Building your own business requires a set of skills to set the right structure’s base to build upon it.
Having said that, you need to understand what’s the actual definitions of how the business gets structured.
Terms like “Business Model”, “Revenue Model”, and “Marketing Model” among other professional terms can sound so overwhelming to you at the beginning.
Those terms are actually the conclusion of very long and in-depth research and experiences of professionals and scientists.
Using professional marketing and disciplines help you manage and run your business towards success.
You might find yourself applying a lot of professional marketing, business rules, and disciplines without even knowing it, that’s because they are all intuitive.
At the beginning of starting your own business, you might feel like you don’t need all those disciplines to apply and you can naturally run it, but as I mentioned, the solid business base structure you build the more successful business you will run later on.
In the next few chapters, starting with modeling your marketing efforts will be introduced to you, but before so, let’s start with a gentle introduction to marketing.
Definition of Marketing:
Marketing has a lot of definitions, starting from the activities involved in creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings of a value to a customer at a profit.
That’s just one of the definitions among a ton of them, but marketing at its core is actually everything.
Marketing is not just promoting and advertising your product or service, it starts with how you treat your employees and clients, it can even be applied to a job interview.
Building your startup:
Starting your own business is a continuously evolving process, starting with the idea of your business, to delivering the final product or service.
That includes hiring, renting an office, planning the execution of the offering delivery, and a lot more.
Since we are living in a digital era, the one common factor of all businesses is the online presence of the business.
Online representation of a business:
The online presence of your startup is crucial for communicating with your clients and promoting your brand.
However, some mistaken understanding of the online business’s representation can always be found with rookies.
For instance, when you ask a business owner about their brand website and they send you a Facebook page back, that’s totally wrong, a Facebook page is never a business website, it’s just one of the online channels that can be used to communicate and promote your brand.
Facebook page can’t be considered as something you own and trade as it eventually belongs to Facebook itself.
Your website is what you really own and trade online, but the question is “Do I need to build a website for my business?”
Answering that question requires a deeper in-depth thinking of how you are going to communicate and deliver your product or services.
For instance, if you are selling a set of products, and your customers may need to search or navigate through the products in a categorized way, then definitely a website is crucial.
There are a ton of situations where a website can become so handy to help to deliver a good experience to your customers to delight and keep arising customers loyalty, like:
- Selling your products online (E-commerce)
- Accepting online payment for your services
- Showcase your past projects and case studies
- Easier navigation and search for your product and services
- Better communication with your customers
These benefits are just a small set of what you can get from having a website for your business.
However, having a Facebook page still can be crucial for your business as well.
And not just a Facebook page to be built to represent your business, you should build a page/group for your startup on all the online social communities that you expect your customers to be on.
Each social community has a different type of audience, for instance:
LinkedIn:
You can find almost any corporate having an online page on LinkedIn, and it has an obvious online business environment, as nearly most of its users are either employees of a company or owns a business and discussing business related matters on the platform.
Even the ads found on LinkedIn have the same business-oriented promotion.
You can find both B2B and B2C related discussion or ads, as the platform can be used if your offering is meant to be sold to another business or an end user the same way.
However, most of the cases I have used LinkedIn for was B2B.
Facebook:
You can find nearly anyone with all types of interests and ages; however, Facebook users tend to be of younger ages around the 20s and 30s.
And obviously not a business-oriented platform, however it has an incredible use for B2C businesses.
Twitter:
It’s a huge mix of ages and interests and mostly used for small sized public messages of 280 characters which previously was just 140.
You still can find business owners and celebrities on it, most Twitter users are from the USA, for Arabs you can find a huge fan base from the Arab Gulf.
Instagram:
Pretty much similar to Facebook, matter fact it’s owned by Facebook.
It can be considered as an online community for images if your products or services can have a visual representation and your business is a B2C, then Instagram is very crucial to you.
Pinterest:
Most of its fanbase is from the USA and mostly females.
If you offer a product or services for females then Pinterest is a huge channel for you to communicate with your customers.
You can make use of all types of visual representations, especially infographics.
Conclusion
Studying and knowing more about business and marketing is crucial for building a successful and stable business.
Knowledge alone won’t help you, practicing why you learn is the only way to make it work.
Business and marketing terms can be overwhelming at the beginning, but it was all researched and disciplined by a set of professionals and solid experiences, that’s not just academic, but practical at its core.
Online representation is crucial for any business, so you need to decide whether or not to have a website, it’s important for your business, and also which social community to use for communicating with your customers is crucial as well.
Understanding business and marketing disciplines helps you knowing who your customers are and how to communicate with them, that involves every single step and decision you take in running and building your business and that’s how important these disciplines are.
