Soft Entrepreneurship Skills To Outgrow Your Competitors

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There are several essential soft entrepreneurship skills sets that you can develop to increase your entrepreneurial success if you are an entrepreneur or considering becoming one. Soft entrepreneur skills can ensure you grow your brand and get clients choosing you over your competitors. In this article, we will explore soft entrepreneurial skills are and how to develop them effectively to outgrow your  competitors.

What are soft entrepreneurship skills?

Entrepreneurship is an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action. Soft entrepreneurial skills encompass a broad range of various skill sets like customer service, leadership skills and creative thinking. It includes creativity, innovation and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects. It is seen as vital to promoting innovation, competitiveness and economic growth. For instance, to be a successful business owner, you may need to develop your communication and listening skills. To build successful project teams, you might need to improve your leadership and teamwork skills.

Examples of soft entrepreneurship skills

Developing your soft entrepreneurial skills can increase the growth of your business and brand. Here are some examples of soft entrepreneurship skills you need to excel:
  • Business management skills
  • Teamwork and leadership skills
  • Communication and listening
  • Customer service skills
  • Analytical and problem-solving skills
  • Critical thinking skills
  • Strategic thinking and planning skills
  • Time management and organizational skills
  • Branding, marketing and networking skills

Business management skills

Successful entrepreneurs will most often rely on their business skills to manage and run a business or brand. Developing your business management skills can mean building up your ability to multitask, and make decisions regarding the health and profitability of your business.

Teamwork and leadership skills

Becoming a successful entrepreneur can also mean taking on leadership roles and working as part of a team. Being a business owner means you will most likely act as both a supervisor and as part of a team. You will need to rely on effective leadership skills to help motivate your team.

Communication and listening

Business owners and entrepreneurs should also develop effective communication skills. From active listening to clients, being able to communicate effectively can help you work with others. Likewise, effective communication can also translate to how you promote awareness of your brand. For instance, effective messages through content marketing, social media and other advertising methods can positively influence how you reach your target market.

Customer service skills

No matter the industry you venture into as an entrepreneur, you may still need to develop effective customer service skills. From talking with potential clients to discussing opening partnerships, effective customer service skills can help you connect with your customer base. Good customer relations can also ensure your brand is providing the products or services your market needs.

Analytical and problem-solving skills

Successful entrepreneurs may also have exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills. This is because there can be many aspects of building a brand or business that can require difficult decisions, finding solutions to obstacles.  Using creative thinking to develop plans and strategies that will also help you achieve your business goals.

Critical thinking skills

Critical thinking skills can be necessary for developing your overall entrepreneurial skills. Being able to look at problems, and operations from different perspectives can help in decision-making. Critical thinking skills can also be necessary for strategic planning and evaluating the approaches you’re using to improve your business strategies.

Strategic thinking and planning skills

Critical thinking skills can also translate into strategic thinking skills. Entrepreneurs who have built brands and businesses most likely applied their strategic planning skills to develop strategies for growth. To be successful as an entrepreneur, it takes planning and being able to think strategically. This will allow you to find ways to beat out your competition, and implement effective strategies to reach your goals.

Time management and organizational skills

Time management and organization are also important skills for entrepreneurs to have. Strategies that can help develop these skill sets include to-do lists, and setting achievable objectives for yourself and for your team. Additionally, you might implement technology to help keep business files organized. You can also employ an office assistant to help you keep paperwork, business records and customer files organized.

Branding, marketing and networking skills

Entrepreneurs may spend the majority of their time marketing and networking with other professionals to promote and grow their brands. Being able to implement successful branding and marketing strategies can be an essential aspect of becoming an entrepreneur. You might take a free online course to get started with branding and marketing basics, and you can also meet with other entrepreneurs to help grow your network. As you develop these skill sets, you can increase the successes you see as an entrepreneur. Get in touch to know more!

What You Didn’t Know About Social Media Marketing And Were Afraid to Ask

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This article has been prepared with the understanding that will allow you to build a foundation to serve your brand, your customers and helps achieve your business goals through the proper understanding of social media marketing. Bulleted are practical tools that would help you achieve success in your career as a social media marketer.
  • It’s important to listen to what your target audience is saying
Your social media marketing efforts will be way more effective if you listen more than you talk. Try and understand what your target audience is saying online, join in their discussions to get to know their views and truly feel what’s important to them. These insights will help you create relevant content that is engaging and will allow you to spark conversations that they will want to participate in.
  • Have a speciality and don’t be a jack of all trades
It’s always better to be great at one thing than be just about average in everything. A content marketing and social media strategy that is focused on one thing is known to have a better chance at success than a broader strategy that attempts to focus on everything all at once.
  • Quality is better than quantity
This is the case in real life as well. Quality is always better to have than quantity. On a social media set up, it is better to have 500 fans who share, read and interact with your content, rather than 1.5 million fans who connect with you just once and then disappear.
  • Success on social media doesn’t happen overnight
The process of seeing success on social media happens over time and is not an overnight thing. You need to prepared to commit to the long haul if you want to see lasting results in your campaign.
  • Focus on creating content that sells itself
Relevant content that is engaging and sticky and interests users will work on its own to be shared, commented on, liked and retweeted, by fans and followers. You won’t really have to do much after you create your content to propagate it. If it is valuable enough, your fans will do the needful and share it on their Facebook and Twitter pages, on their blogs and more. This discussion and sharing of your content allow search engines like Google to locate it in keyword searches, thereby offering an SEO perspective o your efforts too. This could snowball into more and more ways for your target audience to find you and interact with you online.
  • Spend time finding the right people to interact with
When you target the correct audience, they are more likely to interact with your set of products and services. There are certain online influencers who you need to locate, who have their own set of loyal followers. Targeting these influencers means acquiring access to their set of followers and widening your follower base too.
The importance and understanding of SMM will allow you to build a foundation that will serve your brand, your customers and helps achieve your business goals. Good Luck!

Are You Blowing Your AdWords Budget?

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Ranking organically in search engine results can be hard work which is why many businesses couple their organic efforts with an AdWords campaign. AdWords is form of PPC (pay per click) advertising which means your ads go straight to the top of the search engine above organic results. However, you have to pay for the privilege so it’s important you spend your budget wisely. As experts in providing PPC services to our clients, we’re here to share common mistakes businesses make with their AdWords budget so you can avoid them in the future.

Setting the budget too high

A lot of businesses start with unrealistic expectations of what they’ll get out of their AdWords campaign and allocate too much money in the first instance. Start small with your budget and then monitor how much your campaign increases your turnover. If it’s working well, you can always allocate more money to the budget.

Not using targeting

There are a number of targeting options available on AdWords and you should take advantage of them to get more bang for your buck so you’re not spending money where you don’t need to. For example, if you provide services in only a certain area, set your location targeting to reflect this. Otherwise, you’ll start popping up all over the internet for users who can’t use your service because they’re not in the right location. If you don’t take advantage of the tracking options offered through AdWords, you’ll have no idea if your money is being spent wisely. Take the time to get to know how tracking works so you can keep an eye on your campaigns. If you find that a particular campaign isn’t working that well, you can pause it and focus on something else. Keeping a close eye on your tracking means that you can make the changes you need to so your budget works hard for you.

Not developing negative keywords

Your negative keywords list on AdWords is a list of keywords that you don’t want your ads showing up for. Take the time to grow your list of negative keywords so you don’t waste money having your ads show up in searches that aren’t actually relevant to your business. For example, if you have a business that provides luxury furniture, you can include phrases such as ‘cheap furniture’ and ‘budget furniture’ in your negative keywords as people who use these search terms won’t be interested in your products.

Linking to the wrong landing page

The whole point of your AdWords campaign is to increase traffic to your website to facilitate conversions. With that in mind, there’s no point spending money on ads which are going to take users to the incorrect landing page. For example, if you advertise a product in your ad, make sure the link takes users directly to that product rather than your homepage. If you need a helping hand with your AdWords management, SEOGHANA can help. We’ll get your AdWords campaign off the ground and continually monitor the results to ensure maximum efficacy for your business. If you’re ready to appear right at the top of the search engine results, call us and we can get you started! For help with all things on PPC click here

5 Ways To Use Facebook To Grow Your E-Commerce Business

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facebook ecommerceThe sheer number of social media users grows every day, and thus, leveraging your social media accounts to garner sales can be very lucrative. However, with each social media network being so unique, it can be difficult to stay on top of all the different methods of marketing your business. With Facebook’s advertising revenue amounting to 26.9 billion US dollars in 2016 alone, it’s obvious that the competition for your consumer’s attention is fierce. So how can you use Facebook to grow your e-commerce business? Before you even start, decide whether or not Facebook is the right social platform to focus your efforts on. Keep in mind that American women and men between the ages of 25 – 54 make up 32% and 29% of Facebook users, respectively. Your target age group should correlate with that of the social platform you spend your marketing dollars on.

Reveal Promotions Or Events Exclusively On Facebook

Sharing the same information across all social media platforms doesn’t give users a reason to check all of your accounts. For example, if a user is prone to use Twitter most of the time, and they know your company posts the same info across all channels, they have no incentive to go to your Facebook page. By designating certain aspects of your business to each social media platform, you can teach your customers to peruse through your multiple social media accounts. You may want to share upcoming in-person events solely on Facebook, while sharing promotions strictly on Twitter. This also allows you to cater information to each platform’s unique audience, making the experience even better for users. If you gather data and analyze your customers’ behaviors, you can really personalize the social media experience by age group. Let’s say you analyze your sales and find that customers over 20 years of age are more likely to use coupons and promo codes, you can then decide to share discounts on platforms like Snapchat, where the user base is much younger.

Share Unique And Timely Content

Of all the social media options, Facebook is a great marketing tool because it doesn’t limit characters or the timeframe that posts appear on your page. Because of this, you can create unique content and share it on your Facebook page, whether it be a links to your company’s blog post or lengthly posts written right onto your page. The more traction you get on your posts the more frequently your posts will appear in your follower’s newsfeeds. Writing unique content that is related to current events is a great way to garner attention and is more likely to be shared. Be sure to keep your page interesting and engaging by incorporating different types of posts. You never want your page to be overly promotional, as that defeats the purpose of social media. You want followers to feel like they are a part of the conversation, and not as though they are looking at an ad. The rule of thirds suggests that the best way to keep users engaged is to ensure your posts fall into one of these three categories in equal frequency:
Share content from the web Promote your own content or product Encourage audience engagement

Target Your Ads

The number one benefit of Facebook is their robust advertising platform. Whether you post to your page regularly or not, I would recommend creating targeted ads and A/B testing to get the most out of your ad spend. You can target your ads based on user’s location, demographics, age, gender, interests, behavior, the list goes on and on. Facebook users like 4.1 million posts every minute, proving that if you can get the right content in front of the right audience, you can obtain massive reach and engagement. It’s easier said than done, of course, but with Facebok’s targeting you can really narrow down who will be exposed to your ad, and therefore, the chances for success are much greater.

Get In Front Of Your Audience With Retargeting Pixel

We’ve all had that feeling when you repeatedly notice a newly learned word or phrase shortly after learning it. All of a sudden it seems to be everywhere. The Facebook retargeting pixel does exactly that, but in a very strategic and productive manner. This is an underutilized, but very powerful tool that works by following your leads around the web. Once someone has visited your site, you can retarget that user with your ad in their newsfeed. In advertising, effective frequency is the number of times a person needs to be exposed to your advertising message before they take action. With retargeting you can ensure users are exposed to your ads enough times that they become familiar with your brand or product. In addition, you can segment your retargeting efforts based on their level of interest. For example, if a customer visits your product page and exits the site, you may want to retarget them differently than someone who places an item in the shopping cart but doesn’t complete their purchase.

Provide Service Through Social

You can provide excellent service and keep in touch with your customers via Facebook live chat right on your website. Depending on which platform your site is built on, you can get this feature through an extension, plug in, or an app. Since Facebook chat is reliable and has proven to handle a very large audience, this can be a better option that installing any other third party extension. Not to mention, majority of people are already familiar with how it works, and it doesn’t have any costs associated with it or any limits to how many people you can chat with at once. A lot of other extensions don’t offer this level of flexibility in their free versions. This not only gives customers the option of chatting with you if they have a product or service question, but also promotes your Facebook page inadvertently. Once the customer is chatting with you, they are more likely to check out your Facebook page and either follow or engage. Jia is the CEO and Founder of Studio 15, a socially responsible fashion brand. Follow her on Twitter @JiaWertz and LinkedIn | Source:forbes