4 Ways to Get Traction for Your Small Business

It is easy to start a business these days.

With just a click of the button, you can get your dream off the ground running in minutes.

But the main challenge is that majority of these new businesses will fail.

According to this statistics, 90% of businesses fail because they could not get users for their product.

This means that the number one reasons businesses fail is simply because they could not get traction for their business.

Today, I am going to share my 4 go to strategy with you when you are a startup, have little to no funding and want to get traction for your small business.

Before we dive in, let us quickly discuss what traction means.

What is Startup Traction?

Startup traction is described as having a number of users who continue to use your product.

Getting Traction for your small business is important if you want to scale and achieve product market fit.

Product market fit is when you have a set of users that find your product or services valuable such that they pay for it.

Now that we have gotten the definition out of the way, what traction channel can a small business with tons of budget use to grow their business?

4 Effective Ways to Get Traction for Your Small Business

1.      Content Production

2.      SEO

3.      Event Marketing

4.      Community Building

1: Content Marketing

One major strategy to quickly get traction for your small business is to educate and entertain your customers. Content can take the form of written content, visual content or audio content.

While a lot of businesses have gotten on the bandwagon of generating content for their business, they have failed to see result from implementing this strategy.

The major reason for this is simply because, businesses are producing content that they want to talk about and not content that their audience are seeking for.

The secret to generating and creating content for small business that can help drive leads and growth for your business is to divide your content production into three forms.

·        Content that supports the business. We call this bottom of funnel content

·        Content that educate the customer

·        Content that drives authority or establishes the business as an authority in their industry. An example is this article

The frequency of publishing does not really matter when it comes to publishing content or what is generally referred to as blogging.

Once you can nail the right type of content to create that takes to customer as they go through the customer journey, then you are fine. However producing one piece of content a year is not going to cut it. Quality and quantity needs to be balanced.

2: SEO

Search Engine optimization or SEO as it is popularly called is one of the most important traction channel for business who are seeking to generate redundant leads MOM. Search Engine Optimization is described as the process of improving the visibility of a website on a search engine such as Google.

SEO is attractive to most startups and small businesses because it usually creates a level playing field for brands who want to dominate their industry and as long as people are turning to search engines to look for solutions to their problems, this acquisition channel will continue to remain attractive.

While SEO can be quite attractive, a lot of people often fail into the trap of thinking that SEO is an 100 meter dash.

SEO requires long term planning so it is important that as a startup who is considering SEO, you need to get started early enough.

3: Event Marketing

Another strategy to leverage is you want to really scale your small business fast is to leverage event marketing.

As a small startup, you can identify your core audience and then create an annual, quarterly or monthly event.

This strategy has been used by major business such as Tinder, the dating app, and a host of other startups.

One thing about event marketing that makes it attractive is that you don’t have to organize the event alone and the event does not have to cost a lot.

You can partner up with other people organizing event and become a major sponsor. One such place to find such events is to use meetup.com

Meetup is a service used to organize online groups that host in-person events for people with similar interests. You can search by industry and then join one or create one if none exist for your vertical.

4: Community Building

While there are numerous other ways by which you can attract website visitors to your business, building a community around your product or business is one strategy that I have found to work very well. 

For example, if you run an ecommerce website , one way we are building our community is that we created a Facebook group for our customers where we share information with regards to our business and give other forms of discount deals that is only available for members.

Any business can scale this method. If you have the bandwidth, you can build the community on your own website or leverage other platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn that already have an ability to get this started fast.

Conclusion:

Before someone can become a customer, they need to find your website. Website visitors go through what is known as customer journey which is a marketing funnel.

Building traction is usually the first stage and therefore important that you understand how to do this early enough if you want to grow.

Remember the one singular reason why most small businesses and startup fail is not because of bad product but poor distribution.