When you're a female entrepreneur, it can feel like the odds are stacked against you from the start. That’s because as much as we might wish it was otherwise, we continue to live in a male-dominated society, with only 27 percent of small business and franchise owners being female.
Source: Pixabay
Despite this rather shocking statistic, however, things are on the up for the commercial sphere’s leading ladies. While we may be outnumbered, our presence has risen by an impressive four percent in the space of a single year according to the same source, which means the scales are slowly becoming more evenly weighted.
One way we as individuals can contribute toward this incredibly positive trend is by making our ventures a success, and there are plenty of strategies to help us do this. Some of them you might already practice; others may never even have occurred to you.
With this in mind, here are our three top tips to turn your business into the most phenomenal success, because when you succeed, we all do.
When it comes to building a successful business, it’s hard to overstate the importance of location. While this is something online companies don’t have to concern themselves with, those who require a bricks-and-mortar presence to complement their internet offerings need to choose their spot with care – even if this means relocating.
There are two primary factors you need to take into consideration: economy and foot traffic, and it’s about finding the right balance. This means that while anywhere you choose needs to be within budget, you also have to remember that paying more for a prime spot in a busy city centre will almost certainly deliver a greater monetary reward than a rundown establishment in a rougher area.
On the subject of location, it’s also important to know your audience, and we say this for a number of reasons. Firstly, understanding who you wish to appeal to is essential if you want to find the perfect spot for your business, as you ought to set up in an area that your primary clientele will frequent. This means, for example, that while a pet shop may do well in a more rural setting where dog ownership is high, a tech enterprise is less likely to thrive away from a busy town centre.
Secondly, knowing your audience will help you to funnel your resources with regards to targeted marketing. You can conduct this through a number of channels, but we’ll use Facebook advertising as an example. If you know where your audience is likely to be located, you can target your ads at people who live within this area, as well as trying to appeal to them on the basis of various other criteria, from their age to their gender and even their interests.
Furthermore, the importance of knowing your audience also makes it vital to properly utilise the data you have available to you, on both customers and also business contacts. As a business, you’re likely to have collected more of this than you realise, through social channels etc, and this can be used to inform your marketing strategies and so on, so that you’re able to make the best possible use of your resources.
However, the sheer amount of data available to you online makes sifting through it manually nigh on impossible, so it’s a good idea to invest in software like the B2B browser extension available from Lusha. What this does is give you an insight into everything that's important about prospective or existing business contacts, and scans their profile so you can access all their correct contact information - so there's no wasting time chasing dead leads!
While this particular example is primarily targeted at B2B businesses, to help them source and organise client data, similar tech exists for B2C companies too, so there’s sure to be something helpful out there for anyone who needs it.
What such tools allow you to do, essentially, is to note who you should be targeting so that you can make your marketing efforts both more personal and more successful.
When it comes to ensuring that your business turns a profit, there are three primary ways in which you can do this: by carefully selecting the perfect location, by understanding your audience, and by taking advantage of your data to develop a more targeted marketing and networking strategy.
Manage to achieve all of this, and there’s no reason at all why your enterprise can’t become one of the many inspirational stories out there, setting an amazing example to every young girl who dreams of owning her own company and becoming just like you.