5 challenges faced by entrepreneurs and ways to tackle them in 2017

What’s the Challenge: State of Inbound 2017 has stated that attracting traffic and leads to your website is the biggest challenge posed by marketers today. This is true for most startups as they face the task of not able to translate their content into conversions. Your website may have ample content, but the demand for all that content falls behind, thereby demotivating you as the founder.

How to face it: You may have ample content on your site, but does it have enough meat in it to pull the audience to your site and grab their attention for a few minutes? Ask yourself if you are providing your customers with the right kind of content. It is a well-known fact that customers these days prefer watching short videos that can be easily comprehended and shared as opposed to articles that only interest a few. Capitalize this fact and start creating short engaging videos with gripping titles that have the potential to get shared on social media a multiple times and also becoming viral. And most importantly, create high-quality content that is irresistible to view and share. Variety is the spice in life, even for a marketer. Give your customers a spread of variety in the form of articles, posters, infographics, slideshows and videos. Keep your content and website highly engaging for people to remember and revisit your site often.

What’s the challenge: Targeting your audience is an essential part of the business and may make or break your idea, if not done correctly. It is imperative for you to appropriately identify and categorize your set of customers. Which geography does your business cater to, what kind of people will be interested in the product/service you are offering, what’s the age group your business is targeting, etc. These are a few questions that need to be answered to set your business rolling in the right direction.

How to face it: Targeting can be made easy, if you religiously answer the above questions. If your business eyes an international audience, then ensure that your website is optimized for different time zones, currencies and local languages. If you have a wide age group that you’re targeting, break the whole set into smaller sets and create different campaigns that will appeal to each set. Identify the interests of the people who may be your potential customers and allure them based on those interests. Targeting is nothing but intuition and creativity, served on the same plate.

What’s the challenge: Measuring the ROI of your marketing activities may be the most difficult but the most important challenge as of today. The success of each and every campaign can be stated only with respect to the return on investment. Investors demand to see ROI to increase funding and hence, this is one of the most vital challenges that needs most attention. You need really effective communication between the marketing team and the sales team to calculate this parameter of your business without errors.

How to face it: Digitally, this measurement can be done using a great marketing software along with a powerful CRM. This combination has the potential to precisely measure the figures needed from both the marketing and sales ends. This way, you can maintain exact records of how many customers or leads were generated through a particular marketing campaign. Analytics platforms also provide you with approximate data but may come with some errors. If you can account for that margin of error, you may opt for a good Analytics platform to do the job.

What’s the challenge: A website is the mode of communication of your business with your customers. If you go wrong with this, then it’s quite difficult for you to go any further in your venture. You may face various issues with creating the perfect design for your site, creating compelling content to go on the site, managing and maintaining the pages and links and various other factors. After the website, comes social media profiles, that need equal attention. Your audience is present on most of the social media platforms and are almost ready to make their decision. If your communication isn’t effective enough, your competitor has stolen your customer, maybe forever.

How to face it: A website has various parameters that need attention to detail – content, design, maintenance, etc. Small companies or startups often lack talent and skills to excel in each of these tasks. In such cases, it is best to opt for freelancers or small agencies that offer these services within your budget. Similar is the case with creating and maintaining social media profiles. You need creativity and good judgement to appeal to the right kind of audience. You cannot be a superhero and possess all these qualities. So outsource them to people who are the best at what they do. It’s always good to delegate. You’ll see that your attention is at the right place and you have more time to focus on increasing the revenue of your venture rather than looking into every detail, all by yourself.

What’s the challenge: You may have the best idea in your head, but how to identify the perfect technology or tool that supports your idea and helps in elevating it into a successful venture? Where do you look for the right market trends and how do you stay ahead of your competition? These are a few daunting questions that most marketers fail to get answers for.

How to face it: Growthverse is an excellent platform that offers a wide range of technologies and tools that can be virtually used for your business. However, only an expert will be able to translate the findings and correctly superimpose the results on to the business. Hire professionals who have good knowledge of the tools and technologies available in the market along with their application to different sectors of the industry.

Well, these were some of the most important challenges identified by us for startups that are looking out to make it big in the market. If you feel we’ve missed out anything, go ahead and add your suggestions in the comments below. We’d be happy to include them in our article.