting your business running involves a feasible plan and the right timing. If your business is new, it's crucial to have a checklist of your priorities. Here, we're outlining everything you need to focus on in the first six months of your startup so you can sustain its growth. 1. Continue doing your market researchResearch is essential for any new business, and there are several good reasons to continue researching even after you've started operations. First, the business landscape changes rapidly. What works today might not be what customers want tomorrow. Second, you might not be targeting the right demographics for your product or service. By keeping up with new developments in your field, you can ensure that your business stays ahead of the curve. Doing a lot of research can also help you identify new opportunities for growth and expansion. Even if your business is doing well now, there's no guarantee that it will stay that way forever. 5 Signs Your Startup Is Targeting the Wrong Audience |
| Harness the Power of Conflict to Grow Your Company Posted: 25 Apr 2022 09:00 PM PDT
The following is an excerpt from "Don’t Get Mad at Penguins: And Other Ways to Detox the Conflict in Your Life and Business” by Gabe Karp. Copyright 2022 by Post Hill Press. "Gabe Karp, you look like shit," Steve grinned as he swept into the waiting area. His bold remark caught me off guard. To be fair, I was coming off of an exhausting red-eye flight. "Nice to meet you, too." I shook his hand. I was here to observe Steve's company—let's call it Vulcan Solutions—because it had the fastest rate of growth and the highest level of conflict out of any company in my dataset. On the surface, their business model was boring (they manufacture recyclable synthetic rubber for medical devices). But under that conservative facade, this company was buzzing with confrontation during every meeting and, somehow, this confrontational culture was working well for them. I wanted to get to the bottom of what they were doing, so I asked their CEO, Steve, to let me shadow him for a day. What I saw during that visit completely contradicts how most people think conflict works.
While most of us generally fear and avoid conflict, it's a powerful asset for those who understand it. In fact, healthy conflict has been the greatest factor driving my success as a lawyer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. I wrote this book to help others benefit from conflict in the same way. Of course, not all conflict is productive. There is healthy conflict, and there is toxic conflict. While healthy conflict propels people and organizations forward, toxic conflict slows us down and causes pain. It consumes an organization's energy, taxing its ability to compete, grow and prosper. When conflict turns toxic, team engagements are painful, client relationships are strained and individual careers suffer. The same painful dynamics play out in our personal lives as well. Toxic conflict deprives us of the love, friendships, and relationships that we seek and need. Toxic conflict, however, is far from inevitable. Just as we might go on a dietary cleanse to rid our bodies of toxins, we can do the same to detox our organizations and our minds—and when we do, the results are phenomenal. Once we cleanse the toxins, we suddenly feel energized to embrace conflict and leverage it to drive new innovation. We navigate difficult situations with ease and elevate our relationships to a higher plane. Detoxing our companies and our minds makes us better, stronger, faster and more connected. The path that led me to this perspective began when I was a trial lawyer investigating the sources of conflict in my cases. I had a front-row seat to the conflicts of others, and I observed how certain communication styles always seemed to either improve or worsen a situation. In those days, a big part of my job was to control the level of conflict. During tense negotiations, I defused the conflict to help everyone relax and trust one another. During contentious cross-examinations, on the other hand, I amped up the tension when I wanted to rattle a witness or make a dramatic point to the jury. While I served my clients well and achieved great results, I also suffered painful losses and struggled in difficult interactions with others for reasons I did not understand. Over time, I noticed the same patterns of conflict I'd seen in my cases play out in my personal life, too. I was identifying the toxins that build up in human interactions and make them unhealthy. When my clients and I were able to detox those interactions, we were successful in resolving the conflicts. But when the toxins were left unchecked, we were generally in for an expensive and painful experience.
When I joined a small startup called ePrize and saw these same toxic patterns play out in the business world, I knew I was onto something important. Building a company from the ground up requires a lot of conflict. But I noticed that when we detoxed those conflicts, they really propelled our business forward. When we engaged in nontoxic confrontations with employees, clients and shareholders, we achieved far superior results than when we avoided difficult issues or allowed toxins to infect interactions. This approach helped us grow our company into the world leader in the digital promotions industry. We acquired several smaller companies along the way and ultimately negotiated the sale of ePrize. After our successful acquisition I entered the world of venture capital, where I've continued to experience the role of conflict on a broader scale. I have led the investments in and served on the board of directors of over a dozen companies, and I continue to witness the effects of both healthy and toxic conflict. I have negotiated business and financing deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and I've worked with CEOs to resolve conflicts ranging from clients wanting to cancel multimillion-dollar contracts to underperforming team members requesting pay raises, and everything in between. Regardless of how big or small the conflict, the same patterns play out over and over. "Don’t Get Mad at Penguins" can be purchased via StartupNation.com below. For more from Gabe Karp, go to gabekarp.com. Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!The post Harness the Power of Conflict to Grow Your Company appeared first on StartupNation. |
| WJR Business Beat: These Companies Top the 2022 Brand Intimacy Survey (Episode 397) Posted: 25 Apr 2022 09:11 AM PDT
In today’s Business Beat, Jeff discusses the 2022 brand intimacy survey by MBLM and why it’s important to have an intimate brand. Tune in to today’s Business Beat to learn the top 5 intimate brands:
Tune in to News/Talk 760 AM WJR weekday mornings at 7:11 a.m. for the WJR Business Beat. Listeners outside of the Detroit area can listen live HERE. Are you an entrepreneur with a great story to share? If so, contact us at editor@startupnation.com and we'll feature you on an upcoming segment of the WJR Business Beat! Good morning, Paul! One of the most powerful things a company can achieve is to achieve a brand that’s known as an intimate brand, that being one that consumers have a really strong emotional connection to. Now, does it really matter to have an intimate brand? Well, you bet it does. In fact, the brands that proved to be the most intimate are those that consistently outperform their market sector as measured by profit, revenue and stock price. And each year, brands are rated for their success and achieving that objective in what’s called a brand intimacy survey. That’s conducted by MBLM. They’re a company that studies the emotional science behind well-known brands. How do you determine that a brand has a strong emotional connection? Well, here’s how you do it, according to MBLM. You focus on these six factors: one, fulfillment, the brand exceeds expectations, delivering superior service, quality, and efficacy. Two, identity that reflects an aspirational image or admired values and beliefs that resonate deeply; three, enhancement, the brand is effective at delivering its promise value. Four, ritual, a brand that becomes ingrained as a part of daily existence. Five, nostalgia. That is, does the brand create strong memories of the past, and six, indulgence, the level of gratification from what that brand provides. So who, according to the MBLM 2022 survey has those strongly intimate brands? Well, No. 5, it’s YouTube. No. 4, Sony. No. 3, Apple. No. 2, Tesla, and coming in at No. 1, it’s Disney. Want to make sure your brand is working for you? Well, focus on the six components that MBLM believes are those critical to achieving a strong, emotional connection leading to your company doing more business. I’m Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of startupnation.com, and that’s today’s Business Beat on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR. The post WJR Business Beat: These Companies Top the 2022 Brand Intimacy Survey (Episode 397) appeared first on StartupNation. |
| How the Metaverse Is Going to Revolutionize Retail Business Posted: 24 Apr 2022 09:00 PM PDT Most of the population has come across the term “metaverse” after Facebook's revelatory move to change its name to Meta. Little did we know that the term was born in the early ’90s through the fiction novel "Snow Crash" and has been used to describe an alternate reality since then. The buzz around the topic has resulted in a lot of varying definitions of this technology and the market opportunity has grown tremendously in the last two years. For instance, the below graph shows potential market opportunities in the metaverse realm in 2021. It was based on different scenarios varying Total Addressable Market (TAM) expansion and the share of the digital economy shifting to the metaverse.
Here, we aim to look at the metaverse from the retail industry's perspective and examine how it will transform the current scenario. A Beginner's Guide to Business Success in the Metaverse |
| Underrated Marketing Techniques Your Business Should Be Using Posted: 24 Apr 2022 09:00 PM PDT There are some marketing techniques, like social media marketing or monetizing your website successfully, that just about every business is using. But there are also a lot of other underrated tactics that aren't as widely used but that can still effectively increase your online visibility and grow your sales. In this article, we're going to outline some of those underrated marketing tactics that your business should be using. Let's get started. Personalized SMS marketingSMS marketing involves sending promotions to customers using text messages. SMS messages can feel more personal and help you build stronger connections with your customers, because they'll be used to receiving texts from their nearest and dearest. These messages can be used more generally to announce sales or draw people to your website, for instance — but, if you personalize your SMS marketing, you can achieve even more. Here are a few different ways that you can personalize your SMS messages to improve the results of your marketing efforts:
If you need help with your text message marketing, Emotive is a platform that can offer a lot of support. Not only are they able to automate your text message marketing for you, but their service also allows for two-way conversations with your customers. Working with micro-influencersInfluencer marketing has become very popular. It's a type of marketing that leads to endorsements and product mentions from influencers. These are people who have a strong following relevant to a certain field or niche. Micro-influencers are likely a better choice for your business. These people have anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 followers. They'll also often have very dedicated followings, meaning working with them can be very fruitful, especially if you sell particularly niche products or services. To identify micro-influencers in your industry, consider using a service like Scrunch, which lets you search for influencers by category and provide you with statistics concerning their audience sizes, the platforms they use, the topics they post about and more. Creating and publishing interactive contentInteractive content can be very helpful for improving your website engagement. Quizzes, virtual try-on features, calculators and virtual tours are all examples of interactive content you could create, depending on what you sell. This type of content can also help you to increase your sales numbers. Calculators and quizzes, for instance, can help the user determine which of your products would suit their needs. Virtual tours and try-ons, on the other hand, can give people a better idea of what your products will look like in real life, so they feel more confident about buying from you. To get you thinking, let's look at an example of interactive content.
Truthfinder, an online public records search company, has helpful interactive content that supplements their blog posts. For instance, in their article on how to run a background check, Truthfinder discusses what types of people they can help you pull background reports on, how to search using phone numbers, full-time jobs and possible relatives, and what information their search can uncover. The interactive element is at the top of the page, where the user can simply begin to search for the individual they're looking for. In taking this approach, Truthfinder is able to convince more people to use their tool, as they'll have a much better understanding of how it works and what it can be used for. Consider adding interactive elements to your content, as Truthfinder has. This will help give your readers a better understanding of what your services and products are capable of, making them more likely to want to spend money with you. Promoting your company with useful freebiesFreebie marketing is the process of offering something like a free sample, gift or trial in order to draw people into your business and increase your future sales. Freebies can be very helpful for showing your ideal customers that you understand them, and provide an idea of what your company is capable of offering. This will make them more likely to make a purchase! There are a lot of different ways you can use freebie marketing. If you offer a service, you might consider providing a monthlong free trial for those who want to sign up. This will help you build trust with prospective customers, making them more likely to sign up with you later. Or, you could offer them a resource, like a tool or eBook, for free in exchange for their contact information. This will let you send them more marketing materials, helping to encourage future purchases. Adding calls to action to your contentWhether you've started a great self-employed job or run a large enterprise, having a great call to action is one of the basics that businesses need to be reminded of. A lot of businesses invest their time and money into creating great content, but many of them fail to turn their readers into customers. Fortunately, you can help push your readers to make a purchase with the help of a call to action, or CTA. A CTA is a word or phrase — often placed on a button — that tells the reader what they need to do next. Sometimes, people just need an extra push to get them to do what you want them to. This means that adding an effective CTA to your content can help encourage newsletter signups, sales, and more. Here are a few tips for creating effective CTAs in your content:
Even when you add CTAs to the text of your blog, you should also add a button somewhere below it. With a simple blog design tweak, button CTAs become easier to spot and therefore more likely to attract clicks. Let's take a look at an example of a business with great CTAs in their content as inspiration.
Tipalti Approve, a procurement management software company, has a very solid CTA at the end of their blog post on business procurement. The article outlines what procurement is, its end goals, its impact on suppliers and how technology can help improve it. Once a user has read the article, they'll see the CTA shown in the image above. It clearly states that Tipalti Approve offers a free trial of their services and, if a visitor has just read through the article, they're fairly likely to be interested in this. Not only is the placement of the CTA smart, but the color helps it stand out. Plus, it's clear the company is offering something for free, which will further encourage more people to click and move forward in their customer journey! Following a strategy similar to Tipalti Approve's can help you get more clicks, more trial sign-ups, and ultimately more sales and privileges to bnb wallet. Revisiting cold leadsWhen a lead goes cold, many businesses will be tempted to give up and move on to the next thing. But cold leads can actually be great targets for generating more business — after all, these are people who have previously expressed interest in what you do. So, you need to keep track of your leads in order to ensure that you can revisit them in the future if necessary. Consider using a software program like ActiveCampaign to keep track of any cold leads and reach back out to them when appropriate. And keep in mind that re-engaging cold leads is always easier than marketing to new ones — after all, cold leads are already familiar with your business. SummarySometimes, to take your business to the next level, you need to think outside of the box. In this article, we outlined some underrated promotional techniques you can use, including SMS marketing, micro-influencer marketing and more. Start thinking about what tactics would work best for your business, and begin implementing them! You'll be surprised by how effective these techniques can be. StartupNation exclusive discounts and savings on Dell products and accessories: Learn more here. |
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