Business.com |
- How to Generate PR for a Startup at Conferences
- Is Social Media Marketing Still Worth It?
- Want to Prevent Creative Stagnation? Look to Agile Collaboration
- How to Build a Video Distribution Strategy that Works
- How to Stay Motivated to Start a Business
| How to Generate PR for a Startup at Conferences Posted: 04 Mar 2020 03:29 PM PST  From the point of view of marketing, any tech conference is a place where the interests of all attendees coincide to a maximum. That is why startup conferences allow one to expand the audience reach, stimulate interest in goods and services, and ensure a stronger connection between supply and demand. In the long term, an effective conference can lead to an increase in sales and the gaining of useful contacts. Attendance at these events provides an opportunity to conduct a marketing analysis and evaluate the current trends among buyers. Conferences such as the Web Summit, Collision, or Startup Grind can help establish PR for startups and make them visible on the market. How startup conferences are arranged and why you need them for startup PRAll startup conferences are arranged about the same. At some point, clever organizers realized that it was boring to just make IT-conferences where the same big brands would talk about their new products. It's a lot more fun to ask startups to join the party with their innovative ideas and pitch decks. Additionally, it is more efficient for gathering people. Meanwhile, mature companies will buy sponsorship packages and exhibit booths. That is why, Web Summit (70 000 participants), Collision (30 000 participants) and many others are large IT-conferences with a hint of innovations. But that's organizers' desire to make money off the publicity's interest in startups is what allows every young company to obtain PR benefits on modest financial terms. No wonder IT conferences offer startups cheap tickets, booths, plenty of discounts from partners, and excellent opportunities for networking and attracting investors. How conferences influence public relations for startupsIf you have never been to these conferences before, these events will certainly expand your consciousness. You will understand that the IT world is vast and limitless with plenty of opportunities waiting for you. You will get a chance to do networking. Large startup conferences are the only events where you can meet the founders of YC, Andreessen Horowitz, CEOs and CTOs of the large corporations, as well as high-powered journalists and bloggers. You will receive a surefire mark of quality. If you were selected for Collision or another tech conference, your idea is interesting, and you, as a founder, will be worth talking to. Investors and journalists are very forthcoming in communicating with startups that have already been filtered out by someone else. You can refer to your participation in conferences, and this will clearly increase your chances to meet with investors outside of conferences. Conditions under which conferences will not help a tech startupIf you just wait around at the Alpha program at the Web Summit or Grind at the Startup Grind, YC will not come to your exhibit booth. Techcrunch will not write about you, and Andreessen Horowitz will not invite you to come over. You will simply be among the other startups in the crowd, going from one stage to another. Thus, if your company wasn't selected for the pitch on the main stage, your presentation will be seen only by dozens of other startups waiting in line. In short, startup conferences, like any other B2B events, require preparation. It is a place where everything is possible. Yes, there are investors and journalists walking somewhere nearby. But you need to be more active and make appointments with them on your own. How to prepare for a startup conferenceA PR strategy plan should be thought out in advance. Before you decide to apply for a tech conference, you need to define your target audience, business goals, and the ways to achieve them. Let's start with the list of conference participants. Who is the Audience?Tech conferences are usually attended by several groups of people. They have different purposes and can be divided as follows:
List of upcoming top tech conferences worldwideIf you have already made a decision to attend a tech conference, it's the right time to think about where to go. The best advice here is to apply everywhere possible and choose the best option later. This is an excellent chance to practice pitching and understand how to get media coverage for your business. We have made a list of the best upcoming events you can apply for:
How to prepare for applyingNow, it is time to apply to the tech conferences. Since every event has its own requirements, you need to prepare well and in advance. The larger the conference, the more rigid the formal selection process. As an example, we will describe the process of applying for WebSummit. First, tech startup companies should fill out a questionnaire. Apart from the contact information, you will need to provide a 7-word startup description and basic information about the team, financing, and industry. If all goes well, a scout will write to you and offer a call. After you go through the call procedure, you will be able to apply for a pitch contest, acceleration, communication with mentors, and other useful events. But before that, you will need to:
How to prepare for the interviewIf you pass an initial test, it means the conference organizers understand that you mean business and you have an interesting product. Therefore, scouts will call you. A conversation usually lasts for about 15-20 minutes. Don't be afraid of this procedure. Conference scouts are not business sharks, and their main purpose is to select the best startups and sell you tickets. It means that they are on your side, and it won't be easy to disappoint them. Scouts usually act according to the script. They ask you about your product, team, MVP readiness, and investments. Formally, these are the same questions any VC is likely to ask you, but scouts are simply interested in whether you have prepared answers to these questions beforehand. After the interview, the scout refers prospective applications to an organizing committee for further discussions. In a couple of weeks, you will receive a congratulation letter with a link for purchasing group tickets at a discount (for instance, ~ €300 instead of €1000 for Web Summit). After that, you will still have to apply for the pitch contest and upload the logo for the stand. Once you are selected for a conference like this for the first time, you'll come out on top. The organizers of such events as Collision and Web Summit are very interested in success stories. Every year, they need to show that the startup newcomers are making progress and generate a higher volume of ticket sales. Therefore, if you were selected for the first conference, getting into the second one will be much easier and faster. Startup conference networkingAs I said before, startup conferences are a perfect opportunity to talk with anyone. But all meetings must be arranged in advance. Tidy up your LinkedIn profile, fill out AngelList, install the official app, and start writing to everyone you need, offering meetings during the conference. Depending on whether you reach the target audience, 20-30% of them will agree to meet. Chats and partiesIdeally, during the daytime you will be at the meetings, only occasionally running into the most interesting reports. But don't forget about two more opportunities to find new contacts. Large conferences usually have very targeted chats and publics. They gather many smart people who can share their thoughts on your product and give advice. Moreover, dozens of parties are usually held around the conferences. However, remember the two golden rules of any conference party:
Polishing your PR strategy: conference tipsThe main goal of your conference presentation is to impress others. To still get the desired PR while taking part in a conference, I suggest that you use the following framework:
Being great PR tools, tech startup conferences are an essential, but simple way to advertise your startup. Not only do they increase the recognizability of your company, but they also give you a chance to do networking. It's the best option to receive feedback that you won't get by any other means. As a founder of a startup tech company, you will earn invaluable experience in pitching and boosting your sales and founder skills. |
| Is Social Media Marketing Still Worth It? Posted: 04 Mar 2020 03:23 PM PST  Executing a proper social media marketing strategy is more difficult than ever before. Social newsfeed algorithms are tightening up and favoring non-commercial posts while also only rarely displaying commercial posts that aren't paid-for. So is all this time, effort and money worth it anymore? Is social media still valuable as a marketing channel? More followers don't always lead to more salesHow often have you come across an ad somewhere that promises you can get 1,000 likes for your Facebook page overnight? Or that it's so easy to "win" on Twitter – you just need to follow a simple formula and you'll be a true blue social hero. Of course, what these high-flying promise-filled ads don't say is that those people worked really hard to get where they're at. And while social media might not look like the kind of work people were doing 20 years ago, it's still resource-intensive and requires an expert knowledge of do's and don'ts. Those who have found the most success with social media marketing campaigns have put thousands of hours into the effort to get their followers and likes. Buying followers or likes might seem like a good idea to give you a boost, but it can actually do far more harm than good. The thing is, buying likes or followers means those people have zero actual interest in your brand. And that means they aren't going to engage with anything you post. Why does that matter? Because social media algorithms take into account your engagement levels. Guess what happens when you are always posting things that get zero engagement? That's right, you're going to become known to the algorithm as someone who never has anything interesting to say. Why would they want to ever display your content in people's newsfeeds if nobody ever engages with it? Now, I don't say this to discourage you. Rather, I say it to inspire and to motivate you. Buying followers or likes might give you a boost in a vanity number, but they certainly aren't going to translate to an increase in sales or engagement. To increase what really matters – sales and engagement – you need to actually engage on social media. You can't fake engagementPretty straightforward, right? When you get right down to it, you can't fake authenticity, and being real is precisely what people want to see from other people on social media. Anything else comes across as promotional; the tactics of a bygone marketing era. Outbound has its place, sure, but it sure doesn't belong on social media where inbound marketing reigns. Putting your social efforts on autopilot will not only be obvious to your audience, but it could also result in them unfollowing you. Think about who you find to be the most engaging in your social feeds. It's the people who communicate openly, right? It's the ones who share hand-selected content. It's the folks that don't shout, "Hey! Check out my blog post!" ten thousand times a day and instead invite discussion and community participation. The people who are killing it on social media understand first and foremost that there are real, live people on the other end of those tweets. Twitter and Facebook are not your bullhorn. They are a means to having a conversation with your potential target audience to build brand awareness and authority in your field. Social media isn't formulaic (except when it is)No, I'm not being purposely obtuse. I'm just being honest. There isn't a winning formula to social media that everyone can pick up, dust off and use unchanged. You have to put your own spin on things if you want to capture attention, make an impact, and establish yourself as a thought leader. Creating awesome content, sharing compelling posts and tweets, and being an involved member of the social community are things you'll need to pick up by watching the best, then implementing in a way that's true to your authentic self. This is what I'd categorize as the "what" of social media work – what you're sharing. And using a formula for what you're sharing isn't a guarantee for success. On the other hand, the "how" of social media work can (and should) be formulaic. Those who've totally mastered social media all use similar tools to get the job done. I'm talking Hootsuite, Buffer and SproutSocial. Social media professionals use tools like these to schedule posts in advance. Social media is a 24/7 game and since you can't realistically be "on" every hour of every day, you need to use scheduling to make sure you connect with your target audience — even if you're not awake. Just be sure that you're also interacting and engaging with people in real-time, too! And do your best to respond to comments you get while you're away. The importance of goal-settingWhile anyone can dive into social media marketing by creating an account and posting a tweet, I don't advise jumping in blind like that. Creating goals and a subsequent strategy for your approach to social media is about more than broad statements like, "I want to increase my followers!" Rather, you have to think about what you want to get out of your time spent on social media. Your first step should be identifying and leveraging the right social networks. Then you need to ask yourself, what is it all for? Why be on social in the first place? Here are a few common goals:
Of course, all these goals are really just ways to increase sales, right? That's what we're really talking about when referring to social media goals. What do you want to get out of it? Why, increased conversions, of course! What savvy business owner wouldn't have that as a goal? Measuring social media ROIMany people seem to think social media is just a place to essentially goof off and waste time. And sure, there are plenty of people who waste time checking Facebook all day, but when it comes to business, the time you put in correlates to what you get out of it. To know whether or not your efforts are proving successful, you need to measure your ROI. You have to know where your time (i.e. money) is going, and you can use analytics to assist with that goal. One of the simplest ways to see the correlation between your social engagement and sales is to use Google Analytics. The popular web analytics tool can show you which social networks are driving the most traffic, which content on your site attracts the most social media traffic, and what kinds of posts at what time of day lead to the most conversions. Specifically, I recommend you start by setting up Advanced Segments. This allows you to set up filters for tracking data from the social networks you choose like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Then, once it's configured, you can view all of your referral traffic from social sources in one place. You can break these down in any way you like, from tracking individual social sites or collections of sites. You could lump all the image-based social networks together — Pinterest, Instagram, etc. — to see how your visual strategy is faring, for instance. You can also track how individual links you share on social networks are performing by using Google Analytics UTM parameters. This method is especially helpful if you're running ads on Facebook, for example, and want to see how many clicks you get — and how many of those clicks convert. UTM parameters are tags that are added to the end of a specific URL to enable tracking and source attribution. You can build them using the Google campaign URL Builder. Benefits of social media marketingWe've covered the costs of social media, so let's examine the benefits. I covered the top ten benefits of social media in another post, so I'll summarize them here:
Without getting into detail here about each of these benefits, suffice it to say that these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg of what you can expect with a well-thought-out social media campaign. By now, I hope you have an understanding of what I mean when I say "social media is hard work." It's going to take time and money not just to get your campaign off the ground, but to sustain it over time. But that doesn't mean the results aren't worth every bit of your efforts. Because — and believe me on this — they definitely are. |
| Want to Prevent Creative Stagnation? Look to Agile Collaboration Posted: 04 Mar 2020 03:12 PM PST 
Recently, my team at Pantheon took the opportunity to dive into the user experience on our pricing page. Once we decided on a tab-based layout, we started running tests. The initial results were exciting, but it did not drive the engagement that would help us meet our goals. Instead of trying a different design, a member of the experimentation team suggested adding a data layer, which would personalize what content within the tab-based design would be featured first. By personalizing the content, we could better optimize for the engagement we wanted to see around the different plans. We saw a 5.5% increase in clicks for the pricing plan calls to action and a 23% increase in registration form submissions (our primary key performance indicator for the page). Without this combination of creative and analytical insight coming together, our test would not have been as effective. In other words, we were leveraging agile philosophies to make more data-driven decisions. Informed decisions begin with dataIt is easy to say that you want to make data-driven decisions. You can build a data warehouse and admire all the data you're collecting. But if you aren't using that data to inform decisions and challenge preconceived notions about what drives value for your team and goals, it is all for naught. A Forrester report said that 60% to 73% of a company's data does not get used for analytics — meaning that the organization is not using the information to its fullest advantage. If we had changed only the design of the layout again because we didn't see the results we wanted, we would be even further away from our goals. Instead, based on these results, we are about to launch a new iteration of this test with additional criteria applied to the personalization strategy. If you're ready to reap the benefits of data-driven decision-making, you need to open your eyes to the advantages of agile collaboration — bringing co-workers from different departments together to drive solutions. Below are strategies I have used individually and within my teams to increase the velocity and impact of testing — not to mention develop disruptive and successful products and services — by diversifying the agile process. 1. Collect fresh perspectivesTo prevent creative stagnation in the marketing department, we decided to build a culture of agile testing by inviting people who serve different functions in the company to our testing meetings. I saw a way co-workers from other teams, such as design and revenue operations, could provide value through their unique points of view. Too often, departments are focusing so hard on their own goals and responsibilities that you find a lack of collaboration — or worse, an absence of trust. Siloed groups work toward competing priorities. According to an Institute for Corporate Productivity study of over 1,100 companies, two-thirds identified collaboration as an organizational value, but only those that purposefully pursued collaboration were able to reach their business goals. Recently, we brought a leader in our sales organization into an agile testing meeting. Hearing his priorities for growth emphasized how and why his department's key metrics differed from our own. As a result, we added testing concepts to our task list to further refine our experimentation program. Regularly pull in co-workers from outside your team to see what concepts they can bring to the table. This could be the secret ingredient that kickstarts a new program or revives a lagging idea. Over time, working with the same group of people will eventually have a diminishing return on investment because you will collectively start to lean on the same instincts and biases. Mix things up to keep your program fresh and innovative. 2. Define standards for measuring impact and excellenceI recently attended an Optimizely masterclass focused on establishing a culture of experimentation, and the instructors highlighted the value of creating a team mission statement complete with well-defined, measurable goals. Not only does this help everyone stay on the same page, but it also enables you to avoid wasting time on irrelevant conversations that fall outside of your program's scope. Monitor things such as the velocity of your testing, the rate at which you reach statistical significance, and the win rate of your tests. These metrics can be tied to your company's North Star metrics to show your colleagues the impact of your work. For example, you can set goals around a website's performance metrics, such as speed, the time it takes for the page's content to appear on the screen, accessibility ratings, or search engine optimization. We hold quarterly retrospectives to analyze our success metrics and highlight new testing ideas that we believe will have an outsized impact on the next quarter. Leading our testing program, in addition to managing our design and web development team members, places me in a position where I need to be decisive. I often need to remove myself from the process to prioritize the needs of others over my own testing programs because we have hard deadlines that need to be met on the production end. Furthermore, I am constantly evaluating testing ideas for their business value and feasibility. This can be politically challenging when you have to say "no" to someone. Having a mission statement makes it easier to explain why some ideas might not warrant continued iteration. 3. Set agile and changeable goalsWhen you begin to see the world through an agile lens, you realize just how wise it can be to move the goalposts from time to time. Because markets today are constantly fluctuating, agile marketers will re-test theories and question data results. By confirming your working theories, you will gain valuable new insights that lead to getting the best result faster. Evaluating customer satisfaction alongside conversion rates is only one example of how using quantitative and qualitative research in your testing discussions allows all parties to make stronger decisions. Throughout my career, I have gained lots of insight by attending sales calls and talking with the sales team to gather feedback on how our marketing programs are performing from a customer perspective. Honest conversations with loyal customers can pinpoint flaws in our marketing programs. For example, they might highlight how a short-term win with new customers may have had a negative impact on longstanding customers — risking churn from high-value accounts. I have also seen instances when a campaign generated a high volume of leads that didn't convert to paying customers. If we only optimized campaign spend based the conversion metric on the lead form, we would have wasted resources on campaigns that did not drive business growth. Leveraging data within a testing environment increases innovation because it has a cascading effect. You test a hypothesis with a minimum viable product. If it works, you iterate on that experiment and get better results. If it fails, you still learn. With each test, you can uncover new hypotheses that will fuel creativity and action for your company. Collecting data and actually using that data to inform your decision-making are two different things. If you apply these three strategies, you can diversify the agile process to boost the velocity and impact of your testing — and create successful, disruptive products and services along the way. |
| How to Build a Video Distribution Strategy that Works Posted: 04 Mar 2020 03:05 PM PST  Recently when I interviewed twelve entrepreneurs for a blog I was writing, I was surprised that three of them cited making a corporate video as their best ever marketing decision. The reasons were varied: one video went viral, generating a wave of inbound enquiries; another explainer forced the team to really redefine their value proposition, delivering a host of other business benefits; and the third had a dramatic increase on home page conversions. I was surprised because it's unusual for video to have such a significant impact on a business. And that's not because video isn't an excellent marketing medium (it is). It's because too many companies approach video in the wrong way, so their video campaigns simply don't reach their potential. Putting video firstVideo can be an excellent tool to support a marketing campaign and at my video animation company I have seen video deliver really impressive results. But we believe your video distribution strategy has the best chance of success if video is at the centre of your campaign. And we have found that a video-first campaign is ideal in situations where:
I like to write the video distribution strategy up into a document that keeps me focussed and enables me to share my plans with the team. Here is what we cover in a typical video distribution strategy/ Your audience panelWe usually find it's best to build your own "panel" of experts to help you with your video campaign. This doesn't need to be a group of prospects willing to sit around your boardroom table in a focus group. However, it does help to have a handful of friendly customers to provide their feedback on your campaign as it unfolds. Make friends, buy them a coffee and send them a gift to thank them for their time. Get your team to help. Will video work with my audience?If you've decided on a video marketing campaign, you probably already have an inkling that your audience will respond well to video. However, you need to drill deeper into your audience to identify the best content and distribution approaches. Audience size It's important to actually define the target audience in terms of size, because that will inform certain content and distribution decisions. For example:
Your target audience might be anywhere in between these two extremes, so include this in your strategy. Customer value It's worth considering the lifetime value of each customer and your target cost per acquisition. If you're working with a small, defined list of prospects with a very high potential customer lifetime value, then you'll need to tread very carefully. Your list is finite – once you've exhausted it, then there are no more prospects to approach. So you need to make sure that the content of the video is engaging and compelling and leaves the door open for future interactions. If your potential pool of customers is much larger and much lower value, you're going to need to find a much cheaper way of getting this video in front of them en masse. That means you might need to consider how you might attract organic traffic on YouTube, how you can get people into your marketing funnel. Which channels Assuming you know the broad subject of your video campaign, you now need to determine which channels will work best for your content and your audience. You will already have this from your marketing persona research, but you need to think about this with a video lens on. You won't be able to set your definitive list of distribution channels at this point, but you will be able to rule some in and out. You need to find out which channels these people use. Do they use YouTube and how? Are they on Facebook? How often do they log in? The best thing to do is to ask and then consider how their media consumption dovetails with your content. For example, while they might spend a lot of time on the BBC website, it's not going to be easy to get your video content onto that site in a way that they will see it. Prioritise your channels based on your content and audience consumption. Then identify and isolate organic and paid distribution opportunities (e.g. LinkedIn organic could be from your company page, key team profiles or in groups; paid could be a sponsored post). Brainstorm your contentStart with a wide list of creative ideas and then narrow them down based on whether they might work on the channels you have selected. Run the ideas past your panel to get their initial feedback – this will enable you to narrow them down and choose the one that is most likely to be successful. Create your contentIt might seem counter-intuitive to only be getting to the content creation part now. However, if you don't skip the previous steps and you let them all inform this one, you'll have a much higher chance of success with your video strategy. Maximise your chances even further by getting your panel involved in signing off the script and storyboard. Modify for distribution channelsIn some instances, you will only focus on one or two distribution channels. In others you will use the same content across multiple channels. We usually use a combination, with one primary channel – the video is made for that channel (e.g. direct mail), but then we use cuts on social media, our website and at events LaunchYou might want to consider putting 10-20% of your budget into a test launch. You can spread this evenly across the channels you have chosen and then adjust your strategy. This means you can use the remaining 80% of your budget more efficiently. However, this doesn't always work – if you're timing your campaign around a certain event, you have to take more of a leap of faith – if you have followed all the previous steps this should be more of a calculated risk. Long tailThis is ideal for evergreen content – just because you have finished the campaign doesn't mean you should finish promoting it – how long will it be relevant? What days, months or weeks of the year will it suddenly be relevant again? How do you promote for that? You can re-use content for many years if you think laterally about it. Report on resultsThis step depends entirely who you have to report to. Even if you don't have to produce a report, it's worth pulling together a summary of results to inform your next campaign. We like to keep it to a single page with metrics – views, view-through-rate, conversion rate etc, and then some qualitative outcomes that we might not have been able to predict:
Distribution is a really important and strategic part of any video campaign, follow these steps to get the most of your video distribution strategy. |
| How to Stay Motivated to Start a Business Posted: 04 Mar 2020 04:45 AM PST 
At the base of every business is the ardor and dedication of an entrepreneur with a goal. Working for yourself is an incredible feat that can be extremely challenging. Many resolutions rest on your shoulders, like the structure of your business, company culture and even whether your company continues to run. It's a lot for one person to carry, and sometimes running a business feels overwhelming. It's not always disorganization or a lack of cash flow that brings a company to its knees. Enthusiasm can be short-lived, and a negative attitude is a silent killer. As our emotions shift, it can be hard to keep that passion for your business steady, especially when new challenges come along. Fortunately, there are many ways to manage and sustain your motivation so you don't burn out. Why is motivation important for an entrepreneur?Motivation is important for an entrepreneur for the same reason fuel is important for a plane: Nothing gets off the ground without it. A business isn't always booming with profit or celebrating achievements. Completing mundane or difficult tasks is a daily necessity, and it's your ambition that will push you through it to keep striving for your goals. "Motivation can boost an entrepreneur's confidence to match their goals," Shagun Chauhan, a business consultant for iFour Technolab, told business.com. "Recognition, esteem and self-actualization fulfill you. Motivated thoughts allow you to think more productively and experiment with new ideas." Your drive is also tied to your dopamine reward pathways, which make you want to keep going or do something again, said Teralyn Sell, licensed psychotherapist and owner of Inner Strength Counseling and Recovery. "Motivation is the workhorse behind your ideas." How do I sustain my motivation when starting a business?Being in the right headspace is important. To stay motivated, you can't allow fear of failure or bumps in the road to knock you off your path. When you focus on your strengths, the future of your company becomes clearer. Your general mindset is a crucial factor in sustaining your positive energy. "Think of the Little Engine That Could," Sell said. "He knew he wanted to get over the mountain to bring the toys to all of the boys and girls on the other side. And when self-doubt began to creep in, the little engine repeated over and over to himself, 'I think I can, I think I can.' As new business owners, it's imperative you do the same." Starting a business can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to stay motivated when you hit a roadblock. When those issues arise, so does fear, which is why protecting your headspace is key to overcoming them. Chauhan recommends breaking down your process to understand exactly what is needed to complete your workload. He also recommends meditation to help you clear out your thoughts and focus on the progress you've made. This reflection strengthens your fortitude against stress or disappointment and pushes you to learn from your past mistakes. "Practice daily mindset shifts," Sell said. "Put out positive energy and create some new neurological pathways to keep you going. It's easy to slip down in the dumps when things get tough, but mental toughness is key to your success." Aside from a good attitude, it's important to surround yourself with like-minded people who share your goals. Not only will this give you a support system, but being around other motivated individuals who encourage you and hold you accountable makes it harder to quit. A good group of successful people can inspire you and keep you on the right path. Don't underestimate the importance of your mission statement either. A strong mission statement that you and your employees understand and believe in can help you set company goals, avoid missteps, and stay motivated when you face rough patches. Finally, if you find that your determination ebbs and flows, this fluctuation might be due to your mental health, explained Sell. When you have an imbalance of neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonin, your enthusiasm is more apt to burn out. "You might start off with a dopamine push like, 'What a great idea!'" Sell said. "But [when you] lack drive or reward, you fizzle out. If you are stressed out, your cortisol might be impacted, and you may feel fatigued or depressed. If this sounds like you, then get those levels checked out before your big idea gets off the ground." [Read related article: How Entrepreneurs Can Stop Burnout Syndrome] What are the types of entrepreneur motivations?Contrary to popular belief, money isn't the only motivator. Entrepreneurial motivations include flexibility, control and legacy, said Jacent Wamala, licensed therapist and owner of Wamala Wellness. Each motivation falls under one of two categories – intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the internal form of motivation that comes from a personal desire to fulfill your goals and achieve individual ambitions and personal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivation is driven by external rewards like money, praise and fame.
Understanding your motivation and what drives you will help you focus on your goals. When your underlying purpose is clear, you won't feel as overwhelmed or discouraged when things change or you encounter obstacles. "Having a solid understanding of why you are starting a business will remind you of the necessity to continue in the face of adversity," Wamala said. What makes a great entrepreneur?One of the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur is resilience. A good businessperson plans for obstacles, learns from failures and chooses to keep moving forward. "Write down your lessons and wins regularly," Wamala said. "Create boundaries to avoid burnout. Seek peer support or mentorship to have a community that you feel understands you. A great entrepreneur is flexible and a lifelong learner." |
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