American management consultant and author, Peter F. Drucker rightly says: “A business has only two functions: marketing and innovation.” The same axiom holds for your startup business too. Of course, a few other important things matter for keeping your startup business growing. Here, we will discuss these five tips essential to grow your startup venture.
Problems of Startups
Before I discuss tips for keeping your startup business growing, it is essential to understand why such ventures are usually destined for doom. Between 60 percent and 90 percent of startups worldwide fail due to various reasons. Understandably, lack of adequate finances ranks as the single most significant cause for such flops.
Therefore, these tips I provide also include ways and means to prevent your startup from running into rough financial weather and keep it growing.
5 Essential Tips to Grow Your Startup
These tips I provide are rather simple to implement in the daily workings of your startup. Undoubtedly, some may require a bit of effort to implement, but the results would make them worthwhile.
1) Rapid Innovation
Coming back to Peter F. Drucker’s quote, innovation of your brand, product, or service offerings holds the key to keeping your startup business growing. Regardless of whether your startup is founded on some unique concept or a copycat of a successful venture, innovation is an absolute must.
The reason is simple. If you are an innovative startup, there will be copycats in the market almost immediately. And should your startup be based on some copycat model, chances are, the competitor will try and outshine you at the earliest. Both these scenarios can be best avoided through rapid innovation.
Moreover, customers also look for newer, innovative variants of products and services. It can be something as simple as a new-look wrapper or a service add-on. Unless customers feel they are getting the latest stuff regularly, they tend to move away to other suppliers. Rapid innovation is the first tip for keeping your startup business growing since it prevents your offerings from going obsolete in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
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2) Implement Corporate Culture
Corporate culture is not something for Multinational Companies or large corporations. In simple words, corporate culture means beliefs, values and the behavior of employees and business owners while dealing with other persons. Business etiquette plays a significant role in fostering corporate culture.
Unless you implement proper business etiquette and corporate culture, a customer or supplier, financer or lender will feel disgruntled with your business. Remember, people always remember how you made them feel during an interaction. They tend to forget what you said, did or spent but remember how they felt. Therefore, excellent business etiquette and corporate culture are incredibly vital to keep your startup growing.
3) Go Online Immediately
Bill Gates says: “if your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.” The Microsoft founder’s words aptly reflect the future of business, whether established or startup. For every business serious of staying in business, having a significant online presence is essential.
And there are solid reasons for this. Global e-commerce is projected to cross the US$4.87 trillion mark in about two years- or 2021. This includes Business-To-Business (B2B) and Business-To-Customer (B2C) transactions. Unless your startup has a significant online presence and engages in e-commerce, it is highly prone to going extinct.
Putting your business online may increase your initial expenses or gnaw at your existing profits. Yet, the expense will prove worthwhile in the long run. Going online with an e-commerce portal allows you to popularise the brand worldwide. Additionally, an e-commerce portal also enables round-the-clock sales from all parts of the world, even while you are asleep. It keeps your startup in the fray alongside other players in the market. This is one of the essential tips for keeping your startup business growing.
4) Provide Apps for Mobile
While still on the topic of going online, it is also essential to provide mobile apps for your existing and prospective clients. There are excellent reasons I include this among tips for keeping your startup growing.
Projections are, that some 72.9 percent of all e-commerce will occur using mobile devices such as smartphones and tabs worldwide. There are valid reasons behind these projections.
First is increasing the availability of economically priced smartphones even in relatively developing countries of the world. Secondly, Internet proliferation worldwide is growing rapidly, primarily through mobile networks. These facts aptly point that mobile-based ecommerce will hold the key to keep your startup business growing.
In fact, apps also provide you with opportunities to earn side income for your startup. Advertisers are willing to pay app owners some money to feature their ads. You can even get ads on the app of your startup business by subscribing to Google AdWords.
5) Utilize Social Media
If you believe that Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or LinkedIn is for amateurs, think again. Nowadays almost every large corporation, including those with over 100 years of history, is on Facebook. Because social media is the fastest and most popular way of getting a company’s message across to the public.
Social media presence helps keep your startup business growing if you frequently post exciting content. For example, posting exciting facts about your products or services, brand, manufacturing process or even job vacancies at your startup keeps people engaged.
Another advantage of social media is direct interaction with customers and prospective clients. Satisfied customers will post positive comments on your social media pages or Tweets. Dissatisfied ones will retort with negative remarks. You can resort to damage control tactics immediately, should the startup encounter any unpleasant comments. It also helps customers know you take them seriously.
In Conclusion
Keeping your startup business growing can be fairly enjoyable. Also, you need not spend a fortune to increase business by acquiring more customers. With some effort, tact and adoption of trending technologies, you can turn your startup business into a top enterprise within a short period. These above tips should help you identify some core areas where you may require improvements to grow your startup business.
