Top Reasons Why Startups Fail

There is little doubt in the fact that launching a startup is an uphill task. Making it successful is another story altogether. Startups are considered to be responsible for changing the face of technology. There have been countless stories around us which narrate tales of inspiration and the journey to achieving astounding success.

However, scores of startups have closed their shutters and have been razed to the ground. Statistics reveal that nine out of ten startups fail. Why do startups fail? Here are some interesting reasons outlining the prominent reasons for the failure of startups. They need to work harder and smarter.

Lack of new ideas

In any business, new and innovative ideas are the backbone of making it successful. An extensive research of the present scenario of your target marketplace needs to be done in advance in order to mark an impactful presence. The prospects, current conditions and the possibility of how well your ideas can change the existing scenario-everything needs to be analyzed and well planned.

Working with a vision for the future becomes quite essential in this ever changing world. Ignoring the market realities can put your hard work and efforts in jeopardy. Analyze and envision the future for introducing and applying your new ideas within your niche. Bring unique ideas to the table for bringing about a major change.

A lot many times, startups run into major breakdowns due to the fact that they find little or no market at all for the product/service they launched. It can also happen that the market is years ahead or behind your perception and the market conditions are not yet prepared for receiving it for making it successful.

Financial Issues

Setting aside money to run your business is a sensible thing to do. Making provision for this type of arrangement for minimum one year is ideal. This should include the money required for paying worker’s salaries, operating expenditures etc. It will ensure that the company stays active for the first year without any money problems.

The fact is that for the first year, a majority of startups don’t make much. Huge profits start to accumulate only after few years of starting out. Even if you have to borrow money from a bank in the form of loans, make it minimal to avoid that gloomy feeling in the beginning. Avoid the blunder of going into a spending spree. Finances should be properly tracked and managed sensibly and put into control appropriately. Do not hit the accelerator pedal when it comes to spending. Set the pedal lightly and conserve your cash wisely for avoiding fast burnout.

Team not up to the mark

The top management team has to coordinate with the rest of the team to produce spellbound results and to remain on the path of steady growth for the company. You need experienced and talented people. A balanced team with the right set of people is required. If team members lack coordination and there is a lack of understanding amongst them, it can be a major cause of discontent and result in sluggish growth.

In fact, in many organizations, management teams fall apart and just don’t get along well with each other. Weak management teams fall short of new ideas and they seldom work with unity. Weak strategy building is a lacuna for idea generation. If the product doesn’t get launched on time and has flaws which still need to be sorted out, it leads to poorly managed implementation and execution.

Lack of Marketing Efforts

Never treat the sales and marketing domain as something of secondary importance. Tracing history, the fact is that there have been brilliant products which miserably failed in the market due to poorly planned sales efforts or a sluggish sales team. Many startups lack the knowledge or vision to market their products well so that people are informed about their presence in the market. Therefore, focusing on building a strong sales team and investing in your marketing efforts should be given prime importance. Weak marketing and sales efforts can be one of the reasons for avoiding catastrophic failure.

Failed Connections/Poor Networking

Entrepreneurs also tend to complain about their lack of networking and having a well-connected network of people within their industry. Failing to build new connections is a must while building new connections through old ones is surely a talent and it is not very difficult, though it is quite productive. Sometimes startups fail to recognize the potential of their own existing network.

Another good way of building networking for creating an identity of your product in the market is by using services of PR agencies. Since such agencies already have a relationship with major media outlets and high authority blogs within the industry, they could prove to be a great asset in promoting your voice about your startup. It’s worth investing a bit on few of them for effective results in the future.  

How to Use Twitter Lists more Effectively in Marketing

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world today.  It is a microblogging platform where people go to keep up with the latest trends. Want to use Twitter for your business? Twitter offers many great features for businesses to help in promoting their products and services. You can use the available features to find your target audience and monitor them easily in an organized way.

A Twitter list will help you in categorizing all the people whom you follow in an efficient and useful way by assigning them in groups. It is a great way to organize your Twitter feed. A great advantage is that lists act as filters in enabling you to be able to view only the public tweets by people who fall within your selected groups based on specific criteria.

How will you create a Twitter list?

Here is how you can create your own list:

Click on your Profile Image and now click on ‘Lists’.

Click on ‘Create List’

Enter the name of the list and relevant description associated with it. Select ’Public’ or ‘Private’ as per your choice. Your selection will determine whether you would want to make your list visible to others or not.

Now start adding people to your list by searching for their names. Click the button which you see next to ‘Follow’ and now select ‘Add or Remove from List’ option.  Wow! You now have your own Twitter List. Here are some creative ways you can use them for your business:

Get connected to the Industry Leaders

You can create a separate list to engage and interact with veterans, experts and leaders within your niche. Start following the leaders within your domain.  This will give you a wonderful opportunity to add value to your Twitter account. Monitor their activities and tweets. Continue to retweet the most important ones, while also mentioning them frequently within your tweets.

Keep up with the latest trends

One of the most frequent uses of Twitter is to keep up with the latest trends. Creating lists is a great way to methodically go around and to stay organized. Doing this will prevent you from getting distracted by irrelevant tweets and the ones which are not useful for you.  Adding all the top and relevant news websites which are the first ones to announce breaking news should be your top contenders. Besides those, don’t miss out adding the ones which are unique websites with a different style so that you have an assorted list.

Create a Competitor List

Keeping an eye on your competitor tweets and monitoring them is surely a healthy sign and quite important for your awareness. Observe their tweets, their scoops, updates and the type of messages they give out to their audience. Staying on top of all this will be of great value for you. Preferably, don’t make your competitor list public. Use these observations and improve your own long term Twitter strategy.

Customer Relationships

As soon as you add someone to a list, (for instance, customers), they are notified and this lets them know that they are appreciated for their business. When any customer mentions you in a tweet, respond to them. A wonderful thing about using various social media channels, like Twitter is that they let you get closely communicate with your customers- the lifeline of your business.

You can interact with your customers by replying to their queries, comments or questions addressed to you. In fact, by offering special promotional discounts occasionally and responding to your customers, you let them know that you value them and care about them.

Create Lists for Events

Are you planning to attend a conference, professional event or a seminar? In such a situation, you can create an event-specific Twitter list so that you can include all those names that you met during the event. This will enable you to get in touch with them after the event too for continuing your professional association.

Secondly, in case you are one of the organizers, you can also create an event list separately with the names of all speakers and attendees for the function beforehand so that they will get an opportunity to interact with each other on Twitter and get connected with each other.

Resources for your followers

Private lists could be for your own personal use; however, you can create some public lists which can prove to be quite useful for your followers. Besides giving significance to what is valuable to you, give preference to all of what is valuable to them too. Offering selected lists for them containing the right resources will help in getting you further appreciated and they will look up to you as a symbol of authority within your niche. 

Facts you didn’t know about Facebook Ads

Social media is an indispensable ingredient of our digital space today. Would you want to leverage the power of social media, especially the most popular social media platform like Facebook to create conversions and increase revenue for your company? If your answer is “yes” about all of this, you should harness the effectiveness of Facebook Ads for promoting your products and services. Here are some of the facts you need to know regarding Facebook Advertising which can be used by your brand for bringing about great results and reaching more people.

            

Using Audience Insights

Utilizing data from Audience Insights along with conversion data can indeed prove to be a great source of information for any Facebook campaign. The advantage in using info from this feature is that it helps in targeting prospects based on various characteristics including demography, behaviors, income etc. Besides these, discovering new ways to communicate with users will help in reaching the right targeted audience and increase the overall reach.

Facebook offers Click to Chat Features

This feature is not new, but definitely is one of the least used functions available in Facebook Ads. It is usually meant for those customers who have already visited a website and want to further clarify or might have few questions before making the actual purchase. Click to chat is an awesome feature from customer service perspective.

Pre-selected Similar Targeting Option

When this feature is selected before you run the Facebook ad, it will target the ad to those people who have same choices, interests, demographics etc. as the people for whom the original ad was created for. This is immensely useful as you could reach more customers and garner more conversions paying the same price as the original ad.

Amount of Text in the Image Ads also Matters

The reality is that the amount of text influences the effectiveness of your ad. The more text you will include in your image, the lower will be the delivery of the ad which you created on Facebook. Basically, Facebook prefers those ads which don’t have much text and such ads bring about lower cost per impression. Facebook also labels the images as ok, low, medium and high on the basis of image text ratio.

Do not Rely on Video Ads alone

In case you want to generate majority of conversions by using video ads, Facebook is not the relevant platform for doing that. Lead conversions by using video ads are comparatively less compared to the conventional image ads. They might generate audience interest and you can get a lot of likes and comments, however, when it comes to the website clicks, the numbers are not much.

Facebook issues you a ‘Relevance score’ for every Ad you Publish

The ‘Relevance score’ given by Facebook to each ad is an important criteria which indicates how well your ad is being received by the target audience and how relevant your ad is. It is based on a number of factors including the engagement of the intended audience, keywords etc. The relevant score ranges from 1 to 10 which means that if the ad is given a score of 1, Facebook considers it as irrelevant and if the score is 10, the ad is highly relevant.

Bid will Vary

It is critical to understand that the bidding on Facebook varies greatly with time. Since Facebook is extremely sensitive to marketplace changes, it is quite natural to assume that there will be a lot of variations and a monotonous strategy applied will not be effective every time in your Facebook ad campaigns. A bid effective today might not work tomorrow or even hours from now. The solution is simple: constantly continue updating/customizing your bids and strategies as you go along while creating your campaigns. 

Significance of Social Media for Businesses

The importance of digital marketing in today’s technology world cannot be underestimated. For businesses to grow and prosper, they require reaching out to customers worldwide. Since a majority of people are online, the requirement of reaching out to them over the Internet is inevitable. Social Media has played a significant role in achieving new heights for businesses.  

Brand building and increasing of conversions is quite crucial for every company. Here are some of the rock solid reasons which make it worthwhile for businesses to incorporate social media strategy as a part of their marketing strategy. It has been statistically observed that about 85% of the businesses which started using social media channels as one of their marketing tools saw an increase in their revenues. 

Tells the story of your brand

People of all age groups visit top social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for socializing and knowing more about products/services. Social Media is one of the best tools for connecting with people. Businesses can convert their visitors into prospects and prospects into clients by increasing audience engagement on their website and on social media accounts.

Geographical boundaries

By using social media, you can reach in any part of the world. There are no geographical barriers which can prevent you in promoting your products and services anywhere on the globe. This is a big advantage with social media as you are no longer tied to the obstacles which you might face while promoting your product across different countries. A majority of people spend their time online and anyone who has an online presence can be targeted, which gives you a great opportunity to serve customers from all parts of the world.

Cost friendliness

Social Media promotion is also quite convenient, hassle free and cost effective for businesses compared to sticking to the traditional marketing techniques, such as print and media. Saving money is a significant factor for companies, especially startups which are still going through struggling days of building and establishing their business.

Improves your SEO

Search engines place a lot of significance to frequency and quality of posts. Frequent and quality content is also one of the most important ranking factors on search engines. Search engine crawlers do recognize that which pages are garnering targeted traffic and the ones which merely exist. A well planned and effective content strategy for posting on social media platforms is quite significant for securing top positions on the SERP.

Growing of Community

By creating a strong social presence on social media helps the growth of fans, followers and brand advocates for your business. Being online for people ultimately gives them a feeling of being a part of a community or a group. People who play the role of a cheerleader or a promoter of your products makes a significant difference for the brand. Community strength is a very powerful branding force. You can create valuable leads and generate revenue by fostering a community.

Two-way communication is essential

By using traditional marketing techniques, businesses spend their marketing budget on various methods, such as brochures, fliers and publishing ads in publications. This kind of marketing provides a one-way communication for businesses. With the advent of the Internet age, social media became increasingly popular amongst all age groups of people.

A great advantage in case of social media is that it creates two-way communication between the business and their target audience. Feedback is something which gives businesses the opportunity to grow and to assess whether they are heading in the right direction. Using various social media techniques gives organizations an opportunity to know the opinions and suggestions of their audience and in fact, they are able to directly interact with them online.

Social Media posts drive targeted traffic

Well-placed social media posts with relevant, interesting and original content makes all the difference. When you post quality content which appeals to your targeted audience, it increases the number of visitors and drives more traffic for your website.

Real time targeted ads

Besides being an inexpensive way of promoting your products out there, social media also offers the option of creating and floating paid ads. This is meant for promotion and distribution to reach out to the right audience who are looking for the kind of products/services you offer. Each social media platform has different segments by various demographic, interests, behaviors and social characteristics for reaching the right audience.

Find out about your competitors

With social media monitoring, you can found out valuable information regarding your major competitors. This will enable you to make strategic decisions in order to outshine them, which is good for you in the long run. Based on your competitors, you can improve the business in order to offer enhancements, improvements or additional content that might be missing otherwise and incorporating all those required tweaks in the strategies.