how to grow your startup

Things you can do to grow your business

Are you stuck on how to move forward and expand? Don’t worry.

Is your business in a rut? Are you stuck on how to move forward and expand? Don’t worry – there are many ways in which you can grow your business exponentially. Many of them are simple in their initial idea, but may require some more work in execution.

Open more branches

Opening more branches of your business may sound intimidating. It may also sound like a lot of money being spent. However, by opening more branches, or even just the one to start with, you can expand your geographical target customers.

Expansion of this kind expands the number of people that you can capture the attention of when selling your product or service.

Word spreads too – so anyone that was just out of your geographical target before now has a chance to try the product or service that you’re offering. Those that are loyal customers already will spread the news for you, as well as your own marketing.

Improve your current products and services

This is a very broad point. Improve could mean anything from streamlining your service to make it more efficient and therefore more cost effective, to improving the physical product itself and making an invention 2.0 to market instead.

In terms of services, you could offer more training to staff members to ensure that your business is being run as efficiently as possible to improve them.

Expand your current products and services

If there is a service or a product which would go hand in hand with each other and you’re only doing the one… why not do both?

By expanding your services on offer that cross over and are likely to affect the same people, you will drive up sales as your customers are likely to be interested in both as opposed to just one of your services or products.

Find your audience and go to them

As part of your business, you should be aiming to connect with the people that use your services and products. Not only can you personally get to know them and their habits and needs, but you can also discover new ideas or ways in which to market your services specifically for these people.

Invest your time and energy into marketing

Marketing is the way to connect to new people. There is a whole generation that is numb to typical advertising – the generation that has never had to watch a TV ad because there’s a skip button. Older generations are also getting into that habit.

If you want to break through the advertisement blindness that we have now, it must be with something well thought, relevant and interesting to your audience.

Market your products and services in new ways

Try social media to target your audiences: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. These platforms are being used by the whole world – what better place exists to reach your audience (and for your audience to reach you).

Growing a business can seem daunting initially, but there are many ways to do it and be successful.

If you are looking for social media marketing or digital marketing service for your business or startup, email us contact@ourownstartup.com. You can also view all our services here.

3 Growth hacking strategies that’ll boost your venture in no time

If growth hacking technologies are applied correctly, they can do wonders for your business.

Growth hacking strategies are out of the box marketing experiments that’ll boost and transform your venture in no time. It is usually combines unconventional marketing strategies that leads to greater traffic generation online, more customers and conversion of leads into sales. This increases your start-up’s market value and ushers in revenue.
Following a set framework and strategy can benefit you. Taking help of expert advisors from Entrepreneurs Hub will definitely help. Here are a few hacking techniques you could use to boost your venture:

1. Attract your target audience

The three strategies that are bound to attract your potential customers are:

i) Content creation:

Content marketing is a hugely successful inbound marketing technique which has proved to garner customers online. Through informative and interesting content, you could target your audience. Using social media, you could also make them aware about new offerings and help solve issues regarding your venture. Content marketing is great because through great content, you can reach a huge yet targeted group in no time.

ii) Captivating visuals and infographics

Captivating and well made videos and inforgraphics along with well-tailored content is bound to boost traffic on your website or social media page. However, it is very easy to go wrong while using this method. So, some rules you need to keep in mind are:
– Post relevant videos or visuals.
– Back your infographics with data
– Keep them short and simple
– Make them interesting
– Keep posting visuals at regular intervals

iii) Built in sharing

Keep sharing your content; you can’t post and hope that your customers find your content. You need to have a built in sharing provision and share good content on all social media platforms for maximum reach.
You could also have guest posts and social media influencers sharing your content for more reach.

These methods are bound to make the customers aware about you venture and once they know of it, they will be hooked if you can follow the steps effectively.

2. Build engagement with your target audience

You need to accept the fact that customers won’t buy stuff immediately after knowing or reading about something. Hence, it is important to engage them. E-mail is still an effective way to reach out to customers. You can send the target group e-mails about offers, discounts, what’s new and good deals. This will force them to visit your site and they will learn more. However, make sure you don’t bombard their inbox with e-mails because that is plain annoying and they might get frustrated.

Sending messages via SMS or WhatsApp is also a good technique to keep customers posted about what is happening.

All websites follow this insanely effective trick. Amazon.in sends you sale details, Nykaa.com sends you promo codes via e-mail and FoodPanda uses SMSes to make you aware about new offers.

3. Acquire customers and maintain them.

Most entrepreneurs make a crucial mistake of acquiring a huge customer base and then ignoring them. This leads to a customer feeling neglected and might turn out to be the reason why s/he switches from your brand to a different one.

Build CRM automation to keep them loyal. For instance, if they are dormant, poke them with new offers and discounts or if they’ve used your product, try and seek a review.

If growth hacking technologies are applied correctly, they can do wonders for your business.

Image Credit: steamfeed.com

How Indian startups of today can become successful brands of tomorrow

Branding in India still finds itself in the nascent stage, largely confined to visual identification and communication, despite several incidents proving its importance in the Indian market.

The bygone 2015 was a year of both challenges and opportunities for startups – it posed a time of diminishing barriers to enter the marketplace and increase avenues for reaching and serving new potential customers than ever before, however, at the same time it also paved way for cut-throat competition.

In an already crowded marketplace, setting your startup apart is therefore crucial to survival and success.

However, branding in India still finds itself in the nascent stage, largely confined to visual identification and communication, despite several incidents proving its importance in the Indian market. It does not only help startups survive tough times, but also regain the trust of stakeholders afterwards.

We have listed 6 branding and marketing tips that every startup in India should follow for a bright future. Here’s what they are:

1. Focus Should Be Consumer Oriented

Most startups in the country are product or tech startups, where the founders and team are tech-oriented. What they tend to forget is that tech is merely an enabler and not the end goal in itself as opposed to a consumer oriented approach, which can guarantee a greater brand appreciation.

2. Product And Brand Should Go Hand-In-Hand

Idea of brand today is very look and feel. It’s something that is made to latch on to the product. It’s must for startups to realize that branding is essential to one’s business objective. Young startups don’t understand this very well despite several case studies. Say for example, Paperboat, which is a great case study of how this company thought of brand right from the packaging. They are thinking product and brand hand-in-hand rather than separate entities.

3. Activities To Build Equity, Garner Sales And For Immediate Gratification

Big companies know the importance for such activities, however, when Think Rasta works with startups, we break down their spends into three parts: Purpose spends (key-metrics for a young startup), equity spends (what to spend to build a brand’s equity over a period of time), and spends over experimenting (allocate a budget so that you can do activities on the brand just for fun, and hope that it works with your audience). Startups should not make the mistake of focusing on short term results, but focus on long term results and experimentation for better insight.

4. Build Content Over Campaigns

The best thing is to do both, but considering the cash constraints with startups, campaigns can be an expensive deal and a wasteful method of reaching out to the target group (TG). So the focus should be on creating customized content that is important for your consumer rather than merely talking about your brand. This is how your content will resonate with your audience. For eg, on your social media pages, do not focus on having 8 posts in a day around your brand, rather the idea should be to focus on the kind of content you create such that it is loved by your customers, even if you are making one post in a week!

5. Strategic Alliance: Associate With An Established Entity

One of the most sought after strategy in furious markets, it is a mutually beneficial alliance between two brands to reach out to their TG in most fruitful and economical way. It is imperative, as startups do not have financial bandwidth to do it all. Also, alliances with another market player might fetch you the most desired credibility factor that a startup requires at the nascent stages. For example, Hokey Pokey was a parlour-based model in Mumbai. After Think Rasta worked with them, today they are present across 2,000 stores as majorly an FMCG player. What Think Rasta did disruptively for them last year looking at their young target audience, Think Rasta tied up with NH7 and released a NH7 flavour as partnership marketing. NH7 is targeting exactly the same audience that Hokey Pokey is looking at.

6. Build Tight Framework, Be Decisive About Budgets And Get Professional Assistance

Identify a TG that is not broad (that one person who likes your campaign or content every time) and work towards it. Startups also has resource crunch and they simply can’t do ‘everything’. Professional assistance might be required at the time of implementation as it will bring more thoughts and resources that could do it better on your behalf. You may continue to focus on your product development while they take up on the assigned job. Being clear on what you want, how you want and the time frame you want it in will help you take decisions quicker and at the same time helo you stay within a framework.