What Do Small Businesses Struggle With?

Small Business Challenges Explained: Most people dream of having their own business. Some of them even open their own startups and work hard to get them up and running. By the way, running a business is not easy, especially in the first few years. The initial few years are important for every business because they have to face a lot of challenges and overcome every struggle that comes their way. 

An entrepreneur’s life is full of struggles, and one should not feel that he is the only one who is going through all these things. You should know that not only the owners of small businesses but also the founders of large corporations face such problems all the time.

In order to address the challenges, one has to first understand them. Let’s discuss some of the major and common challenges that every small business or startup faces. 

Top 8 Challenges Every Small Business Face

1. Finding Potential Customers

Not only small businesses & startups face this problem. Even the biggest and successful companies work hard every single day to find new customers. And the ones who are not even a household name need to work even harder and should know everything about reaching out to potential customers. You should know the demographics of your target audience, their favorite social media channels on which they spend most of their time, and their buying platforms. Build your buyer personas and start getting in contact with them.  

2. Brand Awareness & Recognition

The major challenge that every business faces is not getting much sales. Many business founders complain that they get huge traffic but not get potential customers. The only reason behind this is that they do not target customers strategically and of the right demographics. You can also make your brand a household name by following these things:

Blogging: Constantly publishing high-quality blogs on your website and on others (with huge traffic, high Domain authority & Page authority) can help you drive people to your platform and generate potential leads. Make sure you choose websites that can help you reach your potential audience. 

Campaigns: Running Google Ads, PPC campaigns, social media campaigns can help you reach out to your target audience. This way Google will help you get your brand to those people who are interested to get your goods/services from any corner of the world. 

Co-marketing: You can partner with other brands in the market that are successful. By doing so, you can gain a large volume of customers, as well as your brand will be recognized by more people. It is one of the best techniques to build a high volume of customers along with your organic marketing efforts.

3. Leads Generation

Many businesses share one most common small business challenge that is converting website users into prospective customers. To make your website good enough to turn prospects into potential leads, you need to optimize it for conversions. Check your website and see if it has the following things:

• Does your website provide a clear guide to users to take further actions? 
• Have you created proper landing pages for each campaign? 
• Does your website have CTAs (Call to action) on specific places such as the contact page, blog posts, the home page, etc.? 

You should implement the right conversion tools on the page (s) where you want to attract huge traffic such as:

• A Pop-Up
• Hello bars
• Slide-ins

4. Hiring Skilled People

A team of highly professional and talented people can take a business to the next level. But if you hire less experienced people to cut the labor cost then this may drop your level. 

Hiring is a complex, tedious, and expensive process. But it is always great to hire the best than average even if it takes a longer time. Just like a buyer persona, you should create a candidate persona for different job opportunities so as to hire the perfect candidate for your organization.  

5. Managing Organization’s Workflow

One major point that keeps the business growing continuously is the organization’s workflow. As a leader, it is your duty to ensure that your team has all the processes and tools to do good work in an efficient manner. The best way is to first recognize the roadblocks and overcome them. 

• You should conduct employee satisfaction surveys. 
• You should take feedback from employees in regular intervals. 
• You should conduct one-on-one meetings with direct reports. 
• You should conduct meetings with all teams together to know their ideas. 

6. Financial Planning

Running a proper business needs the availability of all required resources and tools to increase efficiency and quality. But we cannot neglect the factor that budget restriction is always a big challenge for the owners. Improving efficiency while working with limited resources can be achieved by making effective decisions based on solid financial planning. 

Each business is different from others and you should use your business credit wisely, cut the costs wherever possible, and manage the cash flow mindfully. It can be done by staying above the invoices and bookkeeping. You can take help from business accountants & financial advisors. 

7. Access to New Technology

When new technology is introduced, it can be expensive to implement in the existing system. A small business may not have the financial or technical resources to take advantage of new technology that a larger company may have, and this puts the small business at a different disadvantage in the market. For instance, a new technique for manufacturing can help an established business to produce products faster and more efficiently than a small business, and this can give the big business an opportunity to capture more market share.

8. Time Management

Small business owners perform many tasks that can take time in their daily schedule. Entrepreneurs often find it difficult to balance a schedule that involves sales and marketing activities, financing, product development, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and business development. In that case, you should take advice from experts.

If you want to be a successful business owner such as LeCiel Technologies, you should know about the tactics and tools they use. Moreover, you can take marketing, financial advice from the experts in our company. To learn more you can call us at  1-888-664-8126.