Small Business Guide: Funding Your Marketing Strategy

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Funding your marketing strategy| Small Business Guide: Funding Your Marketing StrategySmall businesses are in something of a bind at the start, they need to get noticed through advertising, but it’s hard to achieve when you look at the numbers. Luckily, there are a few systems in place to help with this exact problem. One of the best is a merchant cash advance.

Create a Marketing Budget

One of the best ways to create a buzz around your product is by advertising it through digital channels. Done correctly, a digital advertising campaign puts your products in front of the right people at the right times and gets people talking about what you sell both online and offline.

Organizing an effective digital marketing campaign is one thing; paying for it is something else. Unless you have a sustainable and controlled way to pay for your marketing campaign, it can get out of control fast and leave you with a black hole in your finances. Create a tight ad budget.

Merchant Cash Advance

If you’re a startup, you have a problem; how do you compete with the big guns? In this case, the big guns are the competition in your niche that has grown and developed into leading brands with substantial marketing budgets. The answer might be simple – use Merchant Cash Advance.

A merchant cash advance is designed to support startup businesses and close the marketing gap between them and the more established players in the niche. A merchant cash advance is issued by a cash advance company as a loan and receives a percentage of the future profits.


Paid Online Advertising

When you are trying to get your startup noticed by your target customers, you need to advertise. These days, the standard way to make your brand visible and attract more prospects to your website is through paid online ads. These can be on search engines or social media channels.

Paid online advertising is highly effective; it allows you to target your ideal audience and gets your brand and website noticed. Of course, there is more to do to sell your products, but without making your business visible online, you are relying on the quality of SEO and organic traffic.

Social Media Management

Social media channels are extremely important for your marketing campaign nowadays. In some ways, these channels are just as important as your search engine traffic – perhaps more so. The reason is that social media interactions are genuine, frequent, and highly valuable.

That said, social media channels are also numerous, and they have to be managed by a dedicated team member. The social media channels – perhaps three of them – need to be updated regularly with content; analytics must also be acquired to ensure optimal performance.

Website Optimization

There’s no reason why you can’t optimize your website yourself to ensure your organic reach is at its best and you have the best conversion strategy for your business. However, not everyone is a wiz when it comes to website optimization, so seriously consider investing in a professional website optimization service to ensure that your website performs to the highest standards.

5 Tips For Long-lasting Business Success

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Success|5 Tips For Long-lasting Business SuccessSuccess is never a feat to achieve on a silver platter. People who want to succeed in their life’s undertaking inevitably find out that it comes at a cost. It is the same in entrepreneurship. Studies show that 18.4% of private sector businesses in the U.S. fail within the first year. Despite the scary rate of failure among companies, many people still harbor the desire to become successful bosses of their firms. If you yearn to be a successful enterprise owner, here are some tips you can follow.

1. Know how to satisfy your customers

Starting and running an entrepreneurial enterprise involves a lot of diligence, especially in keeping your customers pleased with your service or product. A satisfied client is the biggest strength of every organization. If you can manage to satisfy your customers and keep them coming back to you for more, there is no way you won’t succeed. To satisfy your customers, you should find out what extra services or products they will be happy to get from you. Also, you should know when is the right time to contact your clients to pitch them a product or service.

2. Take an interest in complementary businesses

Almost every commercial entity has other firms that support it in its activities. Some supporting organizations are so key that without them, it will be difficult for the entity to operate successfully. Therefore, every owner should be interested in the operations of the firms that support them. You can buy a business that complements your own if you think it’s vital to your company’s success and ensure its proper management. That way, you won’t have to experience severe consequences from the collapse of that important additional business.


3. Invest in your human resources

One way to ensure a company’s progress is to focus on enhancing the employees who work for you. If you build the capacity of your workers, their output will improve, and you will reap vast benefits. Periodically, you should organize workshops for your employees and reward them for good work. You should also find ways to put them in the right roles to bring out their best. Show concern when they encounter challenges in their lives, and they will always be motivated to give their best to the business.

4. Be ready to forgo certain liberties

The rigors in ensuring that a commercial unit succeeds are so huge that you must be prepared to sacrifice some privileges you may enjoy if you were not the enterprise owner. You may give up your break times and stay at work to see that some tasks have been completed, which may mean spending less time with family and friends. Vacations may become untenable perks for you, and you will have to make sure everyone in the family understands why you can’t go on vacations with them as you used to do.

5. Learn continuously and consistently

Even the most successful companies find ways to improve. Successful entrepreneurs, therefore, never stop learning. It would be helpful if you were ready and prepared to learn about new trends to stay abreast with your competitors. If you stop learning, your competitors will likely get so ahead of you that you can’t put up with the competition, and your firm will become stagnant or even collapse. It would help if you tried to find out what your other contenders are doing and how you can learn from them. If you do that, you will never lag the competition.

It is not easy to make a business successful, but if you put in the effort, the rewards will be worth your toils, and you won’t add to the infamous statistics of failed businesses each year.

What are the benefits of owning a trucking business?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Owning a trucking business|What are the benefits of owning a trucking business?For the self-employed owning a trucking business can offer a lot of great benefits. For starters, you don’t have to answer to anyone but yourself when it comes to setting your hours and work schedule. You’ll also likely make more than enough money from your business to provide for all your needs (rent, groceries, mortgage), so you won’t have any additional expenses like health insurance. When it’s time for retirement, your trucking company will allow you to retire with dignity and financial security.

In addition to being your own boss and having the freedom to come and go as you please, you also won’t have to worry about layoffs. In fact, you can even increase your profit margin on every job by offering a unique service or product. Another advantage of owning a trucking business is that it gives you options when it comes to determining how much control and responsibility you want over your job. You’ll be able to hire other drivers for the jobs that you don’t want to do yourself, which means more time with your family or doing the things that make you happy.

Benefits of owning a trucking business:

1) The freedom to take on any type of job.

Most trucking companies specialize in hauling a specific type of cargo, but with your own trucking business, you have the freedom to take on any owner-operator jobs that comes your way. You’re not limited by what you can or can’t haul and you aren’t required to provide a service or product that’s been regulated by a corporation. With your own trucking company, you’ll likely only be limited by what you can physically do in a day.


2) The freedom to work when you want and how you want.

There are never going to be any limits placed on your hours or how hard you’re willing to work. The income from your trucking business is yours and you can use it when you want to and in the way that you want to. Need to take a few months off to travel or to go back to school? Do it. Want to work a 12-hour day every day for two weeks straight? Go for it. Want to work part-time on weekends? Just put in the hours that feel right for you.

3) The freedom of financial security.

If your trucking business is profitable, there will never be any worries about paying the bills or whether or not you’ll qualify for health benefits at another job in the future. You’ll be able to live a life with financial security and freedom of choice, even if you want to take a break from your business or plan to take it easy in your golden years.

Many people who work at corporations dream about breaking free and starting their own businesses, but for many of them, it’s just not possible. Not only does it take a lot of money to start up a trucking business, but there are also quite a few laws that you’ll need to observe to stay in business and pay your employees.

While owning your own company requires some research and planning, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the benefits listed above without having to worry about any sort of oversight or outside control. If you feel like a corporate job just isn’t fulfilling your potential or giving you control over your life anymore, consider starting up your own trucking business.

What Can You Do to Benefit Your Business in the Long Run?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Benefit Your Business |What Can You Do to Benefit Your Business in the Long Run?After the last couple of years, running a business might have all seemed like survival, but as some things at least return to normal, your thoughts might turn to more long-term plans. With so many things to do at once, it might seem an impossible task to even get started, but to make things easier, here are some of the main things you should consider looking at.

#1 You Are Going to Need to Invest in PPSR

PPSR, otherwise known as the Personal Property Securities Register, is an essential part of running a business. The Personal Property Securities Register is a powerful tool that can help you get the compensation that you deserve if people who haven’t paid you to go out of business.

It means that you can repossess what you lost, or at least the value of what you lost. This is important to get right, and you might need some templates to make sure that it is perfect for use. This might mean that you are going to want to look at templates for Personal Property Securities Register used in Australia to make sure you don’t lose out

#2 You Are Going to Need to Invest in Cybersecurity

Investing in Cybersecurity is important to ensure the longevity of your business. It can help you work in a more secure environment and help your employees trust you. You would be wise to start by investing in anti-virus software and a decent firewall. It should also be beneficial to invest in end-user education to help yourself and your employees work safely on the internet and are wary of threats.

#3 You Should Be Investing in Training Your Employees

Not only does this help employee morale, but it also allows your business to get better results. This is because mistakes are less likely to be made, and communication becomes more fluent with the overall result that the pace of work not only becomes faster but also more accurate. You will be pleasantly surprised with the transformation that the correct training will cause within your business, as it starts to overcome issues more consistently and intelligently, as well as use fewer resources and perform better, even under pressure.


#4 You Should Be Looking into Getting High-Quality Website Management

This can help you tremendously when it comes to keeping the customers that you have attracted to your site. It can help you make sure that your website is up to spec and isn’t taking forever to load, being slowed down further by bugs, and just not looking good, causing your potential customers to click away.

You should also be looking into tools like Chatbots and using SEO to help your site become more findable online and enjoyable for your customers when they get there.

#5 You Should Be Investing in Your Social Media Output

This can help you when it comes to reaching specific audiences and helping your ‘brand’ increase in popularity. It can be a great tool as people all over the world could be potentially exposed to your business so that you have a chance of bringing in a customer anytime, meaning that you are always actively marketing. Although this might not bring the same long-term results as SEO, it will give you a more immediate audience.

#6 You Should Be Ensuring That Your Finances Are in Order

This isn’t just getting your business a PPSR. This is also building up your business’s credit score and making sure that you are as debt-free as possible. This is important as it can prevent you from getting the help that you need when you need it, as lenders might turn you down, which in turn might be the end of the line for your business.

#7 Digitalization Can Help You with Efficiency

Digitalization can be great for building efficiency throughout your business and it can be an effective way to modernize. It can also help you cut down on the single-use products which are detrimental to your business’s finances, and instead invest in other areas. For instance, moving storage to the cloud would be significant as you are going to need the digital space to expand your business and help it grow.

#8 You Are Going to Need to Think About Packaging

This can help your business appeal to more customers and then make them want to come back for more. It has been said that the packaging is more important than the product, and you also need to remember to make switches to more eco-friendly materials and also keep your packaging practical and reflective of your business. You will find that it is easier to keep your customers if they have a great ‘unboxing’ experience.

To Wrap Things Up

It’s never too soon to plan, especially if some of those measures will mean your business does have a future. By getting the back-up you need, both financially and digitally, as well as cutting down on overheads and boosting the knowledge in your workforce, you’ll find that moving forward doesn’t have to be as hard as you first thought.

A Guide to Engineering Business Success

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Engineering Business|A Guide to Engineering Business SuccessGuiding an engineering business to strategic success is not easy. The engineering industry is both highly fractured and immensely busy. Here is a very brief guide to some of the strategic elements that need to be kept in mind when planning out the long-term growth of an engineering business.

Have a Coherent Strategic Vision

It is extremely rare for an engineering company (or any company for that matter) to succeed strategically if it does not have a coherent and achievable long-term vision and well-defined ethos. From the very genesis of an engineering business’ life, it should be guided by the vision defined by its founders. These strategic visions should be directly related to the space within the market that the business wishes to occupy and should guide the long-term onboarding of staff and the development of processes. The vision should be displayed in a strategic vision statement.

Pay Attention to Service Standards and Efficiency

Engineering businesses are not only concerned with the creation of a product or delivery of a 2D service. Their relationships with consumers, customers, and other businesses need to be ongoing if they are to see any kind of success. Service standards and efficiency need to be an absolute priority. Companies like Servicegeeni.com help engineering businesses to offer efficient and effective ongoing relationships. Looking after the people connected through purchase, rental or stake holding in products, in the long run, can provide the opportunity for repeat custom and a good corporate reputation.


Know Your Metrics of Success

Engineering business owners need to be able to develop criteria and metrics that enable them to measure success. These are typically known as KPIs

– Key Performance Indicators. Without the development and quantization of Key Performance Indicators, it can be hard for a business to tell what areas of strategy are proving successful.

Good Key Performance Indicators can provide generally objective evidence for the success or failure of a strategic element. Typical KPIs in the engineering industry include profit to cost measurements, profit to personnel measurements, service outcomes, and a whole host of other indicators. Getting your strategic KPIs in order is essential if you want your business to grow.

Process Driven Onboarding is a Must

Running an engineering business successfully is eventually going to involve hiring some extra help. Don’t just hire randomly – use a process-driven onboarding strategy to find the best solutions. Although process-driven onboarding has received some flak in recent years, it still dominates the hiring strategies of most successful engineering businesses. This is because engineering firms are environments in which specific skill quotas need to be met to facilitate growth. Process-driven onboarding involves the following of a specific process when looking for and interviewing new hires.

Carefully identifying the skill gaps that need filling and looking for personnel that fill those gaps will help a business to grow as efficiently as possible without taking people on that do not have specific things to bring to the table. Don’t just you’re your business aimlessly, grow it intelligently.