3 Things to Avoid if You Want to Grow your Business
By Shannon Ream
Running and owning a business is difficult and challenging, and it requires your attention every day. Not to mention, the early years of your business are the most vulnerable. There are many things you can do to get to the next level of your company, but if you truly want to grow, you’ll want to avoid these three things.
Thinking Everyone Is Your Audience
Growing your business requires you to stop thinking that everyone is your audience. It is impossible to reach every customer or to get everyone to buy from you. It is essential to establish a target market when trying to grow and creating a name for yourself as a business. You need to analyze the features of your products and services. Determine the benefits that your customers get from your products and how your products fill the needs of those customers. Consider categories such as income level, occupation, age, gender, marital status, education level, and ethnic background. By focusing on the demographics of your audience and who really benefits from your business, you’ll make more of an impact with your advertising. Having a specific target market allows you to be able to better reach them. You can then get even more specific by taking into consideration your audiences personality traits, values, and interests. It is also important to keep in mind that the more specific your target market is the smaller your audience will be. Despite this, your message will be much more impactful and stronger than it would if you were trying to reach everyone. Overall, instead of allowing your advertising dollars to be wasted and fall on deaf ears, concentrate on those who would actually benefit from your business.
Striving for Perfection
How else can you grow, you may ask? You need to be willing to let go of the stuff you can’t control and control what you can. Get rid of the “perfection” mindset. Perfection is the enemy of success. Don’t let failure scare you; take risks. The fear of not being good enough is a tough feeling to shake, own it! It takes fearless dedication to build something great. Be fearless in pursuit of your dreams. No business has ever become successful without some bumps in the road. Failure is a learning experience in the business world. We all can change our life by changing our thoughts and actions. Leading us to fear the results no longer. In business and in life if you’re not making mistakes than odds are you aren’t trying very hard. Anyone who has had to courage to try something new can relate to this section. Change your mindset and you will be able to see your challenges as ways to grow and flourish. Think of it as each failure bringing you closer to where you want to be. Think about the end reward and use that as motivation. Sometimes sharing your struggles will interest people more than your success. Failure doesn’t sound as bad now does it?
Not Being You
A strategy essential to growing your business is to avoid copying someone else’s brand. Especially when it does not reflect or align with your business. An example of this would be like the croc brand trying to be like the Nike brand. They both have a large audience of shoe lovers, but each has a different style and target audience. Don’t look at what other people are doing in an online space. This will lead you to feel that you will never get there and unsure of what steps to take. It stops you in your tracks, per say, leaving you lost and hopeless. We recently listened to Amy Porterfield’s podcast with Rachel Hollis. They talked about the three do’s and don’ts of an entrepreneur in the making. Rachel points out that “comparison is the death of joy.” You can easily lose sight of what you want to achieve based on comparison. Thus, this ruins the journey of getting there on your own. Rachel Hollis also discussed comparison in a way that we had never thought of it. She said, “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” You will never truly know what that company or that person did to get where they are. That’s part of the journey discovering and learning on your own! Rachel added, “Don’t let someone with the cheap seats have an expensive opinion about your life.” http://www.amyporterfield.com/2018/04/205/ Odds are that other company or that other person doesn’t have the same aspirations or end goals as you might have for yourself or your company. Focus on you and your business, and things will eventually fall into place exactly when they are meant to. It is essential to stay on your own path and own it.
Check out Amy Porterfield’s podcast episode 205 with Rachel Hollis to hear about their Do’s and Don’ts for Entrepreneurs in the making.
Ever wonder what more you could be doing to expand your business? Let us know what mistakes you have made trying to launch your business, what fears you have, what obstacles you are struggling to get over, and what goals you want to achieve. We can get you there! Check out all the services we offer in our services tab and give us a call of schedule a consultation if you want to take your brand or business to the next level!
