Do you have numerous business ideas to launch but you’re scared someone somewhere will be planning the same or have implemented your idea? Are you a small business owner with the prospect of becoming a big corporation or an artisan likely to become the mover of big service provision companies in the near future? Irrespective of what or where you are at, it is important you take the leap by grabbing the bull by the horn to join in the economic development and enrich your life.

When starting up a new business or scaling up a small one for more customer awareness and profit, there are key strategies you need to apply and a match-up with your vision. These strategies will help you rule the big space as a small business. Business listening is also essential — you should pay attention to what big businesses in your niche are doing; especially in areas like branding, advertisement, customer engagement, acquisition, and retention.

Adopting strategies by big companies might appear overwhelming or exorbitant, but when you develop the strategy and plug it into the sizeable budget of your small business, the difference will be worthwhile. According to CB Insights Analysis of some startups, 42% of small businesses fail because there’s no market need for their services/ products. Congratulations you’re a step ahead in this regard if not, endeavor to conduct market research and give your business an edge. 29% of these startups failed because they ran out of cash — we lost over $2,000 in our first business because we weren’t making enough money to continue operation.

That said, here are four simple strategies to remain firm in your niche market and lead in your industry even if you’re just starting out in your small business.

* Creating niche focused products.

* Delighting your customers.

* Adopt an effective inbound sales approach.

* Leveraging on technology.

Creating niche focused products

Generalist doesn’t rule the industry anymore. The top CEO’s of many multinational companies attained their hotspots via this #1 strategy: they were ultra-specific with their value proposition. It turns out that success is never far fetched when you apply focus and clarity in your idea generation and become laser focused on the market you serve.

Truly shedding down the tentacles and distractions of your main idea to target specific geography, demography and psychographic space will fast track your success and secure a household name for you in the noisy market. Niched product and positioning of your business will also help in a scalable launch and thought leadership.

You can create a focused product by first recognizing your passion, then studying your market with an eagle eye, and be bold to communicate your value.

Delighting your customers

The most efficient and low-cost marketing approach is word-of-mouth. Companies can only attain this marketing hierarchy when they delight their customers. Delighting your customers is a step ahead of satisfying them. When you delight your customers, they become sticky buyers or loyalists and never tip off your customer list no matter their pain points.

Aside from the unique value, delighting your customers by knowing and giving them little gifts as tasters will be an awesome experience, just make sure the gifts are desirable and entertaining. Sending thank you notes to customers is a tested way to keep them loyal.

Here’s are other few tips to delight your customers:-

Listen to your customers at all times

Resolve their issues with deep empathy

Create a personalized experience for them in your product cycle

Give them the opportunity to share their information with you, but treat their information with the utmost privacy

Reward them for their referrals

Adopt an effective inbound sales approach

Why should you look everywhere for clients when your clients can always find you themselves? With an effective inbound marketing approach, your client will come knocking at your front door.

First, you must develop your ideal client’s persona, otherwise called the buyer’s persona is a fictional attribute of your potential client. It is important you do this first as it’ll help in the preparation of the content that will drive your clients to you at every stage of the customer journey, be it the awareness, consideration or the decision-making stage.

Then you create quality contents that are relevant to your buyers’ persona at each of the stage highlighted above. Starting with a few curations from the awareness stage, develop the contents to suit each milestone in the journey. Also, ensure that your contents present you as a thought leader and your platforms such as websites, and social media channels are visually appealing at every sight.

That said, all your content should end with a call to action — such as a form, app download, ebook, white paper, seminar invites, or a landing page to capture their information and email details to keep the conversation inside. This will help you nurture the prospects to loyal customers.

Leveraging on technology

Small companies become global giants by leveraging on technology. Companies can disrupt the industry status quo by investing and fusing technology into their operations, customer insight, and experience, human resources etc. Doing this will bring forth better operational efficiency and decision making and improved customer experience.

Companies like Uber, Airbnb, QuickBooks, and Apple grew to become household names because they disrupt the industry norm with technology. By using the right technology at the right time, companies can attain the thought leadership position with ease.

With these four simple strategies, you can rule your industry no matter how big because companies hardly go wrong with it. You’ll observe that it cuts through every business structure of products, process, and people — which are the life wire of every successful business.

Talking about people, treat your employers like yourself in the job front.