Ever wonder why some businesses do better than others? It is common for an entrepreneur to launch a business, throw everything at the market, and see the company fail. Meanwhile, another entrepreneur launches a business in the same industry and finds immediate success. What sets these two entrepreneurs apart is their approach to conducting business and engaging clients.
There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for success that you can learn and copy/paste. Yet, some businesses aggressively pursue a cookie-cutter approach with the mindset that if it worked for the next guy, it should work for them too.
The real world is constantly evolving and has dynamic variables that rapidly swing from one extreme to the next. It’s like a rock, paper, scissors game. It is naïve to expect scissors on the other side every time you throw a rock at it. At the end of the day, your business plan needs to be adaptable to the ever changing market trends.
This can only be done by working smart and restructuring your business model if needed.
How to Work Smart?
What are the most common traits successful businesses tend to have? It’s the one thing that really sets them apart from the crowd, and adopting this trait virtually seals the deal and guarantees success.
The trait is: staying on top of the latest industry trends.And monitoring what your competitors are doing
An apt entrepreneur knows that true success comes by winning customers. And what better way to win customers than by utilising the latest trends in the industry.
Learning New Trends
The best way to stay the loop is by plugging yourself on to social media. So go ahead and type relevant keywords into Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The search results that spring up will help you scan trending and relevant topics for the day. A good idea would be to customise your news feed so that it would automatically update with new trends, in a single, neat, and tidy dashboard. https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/ is a great dashboard as well for scheduling and listening as I call it for trending articles and scheduling your social media feed. There are many other dashboards to choose from but too many to list here. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ is just one place to look for trending articles about your business,
Tapping into SEO
SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. In most cases, it requires basic research skills to learn what customers are actively searching for.
Many tools like https://moz.com are relatively inexpensive and allow you to learn customer behaviour by entering terms specific to your niche. A good trick is to find certain topics that don’t have a lot of search volume, but are otherwise picking up a lot of steam.
Use your findings from social media to connect the dots and fill in the gap before someone else beats you to it.
Constantly Engage With Customers
If your product or service delivers the same old unexciting shopping experience to customers, they will eventually lose interest. You want your product and service to adapt to customer moods so they would keep coming back. One good way to understand customer perspectives is to simply ask them for their feedback.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing some of your business functions will also give you the entrepreneur time to do those essential tasks to acquire customers. Tasks like bookkeeping, general admin and telephone answering will help you to concentrate on growth and profit.
