7 Things Every New Business Must Do (2017)

by Hassan del Campo, Social Mediums

optimization.

If you’ve been a reader of the Micro Business Monday blog since our inception you’ll notice that we use this word a lot. But it’s important. In the social media sphere, optimization essentially means employing techniques that ensure someone will discover your business. The process usually begins with identifying keywords for your niche to be used throughout the meta-text of your web pages. It can also go a lot deeper. Optimization ties into SEO, SERP, and SEM – and that’s just the start. Uber Suggest Free Keyword Tool offers suggestions for relevant keywords and long-tail phrases so you can stay on top your competition, trends, and best-fitting terms for your business. Lastly, content marketing and concept marketing are other techniques to that build awareness around your business and brand.

segmentation.

The ability to segment and organize data, while identifying targeted markets, is one of the most important skill sets a business should have. After you’ve established your niche, begin to categorize your customers into personas; a basket of characteristics that may define a certain type of customer by their job role, industry, engagement with your product, or any other variable you feel is necessary to highlight so that you may craft more purposeful and effective marketing campaigns. The exercise of segmentation forces you to flush out the pertinent details of agents that affect your business, so that you may be more efficient in your quest towards success. HubSpot offers a “free for life” CRM tool with many integrated features.

personalization.

Businesses really soar once they overcome their identity crisis and begin to embrace who and what they are. People become invested in brands. And businesses that are especially B2C-operated can create leverage and advantage by simply investing in their own brand equity. The powerful characteristic of a strong brand it exists independently from the business itself. Brands are emotionally-driven and speak to the customer in direct ways outside the rigidity of price and product.

information.

Knowing is growing. As a business owner, the learning never stops. There’s a principle that says you should spend as much time in your business as on your business. As an emerging business, you should set aside time away from the daily operation of your business to learn about the business itself – industry trends, best practices, and other knowledge sets that you can then apply in real-time. Additionally, don’t forget to neglect the data that can be automatically populated for you. Twitter and Instagram have both upgraded their features to include some pretty useful analytics.

coordination.

Fortunately, entrepreneurs of today have access to a plethora of tools, some not even available within the last five years. Take advantage of tools such as Buffer to schedule posts ahead of time across your social media platforms. There are also social media calendar templates that you use to guide when certain types of content should be released. Lastly, Facebook Pages allows users to schedule several posts at a time, for specific days, at specific times. This concept also applies to MailChimp and other email marketing services.

experimentation.

Experimentation is the response that is activated after the information is collected. For example, you discover that your Facebook Ad campaign is not engaging customers – you applied best practices, yet people aren’t responding to the ad. The next step would then be to test different ad copy or play around with different types of images to until you can register a result. For this reason, it can be valuable to segment campaigns or activities, so that you can fine-tune the process before applying it on a grander scale. A/B testing essentially captures this notion. It simply means testing against any two of one thing and monitoring what happens afterward. If you use a lot of email marketing, A/B testing subject lines will most likely be a common occurrence. But don’t fret, there are so many free tools that help you with this, it would be a crime not to. 

integration.

Finally, coordinating all of your targeted efforts so they run smoothly in cooperation with other parts of your business, means you have satisfied an important tenet of every business’s success – systems. For a growing checklist of how to integrate tools into your operations, visit this post.