by Whether you are setting up a new business or are already an entrepreneur, keeping up with the latest technology to suffice market demands is quite challenging. One thing that you should never overlook is your skill set which will definitely help you touch the goals that you have set f or your business.
An entrepreneur refers to someone who builds or operates their own business. By having an equity stake in the firm, the entrepreneur can enjoy a great deal of profit if things go well; but, they also take on a great deal of risk far more than a regular employee of the business. This entrepreneurial risk can take several forms, including financial risk, career risk, emotional risk, or overall business risk.
Since there is so much at stake when it comes to starting and growing a successful business, there are very specific skills that an entrepreneur usually needs to be successful. Below, we highlight five such attributes.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of turning more website visitors into customers. The goal, basically, is more sales and revenue. The better your website can encourage users to take a specific action, the greater your business will grow.
Since the bulk of modern businesses do marketing online, this skill is one of the highest-ROI tactics in your marketing arsenal.
The full array of CRO tactics is complex, but the principles are easy to grasp. First, you must have a solid understanding of your customer. Second, you should be able to work with your existing data for some actionable tactics. Then, you run split tests to find out which variation converts more visitors.
From that point, you can interpret test results, make changes, and iterate even more tests.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Far from being dead, SEO is alive and well and more important than ever.
It’s important because it’s easy to veer into one of two extremes. Extreme one is neglecting SEO. Some marketers think that ignoring SEO is the best approach because the algorithms are smart enough to figure out what your site is all about and how to get users to find it. This is incorrect, since targeting user intent and optimizing a site’s technical SEO are still crucial to online success.
The second extreme is doing SEO wrong. Old-school SEO tactics will put your website in the penalty box, preventing users from even being able to find your website.
Knowing the essentials of SEO and acting on them is integral to a modern business’s online success.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing has been around for a long time, but it’s taken off in the last five years in ways that no one anticipated.
Content marketing is a $200+ billion dollar industry, and growing. There are no signs of decline. For modern entrepreneurs to succeed, they must learn to embrace and advance this marketing method.
- User Experience
Also known as UX or UXD, user experience is “the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.”
User experience is at the heart of SEO, CRO, and content marketing. If you can learn the why and how of user experience, you can drive your business to new levels of success.
Facebook, Uber, Slack, and many of the other silicon valley unicorns have achieved their remarkable growth, in part, from a powerful UX strategy. UX is far too important to ignore.
- Email Marketing
An emphasis on email marketing may sound like a blast from the 2005 past, but here’s the thing: Email marketing remains one of the most effective forms of marketing available.
One of the reasons email marketing is still massively successful is due to the rise of mobile. Take your own experience as an example. How do you interact with many of the messages you receive on a daily basis?
Successful businesses know how to combine content marketing methods with growing an email list, with split testing, and with user experience to engineer powerful marketing methods.
- Social media
Hopefully, you’re familiar with the basics of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Since most of us are already part of these social networks, we’ve shortened the learning curve. When it comes to monetizing these social networks, however, there’s still some ground to be gained.
Social media isn’t going away, even if its algorithms and methods change on a weekly basis. It behooves entrepreneurs to know its power and potential.
- Writing
Some of the best entrepreneurs I know are also great writers.
Why do entrepreneurial success and great writing ability go hand in hand? Part of it is the sheer marketing power. Creating great content generates loyal customers. Another benefit of great writing is the ability to think analytically and creatively.
Entrepreneurs will always be writing business plans, emails, proposals, headlines, and guest articles. Improving this skill can benefit you in untold ways.
