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If you weren’t ready to be an entrepreneur before early 2020, the events that followed the COVID-19 outbreak probably changed your mind. The mass furloughing and firings showed countless people that relying on employers is inherently risky. After all, it takes away your control over the situation: you can do everything right and still wind up unemployed.
So maybe that’s why you’ve created a business — or maybe you were always planning to take this step. Regardless of the motivating factors, you’ve taken the huge step of investing in yourself by founding a company. Control is finally yours. But with that control comes responsibility: if you can’t deliver results, you don’t get to pass the buck.
Much to your frustration, your fledgling business isn’t achieving the reach you were hoping for. It’s appealing to some but within a narrow niche. You’ve invested in SEO, polished your website, and achieved some stability — yet you need to attract so many more people to make progress towards your goals. So what’s going wrong? Well, I obviously can’t know for sure, but I can identify these four likely reasons for a new business not resonating:
Your brand lacks a noteworthy mission
Trust in the business world is in short supply these days, and one of the main causes is the ever-rising public awareness of various moral and ecological issues facing industry. The gig economy is allowing so many people to slide into poverty yet consistently being framed as the justifiable embrace of personal freedoms, for instance — and then there’s the pressing matter of moving away from fossil fuels in a world being so heavily impacted by climate change.
In short, people care about more than just how cheaply they can buy the products they want. They want to support companies that have actual missions behind them (not just the drive to profit). And when you’re trying to get more people to take notice of you, you need to have a mission statement to show what you’re hoping to achieve.
Remember that supporting good causes doesn’t require you to be wholly charitable. Green web hosting companies like GreenGeeks make money while encouraging the use of renewable energy sources, for instance — and organizations like VA Claim Pros support people struggling with disabilities while still profiting in the process. The financial benefit can stay as one of your prime motivators. You just need something else to go alongside it.
Your value proposition is unclear
What do you have to offer? You might have a vague outline of what you do, but it needs to be far better than that. You need one or two lines to succinctly describe what someone will get in return for paying you. Goods? Services? Support? If you get it wrong, you can end up with a brand that’s capable of so much but gets ignored because people don’t understand it.
Keep in mind that your value proposition needs to target everyone you’re hoping to reach, and that concerns not just the message itself but also how it’s phrased. The wording you use is quite significant. If you describe your proposition in a way that many people won’t grasp, what will that achieve? Make things as simple as they need to be for your value to be obvious to everyone.
You’re not using social media effectively
Social media is chaotic and often wildly emotional, inspiring plenty of business owners to steer clear of it — but those things also make it incredibly powerful as a promotional tool. Through cross-posting (when it’s done well), you can reach huge numbers of people across different channels, and engaging with prospective customers directly (which is very effective at conveying your personality).
Key to this is achieving the delicate balance between sticking to convention (very important when addressing controversial topics, and you may be surprised by how many topics can prove controversial) and bucking convention. Only when you do something different can you really stand out, but being too different will get you shunned.
Complicated? Yes. But you don’t need to get it right immediately. Instead, begin by erring on the side of caution, then start to add in unique elements and riff on things to see what works. If you cross a line, it’ll only be fractional, so you can take a step back. And once you really get into a social media groove, you’ll start to see great results.
Your business model needs expanding
If you just can’t figure out what’s wrong with your business, the answer might simply be that you don’t offer enough to appeal to a wide base. If you sell niche birthday cakes, for instance, you’re not going to interest most people looking for general caterers. And if you identify this as the problem, there’s no shortcut through which you can avoid making changes.
Instead, you must simply adapt what you do. Instead of sticking to cakes, start selling other forms of food. Instead of concentrating on birthdays, take requests for other days of the day as well. Build a business that brings a lot to the table: only then will you be able to gain traction with a wide base of customers possessing distinct preferences.
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