Starting a business with a friend contract may sound tempting, but is it worth it? When building a business, having a good marketing strategy ultimately defines your success.
This article will guide you through the important questions you should ask yourself and the steps you should take before starting a business partnership with friends, focusing on promotional strategy and assets.
Having the same vision is extremely important when developing a business. Discuss how you see the future of your brand and define your core goals for the next 1-3-5 years. You might want to start a business to help your community or just a side hustle for staying home parents.
It’s time to get honest if you want to build a trustworthy partnership. Think about your personal and professional strengths and weaknesses — it will help you understand what can go wrong and prepare for it.
While sharing the same vision is crucial, having the same skill set is of no real significance. Make sure you complement each other and can cover a wide range of tasks together.
Online business assets include everything you own in the digital world: websites, apps, photos, and videos. Understanding your assets will help you create a strong marketing strategy and build up those assets more thoughtfully.
Your website is one of the most valuable assets for your brand. It will help you to further promotional campaigns — well-built websites add reliability and help potential customers connect with your brand.
A website can be a source of high-quality clients once you create an easy-to-navigate design, content that sells, correct the call-to-action, and take all technical aspects into account.
If you already have a website, you can run a quick audit with NinjaReports.com. It’s largely used by startups, small companies, agencies, and separate freelancers to evaluate overall website performance — use it for an SEO audit, keywords ranking, and backlink analysis.
It will help you understand where your website’s at and how you can improve it to drive more traffic and sales.
A business plan is a key tool that lets you define objectives and create a plan to achieve your goals. The key sections to include are an executive summary, market analysis, financial planning, and marketing plan.
Once you have coordinated a business plan for your product/service, it’s also important to learn about the industry and the target audience. Start by defining a product market fit — it will help you understand how much your product satisfies market demand.
It can also give you a lot of insight into how to move forward with the project and help you to move in the right direction.
Source: https://delighted.com/blog/how-to-measure-and-track-product-market-fit
Once you have a market analysis in place, you can focus on the marketing strategy and plan how to attract relevant audiences. This is also a good time to define promotional channels, their distribution, and promotional campaigns on a high level.
Investing in a future business equally can help avoid many future problems. You don’t know how everything will turn out, and unequal distribution of personal funds can lead to personal conflicts.
Online promotions will take a lot of your general budget.
While planning online promo campaigns, decide how much money each of you is ready to dedicate and define an approximate monthly budget. It will help you determine how rapidly you can grow your business.
Part of the budget should also be allocated to website optimisation — it’s a time- and money-consuming strategy but brings good results in a long-term perspective.
You should decide how much control each of you has over certain situations. You may feel more confident making the most important decisions together and dividing the areas of responsibility. While you don’t need to have one role, you can still be equal leaders and go through difficult times together.
To avoid possible miscommunication in terms of promotion, decide in advance who is responsible for which marketing channel.
For instance, you can be in charge of all decisions related to social media while your partner makes important SEO decisions.
You can also decide how you want to approach budgeting or channel distribution decisions, resolving them together or designating a responsible person.
Communication is key when building a business with friends. If you know how to approach conflicts, share opinions without prejudice, and respect each other enough to hear every thought, you have a chance to build a strong partnership with equal decision-making control.
Without communication, your boat will sink pretty fast.
For instance, your last promotional campaign did not work. You should get together, define your priorities, and decide how to change the campaign or promotional channel while staying respectful and reasonable.
When you start a business with a friend, it can be both tempting and scary as there are plenty of things to consider: your approaches to work, personalities, boundaries, values, and vision for your future business.
Take your time to evaluate the pros and cons and ensure you convey the most important thoughts and doubts to your partner, building a transparent relationship from the start.