Starting up a business is an exciting time, but writing a business plan can seem daunting initially. However, being able to write a good business plan is an essential skill to have for any entrepreneur or new business looking to increase their chance of survival.
1) Identify your audience. A good business plan should be written from the prospective of the audience. First, you need to decide on the purpose the plan. Are you trying to persuade an investor to take on your project or communicate the future plans for the company? The purpose of the business plan will affect the style and content so make sure you are clear on this before beginning. A good business plan needs to be tailored to the specific requirements of the target audience in order to be engaging.
2) Do your research. In order to be able to write a strong, comprehensive business plan you need to possess a sound knowledge of the market you are involved in. You need to actively conduct market research and ensure that your plan makes reference to your findings. It should include factors such as market size, the predicted growth path of said market and how you propose to gain access to it. For example, if you are planning on opening a bar then your business plan should include figures based on the local population, cost of suppliers, predictions about whether the bar industry is likely to grow or decline in the area and a review of the competitive environment.
3) Assess your competition. Understanding your competition is an essential component to understanding any business environment. Whatever the business you are looking to establish, you will always have competition in varying degrees. Perhaps you want to open a restaurant in an area that is already saturated with eateries; you then need to think about what is the unique selling point of your restaurant. Or maybe you have found a niche in the market, why is that? In order to make your business a success you should look to your competitors to see how they are managing their business or areas where they could improve. You also need to assess whether you can compete effectively with the loicgrosflandre.com/7-meilleurs-outils-detude-de-marche/ existing businesses and how you plan to do so.
4) Attention to detail. A plan that is concise and clear reads professionally so don't make yours too wordy. The reader needs enough detail and information to be able to make an informed decision. As with all professional documents, care must be taken to avoid spelling mistakes and use correct grammar and punctuation. A plan that makes absurd or unrealistic assumptions is of no use so stick to the facts and make sure you are making credible projections and accurate content at all times.
5) Cover all bases. Before embarking on your plan it is a good idea to undertake some research in to what a professional business plan should include. You can then use this as a check list to make sure you have covered all the relevant areas. Sections of the business plan should include information on the company, the product/service market, competition in the field, management team, marketing strategy, operations and financials.
Once you have done all this you should have a complete and detailed professional business plan. The most important thing to remember when developing the plan is to see it as a living document and include specifics regarding dates and specific responsibilities. Your plan will need constant reviews and updates and things change so expect it to be a work in process for a good stretch of time. It will all be worth it in the end, a well-written plan will help ensure that the business is fully focused on what is required to achieve the company's goal.
The rise of social networking software has brought a completely different approach to market research. Whereas before we needed costly marketing firms and tedious surveys, today we can easily use the exciting new technology of social networking software to gather market information for us.
Below article will take a look at the key changes social networking software has brought and will give you an idea of what you might be missing out on - especially as a small business - if you are not yet using this exciting technology.
In order to understand the key change, let's briefly take a look at the success of Google.
The web counts more than 150 million web pages. There are websites about everything. Can we see this as a network? Up to this point, it is just a huge compilation of web pages. When those websites start linking to each other however, that is when they are creating a network. They have understood that by linking to each other, they will have more visitors - even if they haven't consciously understood this. By linking to each other, the quality of all the websites inside the network increases. It is comparable to a shopping outlet - by putting them together in a huge building complex, the value of a single store becomes much higher.
Google understood this and provided a great tool for people to find their way around the net. Rather than providing a portal to websites based on human research (like yahoo did), it created an algorithm with the intention of ranking websites based on (amongst other criteria) the amount and quality of the links to the websites. These links have off course been created by human beings, who decided that something was worth linking to. This ensures the quality of the sites Google is listing, as it assumes that the people who have created the links are rational human beings who won't link to something that is not useful.
So how does this apply to social networking software, and how can we learn from this insight? Google discovered that the key ingredient to the quality of something is the value that people give to it. Google decided to soak up what the internet visitors were looking at, and then threw it right back at them, neatly organized in the form of search results. This is a fantastic business insight...It listens to people, and then gives people back what they want. The more popular something gets, the more links it will receive, the higher it goes in the results of Google!
So how can we use this insight using social networking software?
Imagine you own a website selling shoes. You could decide to neatly structure your shoes on your site, optimize it for SEO, etc. Every week you could add some shoes and add some promotions. You could create an emailing list, and build up a firm basis of customers. You can look into Google "insights for search" to check out the latest trends to see which products are hot and try to sell them...
Imagine though, if you added social features to that site. You could add the possibility for users to review the items on the site, and have the item with the best reviews of the most people appear on top of the site (just like Google moves the best results on top). Other visitors will see this and you'll end up selling more of it. You'll find out which shoes people don't like so you can easily remove them. You could create polls or shoutboxes, encouraging people to participate and have fun on your site!
In a nutshell, all of a sudden you will have a dialogue with your market. You'll know what they want & what they don't want. You'll have done it just by allowing visitors to participate and by giving them the opportunity to share with others. You don't need all that expensive and time consuming market research of the past anymore. Have you ever wondered about the success of Amazon? They have a lot of social features on their site, with great marketing potential. If you have ever ordered something from Amazon, just to find yourself buying another book or dvd because they show you that page where they show the stuff that other members are buying who also purchased what you just bought - you'll know what I mean. Any webshop should have that capacity. This software is actually easy to get your hands on!
By making your site socially interactive for your visitors, you will be applying the insight that has made Google and Amazon successful. You'll soak up what the visitors want and you'll be throwing it right back at them. If you listen to them, extract the value from the network that is forming itself around your products, the network will love you for it.
Using social networking software for your site can be done in as many ways as there are social networking scripts. A great way to start is by giving people a forum, or by setting polls. If you are more ambitious, you could create an entire community with your brand all over it. If you own a website selling shoes, you could build a shoe review site, allowing people to comment shoes. I know a lot of women who would spend a lot of time on such a site!
You could use technology like on the Amazon website to measure the popularity of the products you sell. You can have the script automatically show top user rated items on the front page of your site. If your website is getting a lot of hits, you could give them a small marketplace where they can sell second hand products within your niche! The possibilities are endless.
As the web is becoming more and more polluted by link-builders and e-marketers who are all trying to please the search engines, Google will without a doubt look more and more towards social networking sites to calculate the ranking of the sites. It is already more and more difficult to build a couple of hundred links to a website in order to make Google think you are important. Building a social network with an active user community might seem a little more hard work, but it can not be faked. If you do it right and listen to your community, not only will you have returning visitors and customers - you will be listed all over the Google first page results for your niche. Search for any product nowadays and you'll