Starting a new business is not a joke. If you have a business or product idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can commercialize it and start making money right away. There are certain steps that need to be taken, and certain factors that need to be considered, before a business plan can be put into practice.
Opening a business in a rush is not a good idea. Many entrepreneurs make this mistake of getting too excited over an idea, and ignoring the hurdles they will have to face if they invest all their money into the venture without doing proper research first.
You always need to do your homework to start your own business, in order to make sure that you can deal with the possible circumstances. The wise ones first do research on how to start a business, and then put their full time and money into it. They are also mindful of maintaining their existing source of income while working on starting a new business on the side until their business really kicks off.
If you also want to start and run your own business, you have come to the right place. We will discuss the things you need to do or take care of before you start your own business.
10 Things to do Before Starting a New Business
Here are 10 fundamental things that you must keep in mind. Once you go through these steps, you will have better information on how to start your own business.
1. Have a Solid Business Idea
There is no doubt that you cannot start your own business without even having a business idea. But the thing to focus on here is that merely having an idea is not enough. You need to put it down in words and create a business plan out of it.
This is important because as you prepare a business plan, you will come across many other things that you need to get information about. As you collect all the data that you need, you will become more aware of the business environment you are surrounded by.
Successful entrepreneurs are those who conduct a SWOT analysis to capture the situation of the market they want to target before starting a new business. The SWOT analysis not only brings forth your internal strengths and weaknesses but also forces you to see the opportunities and threats in your business environment. It is crucial to have this data with you before you invest all your savings into a business idea, only to find out that nobody is actually willing to buy it.
2. Select Your Niche
Having a business idea and identifying the exact niche that you will target are not exactly the same thing. Once you have a written plan in your hands for opening a business, you need to further specify the niche you will sell to. This is important for you to develop effective and relevant marketing content.
Before starting a new business, you need to figure out what your buyer persona is. The more specific you are in doing this, the more easily you can influence the minds and choices of your target customers. Your marketing content will turn out as something that your ideal customers can relate to. When you are aware of the problems that your target customers are facing, you can offer accurate solutions through your products or services, and convey this to them through your advertising strategies.
3. Work on Your Branding
The next step to starting a new business is to work on your visuals and branding. This includes designing your brand logo, coming up with a catchy tagline or slogan, choosing the color theme of your brand, and perhaps also preparing some branded marketing items, such as branded mugs, pens, envelopes, or T-shirts.
You can either design these on your own if you are adept at these skills, or hire an individual from one of the freelance websites. If you are starting big and already have an office in place, you can even choose to hire a full-time graphics designer to do these jobs for you. Depending on your feasibility, and your financial position in particular,
4. Formulate an Effective Marketing Plan
Once your business plan and your branding visuals are in place, it is time to come up with a strategic plan on how to market and promote your business. It is a misconception that this step should come after your products are launched and your services are ready to be delivered. A marketing plan should actually come before those steps.
Before your product enters the market, you need to know how you are going to push it and get your target customers to buy it. The best thing to do is to have an entire marketing funnel prepared, which filters your audience from the point when they are first introduced to your product concept to the point when they purchase the ready product from you.
It is crucial for starting a new business that you have everything planned regarding making money out of your business idea. In other words, you need to know how you will make sales. Are you aware of the changing trends in the market for the industry you are targeting? Have you checked on the competitors’ prices? How sure are you that your customers will give positive feedback after testing your product or buying it for the first time?
If you do not have the answers to these questions, you need to take one step back and strategize things properly. Successful businesses are those that have comprehensive brand management strategies in place.
5. Build a Brand Website
Now is the time to build your brand website. The good news is that this can be done in just a single day if you use the right website building tools. A suitable website building platform for anyone who is starting a new business is Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
This website will be the center point for anyone looking for information about your brand to visit and browse through. Getting traffic to your website should be one of the major steps in your sales funnel. The site will showcase your products and services, and have means available for site visitors to get in touch with you.
If you plan to run your own business purely over the internet, you can convert your site into an ecommerce store. This means you will upload all your product photos, write their prices and product descriptions, and enable customers to buy directly from your online store by accepting credit or debit card payments through the site.
6. Work On Your Site’s SEO
Starting a new business and starting a website for it is quite pointless if your website’s search rankings are poor, especially if you plan to run the business online. Hence, the next step is to work on your site’s search engine optimization. This is critical if you want your website to be discoverable on the internet. Websites that do not rank well in search engines often face very low traffic and thus low sales.
You will need to do both on-site and off-site SEO. On-site SEO is often simpler to implement, as it only involves keying in the right descriptions, page titles, tags, keywords, and quality content at the right places. For instance, one part of on-site SEO is to write a catchy and precise site description. If you want to run your own business, you can apply these simple tactics on your own in the beginning. Later, once your business kicks off, you can choose to hire someone to work full-time on maintaining your site’s web presence.
The screenshot below shows where to key in your site description if you build your website on Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
7. Promote the Website
It is now time to promote your website. You can do this by applying strategies like social media marketing and content writing. Create social media pages to give information about your business, and integrate them with your website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
To promote your website through content writing, you can either choose to make guest posts on other people’s blogs, or create a blog of your own which will be attached to your website. If you build your site on Strikingly, you can add a blog section to it and keep posting articles there to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in your industry. This is all part of the process to run your own business.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
8. Be Involved in Networking and Develop a Brand Community
In order to keep your customers engaged, you need to provide them with a platform where they can interact with you or your support staff, and with each other. Some businesses use a Facebook Group for this purpose. This is an important aspect to successfully run your own business. This can really make a difference in your process of starting a new business and letting it get off the ground.
At Strikingly, we have our online community called our Idea Forum, where we invite our users and encourage them to share ideas, opinions and feedback about our tools and about web development in general.
Image taken from Strikingly
9. Provide Good Customer Service
Don’t forget to provide excellent customer service, or else it will be very difficult for you to keep any customers that come to you. Keep venues open for your customers to get in touch with you at any time.
10. Be Consistent in Your Marketing Efforts
The last step for starting a new business is to be consistent in all the steps mentioned above.
If you use Strikingly to develop a website, we do our best to take care of the technical aspects of maintaining your site. This keeps the burden off from you regarding the online presence of your business, while you can focus on the other aspects and make sales. The growth of our users’ business is meaningful to us. We appreciate all those who are interested in starting a new business, and offer full-time customer support to all our users through our 24/7 live chat.
