If your business has been struggling with growth, your dilemma could be a result of early business mistakes. Myriad companies don't experience significant growth because of poor market conditions or bad business initiatives.
What lapses could be holding your business down? And how do you tackle those issues?
To make sure all your efforts are yielding decent results, you should be looking inwards and identifying where you're likely to be hindering the growth of your business. Then make the proper amendments to experience growth.
Here are four of the most common but yet overlooked business practices that can negatively impact the growth of your business.
1. Not Thinking Through Your Branding
Your brand is the most valuable standalone aspect of your business. Not getting your branding right from the onset will set you up for growth struggles in the long term. From your logo design to the color you choose to be known by, your brand is how customers and users perceive you.
In regards to branding, most businesses lack consistency. Being inconsistent with your brand can widen the trust gap between your business and customers. Some 60% of Millennials expect consistency with a brand, whether online, on mobile or in-store, according to statistics from SLD.
Take a look at where you could be going wrong with your brand.
- Business name. The name you choose to call your business will determine how memorable your brand becomes among users. To make your company name resonate more with your consumers, use a highly brandable name consistent with your registered company name, in apps, and on your website.
- Feel and appeal. The feel and appeal your customers get from your brand can be affected by how your logo is designed. Choosing the wrong color for your logo and a poor website design can make your customers avoid making a purchase from your site. To correct this, study what psychological effects every color has on people before deciding to use it for your logo design.
2. Not Qualifying Your Web-Host Requirements
Having a website that doesn't perform well (or worse, not having a website) may be costing you customers.
Many people just register their businesses with the very first Web-hosting provider they stumble upon, without doing proper diligence to find out whether the hosting provider is right for them.
Not qualifying your Web-hosting requirements before going ahead to register with a hosting provider is one of the biggest business mistakes you can make today.
Your Web host will affect your business in the following areas:
- Website load time. How fast your website loads is the most important factor. Some 40% of Web users leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If 40% of the people that want to know about your business move to other places because your website is slow, the cost of this on your bottom line could be significant.
- SEO. Your Web host can affect your site's SEO performance. Factors like site uptime and downtime, server location, and site speed all have an impact on your search rankings. You want to make sure your website is hosted with a provider that can guarantee a 100% uptime.
3. Giving Up Control of Your Marketing Efforts
Certain areas of your marketing strategy can all be outsourced. But as a business owner, you should be involved in every aspect that concerns how your business is portrayed.
Avoid going MIA once you've delegated critical aspects of your marketing to a third party. Keeping in touch with the marketing company to get regular updates on areas where its team might need approvals or recommendations from you is a valuable way of taking the reins while others are executing your plans.
4. Not Documenting Your Growth Strategy
A great benefit of strategy documentation, whether for your content marketing or overall business strategy, is that it helps you avoid a lot of problems.
Sometimes, keeping documented marketing strategy is like maintaining a journal. When you go through it, you quickly identify what was done to get to where you are. Without proper documentation, you're bound to repeat a mistake several times over.
In your business, how much emphasis is being laid on documentation?
Some main advantages of growth strategy documentation are...
- Helps identify your winning formula
- Gives you a guideline on how to respond to future trends
- Helps you achieve a sense of effectiveness on your strategy
