Category: Marketing blog

Just because you are currently studying, it doesn’t mean that you can’t run a business at the same time. In fact, this may be a beneficial and fulfilling way of paying for your course fees. However, getting the balance right in making sure that you don’t neglect either one of these separate priorities can be very challenging. This article is here to give you a bit of a helping hand in handling this difficult task.

Discipline Yourself

The first point may be an obvious one, but it is an important one to mention nevertheless: you need to have a great amount of self-discipline right from the outset. Plan your time as far in advance as possible, giving yourself periods to focus on your studies. Obviously, at crucial times such as exams, you will have less free time available with which to run your business. Succeeding in both business and study means prioritising and keeping on top of your responsibilities.

Understand Your Limits

For many student entrepreneurs, succeeding in their course remains the most important thing to them. Recognise that you can’t do everything at once. And if you hope to maintain your business, you may have to make sacrifices in the social aspects of your life. Once you complete your studies, this is likely to be your opportunity when you can dedicate more time to growing and developing your business.

Use the Facilities

If you are studying at a university, it is likely that it has a host of facilities for startup businesses. As well as the endless resources that you can find in the library, you will also have the opportunity to pick the brains of your tutors and professors to get more information. You may also consider joining a business society which gives you the opportunity to meet other budding entrepreneurs to swap ideas.

Think Carefully About Finances

Careful financial planning is important for all kinds of business, but this is especially the case if you are a student and you are likely to have limited startup capital anyway. Check out things like the best credit cards for students and make sure you are well-informed about all your financial options. Be careful about taking on debt as this can lead to a stressful situation which damages your studies.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Even though no one starts a company intending to fail, you can learn a lot as a result of the mistakes that you make. You can always start again once you have finished your studies, but you will certainly avoid the pitfalls which you encountered in the first place. Of course, you should still treat your business with care and attention, but don’t let any negative experiences put you off in the future.

The art of balancing running a business and studying is never going to be an easy one to master, but these are just a few of the ways that you can make it that little bit easier.

When it comes to success, we see in the news all time that the entrepreneurs amongst us have some of the best ideas known to man. However, as an aspiring business owner yourself, don’t get put down by the number of people who look like they know what they’re doing when you don’t! Maybe you’ve got a vague idea of what you want, and you’ve looked into a few secrets that’ll take your brand design to bigger and better heights; now comes the time to create a plan and put it into action. But do you have everything your brand actually needs? Here’s a bit of a checklist for you to use.

Do You Know Where You’re Going?

Vision is such an intrinsic need, but once you have it, you have a goal to reach and the drive to get there. If you know what you want, everything else will fall into place alongside it once you start operating in your company. Your brand is built on this alone, and the rest of it can be considered the trimmings on top of the meat.

So write down what you need to do and where you want to go as part of your mission to turn it into a statement. Once it’s in writing it’s more extrinsic and tangible to work with, and you can always refer back to it. Other people involved in your company can also work with it, instead of having to take copies straight out of your head.

Is the Design the Best it Could Be?

So you have your shop front, and you’ve repainted to make it stand out on the street. Don’t stop there! If your brand looks good, you look good! You’re more trustworthy to the naked yet biased eye, and a creative use of colour helps smooth a few more customers through the door. So, get yourself a sign to above the door, or some posters to put in the windows that show off the best you can be.

When you’re original, you’re the best, and a new idea on the market is what investors are on the lookout for. However, if you can’t do that alone, as you’re busy with trying to get your business off of the ground, you can always enlist the help of someone like d4r: in the top 100 agencies for consulting. This way you know there’s a professional polish on any of the work done, and plenty of marketing know-how on offer.

Do You Know who You’re Selling to?

Truly understanding the audience is where a lot of brands fall down, and that makes a business a lot worse to carry out! If you can’t make sales to the people you really want to, it’s time to rethink your business model, not the other way around. Ask the people who come into your store and take to the online world for opinions; feedback is everything!

A lot goes into a brand; make the right decisions for your business!

There comes a time in every business when you need to invest money into certain areas. This might be because you have saved money from your profits for reinvesting or it might be to help an area do better in the future. Either way, here are three areas of your business that you can invest money into.

Marketing

Marketing is one of the most important parts of your business. This is where you convince potential customers to become actual customers. Marketing works on so many levels that it can be hard to pin down exactly what it does. You use marketing to research your target market, convince that same target market to part with their cash and then monitor what they do with your product afterwards in some cases so that you know how to provide a better product in the future. You will want to invest in your marketing if you do not see the kinds of sales that you would like or if you need to have more research conducted. There are a lot of free ways to use marketing such as social media networks like Twitter, but free will only get you so far. You will need to invest in paying for advertising space if you want to get high levels of traffic. This will mean using AdWords and promotions on Twitter and Facebook. The type of marketing your company will need will differ depending on what kind of business it is, but all businesses need marketing.

Equipment and Property

Investing in better equipment can mean a saving in the long run. If you invest in equipment that makes your business run smoother or more efficiently, then you are likely going to save time which will mean that you have saved money. The same is true for property. If you invest in purchasing office space rather than renting, then you will have removed the monthly rent fee from your expenses sheet. Even if you end up paying a monthly loan repayment on the line of credit (https://businesslineof.credit) that you took out to pay for it. Your money will be going towards something, and it will have a defined end date whereas paying rent is seemingly endless. Both are great investments and can help your business in the future.

Upgrade Your Team

Upgrading your team is difficult one. If you make the people in your business better, then your business is going to be more efficient, get more work done, and hopefully, this will translate into greater profits. However, how you go about it can be contentious. An obvious way of upgrading your team is to hire people who have better experience and qualifications than your current staff, but this is tricky as HR laws come into play and can get complicated. So let’s assume that you aren’t going to outright fire people and hire new staff. Instead, you might create a new position and hire a manager to get the most out of your staff in a given area of your business. Alternatively, you could invest in training for your staff and improve their skills and make them all better at their jobs. However, upgrading your team and investing money in them is not as clear-cut as investing in equipment and marketing, so be careful when doing it. You might still have people who don’t work as hard as others or just can’t do any better than they currently are.