Awareness And Mastery – Two Essential Keys To A Successful Small Business
Awareness and Mastery: Two Essential Keys To A Successful Small Business
By Jesse H. Shepard, WebJack Marketing & Design
Small business owners tend to focus on one thing: their company. Unfortunately, this mentality can have disastrous consequences for the success of your business. With awareness, you can achieve mastery and grow your brand in a way that's sustainable and exciting for both yourself and your customers.
Growing your business requires awareness of your company's successes and failures. When you're aware of the needs of your customers and the various ways you can better serve them, you can often solve problems faster than if you're only focused on the needs of your company.
Here are a few ways to go about ensuring that you're getting the right kind of awareness:
1. Set goals for yourself and others involved at your company, but don't be too hard on yourself when those goals aren't reached. Take the time to set goals so that everyone can be on the same page when it comes to what they need to accomplish within a certain amount of time.
2. Don't let your ultimate goal be something that "everyone" agrees with. Instead, create a goal that you're willing to work towards, but also one that everyone supports and can get behind. In doing so, there won't be an argument or "power struggle" when it comes time to decide what the company really needs in terms of staff or money.
3. Ensure that your customers are aware of the achievements of your company and its staff in a way other than through marketing campaigns. This means reminding them every now and then about what you've done—and more importantly, what your clients have done—for them over the years.
4. Build and maintain relationships with your customers, even if you don't believe they're the best customers for your company. Doing so will produce long-term packages and branding that are simply priceless.
5. When you find a successful piece of content that works, traffic it on every social network possible and encourage others to share it as well. This will help people to think about what your business can do for them, which is all a brand really needs to achieve success.
6. Use tools such as BuzzSumo to compare what other businesses are doing in the same niche as yours and see where you fit in on a big-picture level, even when those businesses may have larger budgets and more staff than you do.