Surviving the First 3 Years in Business

Surviving the First 3 Years in Business

Year 1 is really an exploration. You may not realize it at the time, especially if your business is an extension of what you’re already doing as an employee. “It’s not actually different,” you tell yourself. “It’s the same thing but in a new format.” You spend much of year 1 determining if this is, in fact, a business. Every small win feels enormous. If you survive year 1, you walk into year 2 feeling somewhat confident.

We call Year 2 the terrible twos. You have some idea that running a business is unlike anything you’ve ever done, but now you also have expectations, and what felt like a win last year, when you expected nothing (and no one else expected anything from you), now feels like barely scraping by. Yes, it’s a business. But everything—everything—is hard.

Did you make it to year 3? You may not feel like you won, but you did. Your business is about to hit its stride, building on those foundations that could not be knocked down last year. You may have reduced your expectations, reduced your offering, and reduced your self-esteem. But you clarified what you’re really doing, you understand yourself and your business better, and you are now building the business you didn’t know you were building when you got started.

We recommend you have, at a minimum, the below in place as soon as possible in order to survive those inevitable, terrifying ups and downs:

Your Team: As the saying goes: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” You will need to rely on your partners, coaches, advisors, therapist, and staff members to keep you motivated—and vice versa. The initial excitement will wear off and you may be bored of the endeavour before you start making any real money, unless you have the right people in place. You will fall in and out of love with your business. Make sure there’s one person (or several people) by your side who can keep you going.

Constant Review: Entrepreneurs are famous for being forward thinking, but you need to pair that with a regular look in the rearview mirror. What worked? What didn’t? What will you do differently? There’s no point in going through the terrible twos if you don’t learn anything from them.

Process & Systems: Free up your brain time by mapping your processes, and updating them regularly as you, your business, and the world around you change. Having systems in place will give your customers the consistency they deeply desire from you, as this communicates your reliability. These processes and systems make it possible for you to delegate chunks of your work as your business grows. On top of that, the fewer decisions you have to make about what to do next, and when, will allow you greater freedom to explore, learn, and innovate.

Business is not as easy or glamorous as media often portrays, but rest assured you are not alone! For many business owners, the first years are often the most challenging, but they can also be the best, because they’re the years that changed you so deeply that you can’t imagine doing anything else.

How to Create A Not So Boring B2B Social Media Strategy

How to Create A Not So Boring B2B Social Media Strategy

When you start to make a list about all those companies that are killing it in the domains of social media, the first ones to come to your mind must be B2C (business to consumers) organizations. You can hardly name any IT or management company making it big on Instagram or Snapchat. But it does not translate to impossibility, B2B companies with successful social media strategy do exist, but they are in the minority.

For the most part, either B2B companies seem to struggle to grasp the concept of social media marketing, or they just flat out turn a blind eye to the strategy full of progressive potential. Despite the success B2C is collecting through social media marketing, B2B still heavily relies on the more of traditional methods like call calling or attending business network lunches. Don’t get it wrong, these techniques are also useful, but they should not be used instead of social media.

Action- Packed B2B Social Media Marketing Techniques:

Creating a social profile and then sending out a few tweets, B2B social media marketing is not just that simple. Any brand can do this, but this does not interpret a strategy that yields results. Every now and then we see a brand falling out of social media. Usually, because they fail to generate any engagement and scrolling through their page is just as exciting as watching the clock tick.

Build A Personality

The best way to fail at social media is to be a bore and insipid. Unfortunately, since several other B2B companies are going that way, you should steer clear. Since B2B consider social media as an added feature only, their post lack personality.

The fear of being too vexed usually keeps them from being creative. Not everyone can ace being sassy like Wendy. However, businesses to not have to be a troll to sound like a human. All you need is a conversational tone, engagement with users instead of just advertisement, a little humor and you are all set.

Know What You Are Aiming For

Be specific about what you want to achieve from social media, shooting arrows in the dark won’t do you good. Be sure of what you are aiming to achieve through it, whether it is branding you are interested in or you want to increase traffic to your website.

Know Who You Are Dealing With

With social media, you can easily reach the global audience relevant to your brand. Which is why the emphasis is on customers and not brand. Confused about how to find apt customers or conversations? Here is how you can do it, keywords, influencers, hashtags, and competitor’s audience.

Identify Your Social Media Platform

Determining which social media platform you are going to target plays a decisive role in whether your strategy will stay successful or not! For B2B, following four social platforms can play a decisive role, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. As an estimate, almost 93% of B2B market experts consider Linked to be the most potent lead generation site.

Undeviating Attitude

Consistent attitude is a must. Being steady and unvarying allows customers to recognize your brand. Plus post should be more frequent to reach a large volume of the customer without having to opt for paid methods. But it a lot harder then it may sounds. B2B marketers usually fail consequent to their lack of consistency.

Biggest Myth about Social Media Marketing

You must have heard of it from time to time or even think about it yourself, “Social Media won’t work for me because it not for boring B2B industries”.

Abolish this thought completely. Social media is not merely reserved for beauty and fashion brands. There are billions of people on social platforms, and you can bet that there must be a little chunk of audience interested in your brand. All you need to do is find them. There are various successful examples like Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, etc.

Ready to Formulate a Killing Social Media Strategy?

We are no longer at the point where we need to decide whether social media works for B2B or not, in this competitive era, it has become compulsory.

While devising a robust social media strategy, it always comes down to setting specific goals, planning, and understanding the nature of social media. Moreover, it is imperative to create content keeping your target audience in mind and also maintaining visual uniformity.