This articles details some of the ways that would help when one needs to just get started instead of the traditional ‘always used best practices’. The Internet abounds with advice from marketing and business articles that advise you on what is to be done to become successful in your venture.
Whereas it is true that the best of these advise points may actually help an individual to shorten their learning curve and it is hugely satisfying for the adviser, it is also true that the usual ‘best ways’ in which things are recommended to be done put a certain amount of pressure on newcomers to the game. The traditional methods, no doubt, show how some things can be done using the right method.
A brand new entrant may find it quite overwhelming to go through numerous tutorials that detail the best practices. It may happen that after reading through best practices, it is a high number in most cases, the person may not know how to put it all together into practice. Being a newbie, they may not be able to afford to implement the solutions either.
Therefore, at the very basic level, there is a clear distinction between what is ‘right’ and what is to be done ‘right now’. If the new entrant is aware of the difference between the two as well as has enough practical knowledge as to how to act on this information, it is easy to move forward in the business.
When should one give up what is ‘right’?
A person launched an email sales tool with a small team at his side and a near-zero budget. The initial times were frustrating. As the former owner of a successful digital marketing company, he was unable to put into practice all that he had preached then. The resources were simply not there.
During the digital marketing days, he would preach on end as to how important it was to have an email list that was segmented on the type of customers and use that to deliver messages that were customized for each group to meet specific needs. However, now, when he has his own business, he could not lay his hands on software that required for want of funds. Therefore, at the end, he ended up sending one single newsletter to everyone on the mailing list. However, that was not the end of it all.
This is when we learned the importance of letting go of the right and embracing the ‘right now’. After some time, the traffic picked up and the team was headed to where it wanted to go. Income increased and they were able to implement the strategies that were there in mind. They did all of these without compromising on the precious resources that they had so little of in the beginning stages and all this was possible only because they did not follow the usual ‘right’ template that someone else had set up.
Firstly, it is important to determine where the business is ‘right now’. At this stage, it is important to take a step back from the business that you are running, analyse it and determine the position that you are in ‘right now’. The following are some questions that you can ask yourself in this context to correctly determine your current position.
- What portion of your current income can you set apart for the requisite marketing tools and strategies that you have in mind?
- Are you in possession of in-house marketing expertise that will help to implement the strategies that you have in mind or doing such a thing involve a lot of your time and lots of money?
- Why are you so sure that the strategies that you currently have in mind will work well? Is it because you already know that you have a competitive advantage over others or is it because that somebody else told you that it would work?
If you give honest answers to all of these questions, you will be able to determine the gap between where you currently are and where you want to get to. You would then be able to take a few steps that would maximize the impact of whatever you do and help you quickly reach where you want to. It is important to do maximum with what you currently have.
Another wish that one could have in mind is to optimize the conversion rate to numbers that had been seen for large companies when the person had started a business. What was the problem all about? There was not enough traffic to reach any level of statistical significance.
According to Peep Laja of ConversionXL, this was not a big problem at all. Though the numbers did not permit to run tests, there were methods by which optimization could be achieved. He believed that the build-up of conversion rates did not entirely run on science. Most businesses are run for making money, he firmly believed.
When you are comfortable with the rate at which your business is growing, it is easier for you to become more creative. Mathew Toren, Entrepreneur writer once said that Bootstrapping is what builds character.
He opined that there are numerous ways to make money to fund the ideas that you have in mind; however, it is best to encourage new ideas during the beginning period of a start-up that has only a modest budget. Such a situation always encourages creativity.
Even if ‘right now’ necessitates that you have only limited resources to work with, it is important to know your current status and what you can do about it to overcome this limitation. Otherwise, it is all about wasted time and money and ultimate business failure.