Setting up and running a small business requires a whole bunch of skills – some of which you may not have learned – yet!
You’ll need to be able to:
- Strategise
- Plan
- Organise
- Manage the money
- Market
- Purchase the materials your business needs
- Sell
- Write copy
- Negotiate
- Deliver customer service
- Do research
- Understand statistics
… and that’s just for starters.
You have three choices – do everything yourself, hire staff with the necessary skills to do the work or outsource to specialists.
However, the responsibility for getting all of these right is still yours. And, if you’re not doing it yourself, it means you have to communicate your vision and who you’re providing the services/products to clearly to those who will be doing the work.
This is tough – even for long-established businesses as you have to see your business through the eyes of your customer to really achieve success. If you don’t know what they want, what their problems are, how your offering helps – removing pain and./or adding gain – how can you educate your staff or suppliers?
As a copywriter it’s the core of every piece of work I do for clients. Who am I writing for? Not the business owner – because the content I write isn’t for them, it’s for their potential customer. If I don’t know who that is the message isn’t going to be on target. And that applies to every aspect of your business.
Standing in your customer’s shoes
Everything you deliver gets better when you really understand your customer. In relation to what you can help them with:
- What worries them about the issue?
- How important is this particular issue to them?
- What do they hate doing that your product or service could help with?
- What are the long-term outcomes for them if they carry on with things the way they are now?
- What would be different if they had your solution in place?
To understand your customer you need to get inside their heads and dig about!
The result for you is that everything you offer is highly targeted to their wants – and they get a service nobody else matches.
