10 Lessons to Grow Your Business as an Entrepreneur

Running a successful small business is a constant learning curve, even for the sharpest entrepreneur. It involves understanding your customers’ thinking and actions, discovering new high-ROI content strategies and learning how to manage your employees better.

Here are ten lessons to learn and drive your own growth as an entrepreneur.

1. Know what your target customers want

   Read your target customers’ minds before designing and building your product. The best approach is conducting customer research to uncover consumer pain points, challenges with existing solutions and what most customers want. You can then design product features to address these problems and better satisfy consumer preferences. Businesses that leverage customer research achieve a 55% higher retention rate than those that don’t.

2. Repurpose old content for relevance and traffic

   You don’t have to replace your old content with 100% new ideas. Instead, repurpose the material by updating your old blogs with new information or incorporating internal data in case studies. Repurposed online content can help you boost your organic search visibility, target new audiences more effectively or reinforce your brand message.

3. Navigate the market extremes

   Learning how to maneuver the opposite extremes of market dynamics is key to survival in the business world. One way to cope with tough business times is breaking down your projects into smaller, manageable chunks. First, identify resources necessary to bring each small project to fruition and then allocate those based on urgency or importance.

4. Adopt advanced SEO

   Your SEO strategies should evolve continuously to keep up with tougher competition and the constantly changing Google ranking algorithms. Consider leveraging SEO A/B split testing tools to make the required changes on your site automatically. Also, improve your brand authority and trustworthiness with guest posts on reputable news and industry websites.

5. Ask the right questions before analyzing your data

   Formulate appropriate questions for your business data to make sense. Start by identifying key performance indicators (you can research your competitors for inspiration). Next, decide the goal of your analysis and identify decisions that will be impacted.

6. Beware of fake influencers

   Businesses lose more than $1 billion each year to influencer marketing fraud. Before engaging an influencer, check the level of engagement that each one of their posts generates.

7. Run website SEO tests during development

   Test your website during development and fix all SEO errors to ensure it’s set up for maximum search traffic. Automated SEO integration and unit tests can help you optimize the site for SEO best practices.

8. Check employee turnover

   To reduce employee turnover rates in your organization, find out what makes your employees unhappy. Surveys and one-on-one meetings with individual workers can provide critical insights for improving employee retention. Also, implement smart hiring strategies, such as prioritizing candidates that fit well into your company culture.

9. Deliver effective blog content

   Take time to develop an effective content strategy for your blog. To create blogs that resonate well with your target audience, you should identify the buyer persona. For example, content meant for first-time moms would be much different from insights delivered to business decision-makers. Next, decide the objective of your blogs, such as SEO lead generation, creating brand awareness or showcasing expertise in your niche.

10. Optimize the product experience for your customers

    Providing a superior product experience (PX) increases the possibility of retaining your customers. It can also inspire users to recommend your products to others. To improve the PX, analyze user behavior and implement product analytics to identify and fix pain points. Creating products that are efficient and fun to use can impact brand loyalty.

For more tips to grow your start-up in Ventura County, contact the professionals at Business Forward Ventura County. We provide valuable resources to inspire and drive small business success.