While there are many answers to what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk – Aleph Website chooses a different tangent to help entrepreneurs make better decisions. Instead of throwing complex risk management equations at you, we’re leveling with you!
One way that surely works to decrease the risk of failure is having a good website, preferably, built by a Professional Website Designer.
As an entrepreneur, you have an idea and you want to test this idea and collect data so to improve and work upon the initial concept until you have a solid product to deliver to your Niche market.
THERE IS NO BETTER WAY to test the market, improve your product and collect valuable information while marketing your business than having A GOOD WEBSITE.
This article is an in-depth study of what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk – considering all factors such as:
- Limited Budget
- Limited assets
- Limited resources
- No human capital
If you are really looking to reduce the risk as an entrepreneur, invariably you will be dealing with many financial constraints. As an entrepreneur starting out, the biggest problem is a lack of finance. Therefore, this article is taking a radical jab at this problem – eliminating your financial problems by taking a low-budget approach!
This is Why Every Entrepreneur Needs a Good Website to decrease risk:
If it wasn’t clear before 2021, then the pandemic has surely reassured you that a good website is a MUST to:
1. Test Product Absorption in the Pre-launch phase
Test product absorption by your target Niche market and further develop your offers until you meet the demand
A good website allows you to build product pages for products you’re still planning on launching. You may as well get feedback from people and see how many are interested in acquiring the product. If there is not enough interest to justify the investment in manufacturing, shipping, storage, packaging, etc., then you choose not to launch the product.
This is a very good way to save yourself from unnecessary failure. A less painful failure always costs less! That’s why you always start with lighter weights, and then gradually build up your strength to lift like an Olympian champion!
The Diversity of products and services is crucial in the stage of product testing. You need to have multiple products and see what the audience is interested in. Get the initial feedback and document it all. Make sure your interactions are meaningful, engage with your audience in a way that makes them feel important and valuable. Let your style of communication be one of a genuine desire to improve yourself and help your customers!
At this point, you will be able to categorize your products from High-Risk to Low-Risk products. The ones that got good feedback are low risk, the ones that got bad feedback are high risk. So you see, you already have significantly reduced the risk as an entrepreneur.
If you don’t know who your customers are. Then get right to developing your Customer Persona. If you already have some customers, but you are not sure if they are satisfied, then try developing a Customer Value Proposition (CVP) – this helps you understand how to increase Customer Satisfaction.
Once you have tested a few products, learned what your target market’s needs are, you need to brainstorm ways to deliver these solutions. One way of delivering solutions to problems that your target audience is experiencing with your product is by using Content Marketing for Small Business needs.
2. Compete Online Against Similar Companies to prove yourself
The world of business is merciless. There are many articles that help you get it together and survive the world of business. This is so because companies will take you down and devour you if you’re not smart and ready for competition.
You can always use your website to compete against your future competitors who are already established in these markets. It is important for you to see how well your online assets (website and social media) perform before you make the decision to go full-in and invest in the brick and mortar and storage facilities you may need to actually sell your product.
Prioritize your actions and create a strong plan of action that will allow you to take on your competition. For example, do not scatter your focus by building all your social media profiles at the initial stage of your business. Rather, focus on 1 single media outlet, but make it strong enough to compete with the profiles of your direct competitors. This way, you conserve energy for other activities.
Additionally, note that attention is interest in marketing. And Interest is the key ingredient that will move those website visitors into your marketing funnels, and eventually render them eligible for your services. There is no way around it, you need skin in the game way before you have even considered delivering your products and services. Otherwise, you’re in for a world of pain and massive failure!
Aleph Website always recommends first creating your website, growing a little bit (for a couple of months), getting traffic, understanding your online visitors, and then launching the actual business. This is a safe way to ensure you’re not investing in the wrong line of business!
Digital competition is always safer than real competition. Thinking about it as a simulation training where your probe the weaknesses and strengths of your opponents, prior to jumping into a bloody ring fight.
3. A Good Website increases Sales and the number of online visitors
A good website helps you in multiple ways:
- Beautiful design makes people stay longer on your pages and surf your website
- Marketing-oriented design based of industry standards helps you convert visitors to leads and customers
- SEO optimized pages will get you more traffic organically
- A responsive website design may cost a bit more, but it does bring more traffic from mobile which is very important
These are just a few benefits of a well-built professional and beautiful website. Such a website can help you mitigate the risk of going under due to low profit in the first year or two. This commonly happens to companies that within 1 year they decide to shut down their business because they don’t have enough sales.
From our experience, many entrepreneurs and small business owners complain that the website they have is not bringing them, new customers. Therefore, their conclusion is that website marketing is not the solution. We urge such individuals and companies to look into their website’s performance. It is highly likely that you are experiencing slow loading speed issues on your website. Perhaps your website is not SEO optimized and that’s why you’re not getting traffic.
At this point, you already know what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk. Instead of buying insurance, hiring lawyers, limiting financial liability, and micromanaging your employees, we suggest building a professional website to mitigate your risk and manage your business successfully. For your website to successfully defend your small business against any risk, you need to understand marketing basics and truths. As well as, understand Priming, Framing, and Anchoring effects – and how to incorporate them onto your web design.
Be smart, hire website design professionals to build you a great website. This is how you reduce liability, without much financial investment. The use of a good website will get that very needed initial boost of sales! This will be re-invested in Ads and other marketing efforts that will help you grow steadily, but surely!
4. interact, collect data, analyze and move the user through your sales funnel
Finally, a well-designed and developed website allows you to interact with your users. Not just that, but you’re also able to collect data. Here are a few tips on how to create your pages so you can re-target your website visitors:
- Create purpose-specific blog posts about the topics you’re keenly interested in
- Newsletter subscription for discounts on product pages
- Sign up Call to Action leading to Webinars that educate the visitor on how to use the product
- Fill-out or Opt-in forms for special offering
- Downloadables
These are a few interactive elements that will help you build a database you can use to upsell, cross-sell, etc.
Additionally, if you’re website design is marketing-oriented, then you’re able to understand at which page do the visitors fall out of your sales funnel (with Google Analytics). Once you’ve outlined which page that is, you are now able to fix the page (modify copy, put a different image, A/B test, etc.) and try again.
Most of the time, this strategy works and our clients see an uptake in sales after tweaking certain elements that weren’t converting users.
Need Further Proof that a good website is what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk?
Forbes supports the notion that a business simply cannot succeed without a good website. Forrester goes even further to outline how bad websites fail times and again, painfully and ever so clumsily.
Everything Else you already Know
To the question ‘what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk’ there are many answers. Some of them are:
- Insurance for your company
- Saving money
- Protecting your data
- Niche down on a very small segment, etc.
All of this you’re already doing. What you’re not doing however is investing in a good website… You think you will get your business booming by renting a website with Wix, or Squarespace. That’s surely a good way to reduce expenditure, but not risk!
I understand how to reduce the risk, where can I get a new website?
There are a few options for you as an entrepreneur:
- You can do it yourself with website builders like wix, squarespace, and shopify
- Hire a freelancer on Upwork or Fiverr
- Contract a marketing/design agency to do a professional job for you
- Hire Aleph Website
The Lean Startup Method for reducing risk and costs in an early stage might be the right answer for What is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease the risk
While we have our approach, we also want to make sure we provide you with alternative solutions. Perhaps more complex and harder to solve, yet we put it there for you – so you have more information in case you need any.
The Lean startup approach might be the right answer to what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk. So here we are breaking this approach down so you can get the gist of it:
1. Define Customer VALUE PROPOSITION (CVP)
If you want to minimize friction and costs in the early stage of product launch, you could define the customer value proposition (CVP).
The CVP model represents a theoretical framework styling your customer’s needs and how you will address them successfully. While working on the CVP, it will become clear what are the drawbacks to tackling certain markets. It might turn out that you want to trim down your offer – so you only have 2 products and 1 type of customer persona.
At any rate, with the CVP you will be able to understand what will drive your sales and how to get to the ultimate goal of every business – Customer Satisfaction.
2. creating a minimal viable product (MVP)
The minimal viable product is a product that will require the minimum amount of input to generate the offering while being absorbable for your target market segment. It is important to have identified clearly what your customer persona is prior to developing your offering. With the MVP you will be able to have a product on the market with some minimum profit, but that’s your market entry point from where you can always build up if things move smoothly.
3. Feedback and customers analytics
As previously mentioned, client feedback is very important. You want to make sure you are learning as much as possible during the early stages of product development. Also, the Lean Startup targets a small customer segment size. This means that you will be dealing with a very small group of people – not knowing who these folks are and what they care about is problematic.
Here are 4 ways you can get this feedback from your early adopters:
- Collecting information with Lead Generation Forms via Ladning Pages
- Studying customer reviews carefully
- Develop downloadables, brochures and other content marketing materials that you will have steadily accessible to your customers (optimally at the end of the purchase/cart exit) and if they download this piece of content – this would mean they have interest in buying other products
- Social listening for potential cues you have missed – this can be done while maintain your audeince online even when things are not working out well
Suggested Reads:
- Small Business In need of a New Website Design?
- The 3 Steps of Faith Marketing – Apple I Phone
- How to Build An Audience in 5 steps?
- This is how to write a SEO Friendly Blog Post
- Aleph Website – All you need to know about websites.
- What is WordPress?
- Why you should not use Free Website Templates?
- How much does it cost to make a website?
- Why WordPress technology is the best CMS?
- Consumer buying behavior towards online shopping
- Youth Entrepreneurship is the FUTURE of EDUCATION
- what is one way for an entrepreneur to decrease risk?
- Top 3 Best Female Entrepreneur Website Design
- What is social entrepreneurship marketing?
- How to Use Content Marketing For Entrepreneurs
For free consultancy on any question relating to websites:
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
