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8 Essential Skills Every Business Owner Needs to Learn

As an entrepreneur, I make sure to educate other ladypreneurs about the importance of investing in themselves.

While investing in yourself and business might cost you a lot of money, it gives you long-term benefits such as the advantage of building valuable skills that would benefit your business and improving your strengths over time.

Let’s face the truth- the business world has changed from the way it was operated 20 years ago. Running a business on just sheer instinct isn’t enough anymore.

You have to stay on top of growing trends if you want your business to survive and succeed.

And that’s why I have put together this list of business skills and resources that every business owner needs to boost their business.

1. Relationship Building

Building great relationships especially with customers/clients is one of the ways to differentiate your business from competitors.

As a business owner, your relationships will take various forms, as you’ll meet different people; and need to wear different hats to maintain a good relationship.

I’d advise that the major categories of relationships you need to build are with:

Customers/Clients;
Business connections/ fellow entrepreneurs who can grow and support your business; and
Mentors

2. Storytelling

Let’s face it! Everyone loves stories, no matter the age or economic status.

Incorporating storytelling into your business infuses a human touch customers can’t resist. It helps customers establish a human connection with your business.

Some of the advantages of using storytelling for your business include:

It captivates your customers;
It makes your business relatable and approachable; and
It makes your business credible and trust-worthy.

3. Content Creation

Content is king! Yes, that might sound cliché, but it’s true.

Please note that content doesn’t have to be restricted to words alone. It could come in other forms such as videos, infographics, pictures, podcasts, whitepapers, case studies, etc.

Don’t just display the products or services you’re offering. Go a step ahead by also offering value to your customers.

For example, do you sell fashion items? Spice up your brand by posting style inspirations, care of the items you sell, how to rock that item for different occasions, etc.

By providing good content, you not only let your customers know that you have their best interests at heart but also assert that buying from your business is the best decision they could ever make.

4. Customer Service

How many of you never returned to buy from a brand just because of poor customer experience? Lots of you, right?

The same principle applies to your customers too. As business owners, you have to realize that your customers are king, and so, must be treated like royalty.

Providing excellent customer experience is one of the easiest ways to make your business stand out from other businesses.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to retain customers and get referrals. Therefore, ensure you develop your customer skills and treat your customers with respect.

5. Financial Literacy/Management

If you want to run a successful business, you must know how money works. Click To Tweet

This means having an understanding of how much you can spend and how you should spend it.

Every cent you spend and generate must be accounted for. If you don’t know how to calculate your expenditure and revenue, it’s definitely time to become financially literate.

6. Management

When your business begins to grow, it will require expansion. And expansion translates to hiring more people to support you.

Once you do this, you need to ensure that the people on your team are doing what they are supposed to do and that they’re are doing it efficiently. Therefore, don’t be just a business owner.

Add "being a good manager" to the list of skills you need to possess. Click To Tweet

7. Leadership

A good business owner needs to have good leadership skills to run a team of other people.

When you are a good leader, it becomes easy to motivate and inspire greatness in your employees.

With proper leadership, employees, contractors, and even customers will respect you.

Please note that to be a leader isn’t to be bossy to inspire fear. Rather, a good leader brings the best out of people, listens to other people, shows them respect and showing them that you’re capable of leading them to achieve victory.

8. Hiring

I see a lot of business owners make the mistake of hiring the first person that shows an interest in working with/for them or has the qualifications they are looking for.

Unfortunately, that isn’t enough.

While hiring a person with an exemplary portfolio and good work history is good, you have to consider other variables such as their personality, beliefs and whether they are a perfect fit for your business’ culture.

Running a business is very demanding. Identify your weaknesses and invest in skills that that will provide your business with solid foundations.

How to Create a Slaying Social Media Strategy

by Judith Abani

Social media has become the next big thing. One can’t deny the relevance of social media marketing in driving website traffic, creating brand awareness and generating leads.

Statistics show around 90 percent of adults aged 18-29 are on social media. Most people mention social media as their preferred source of communication with businesses.

After reading this, you may consider creating a social media strategy and want to start straight away. However, there are a few things to consider before creating a social media strategy. These pointers ensure you don’t mess up your campaign.

Define Goals and Objectives

The first thing you want to do before coming up with a social media strategy is to have a clearly defined set of goals. You need to ask yourself, ‘what do you want to achieve out of your efforts?’. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day.

So to start, it is important to set SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Your goals will not only determine how much effort you put but also what type of resources you will need to invest in to get certain results. Some social media goals you can consider include:

Increase brand awareness
Higher quality of sales
Improve ROI (return on investment)
Create a loyal fan base

Target Audience

Where are your customers likely to be found? Approximately 70 percent of adults use Facebook but that doesn’t mean your customers are actively engaging with your brand there.

When you target your audience, you get to understand things like who buys your products, their age groups, and income level. It’s important you understand demographics such as age, location, job title, and income level. What are their pain points? Their challenges and needs?

All these are necessary as they inform the type of content to use. But more so, you also need to determine what social media channel will be most effective towards achieving your goals. You can learn more about this through researching essential demographic data for each social media platform. This will help you determine what tactics to employ.

Track, Measure and Improve

Remember those goals you set out to achieve? You will need to find a way of measuring your work to ensure that you are meeting your goals. Metrics are important in social media marketing as they help you understand how your business is doing out in the public.

To select metrics, you ask yourself, ‘what social media metrics are associated with my overall goals?’ Vanity metrics such as likes and followers will not be enough to tell the full story of how well your brand is doing on social media. There are 4 main ways you can measure metrics – reach, engagement, clicks and hashtag performance.

Finally, it is important to often and always check up on how your social media strategy is doing. Change is constant. Platforms such as Facebook change their algorithms all the time. Therefore, there is a need for you to continuously track and measure your online activities to see which areas need improvement.

Investigate your competitors

This is an important step to an effective social media strategy. It’s important you investigate your competitors to see what they’re doing. In doing this, you learn from their failures and successes.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to copy exactly what they’re doing. No! Researching your competitors lets you know what’s working for them so you can adjust and incorporate it into yours. Before creating content, it’s good you investigate what others are doing. You often find new ways to look at the content by analyzing what’s making your competitors successful.

Create engaging content

No one maintains interest in content that is not engaging. Therefore, it is very important to always try and create content that is engaging, but that it also aligned with your brand’s identity. So you need to ask questions such as what type of content should be posted? What about time and frequency? In doing all these things, you will be able to have a successful social media strategy.

Kachi Tila-Adesina: Striking a Balance for Every Season

by Gracious Ernest

Kachi Tila Adesina is an example of Motherland Mogul goals! After growing up in Nigeria, Kachi moved to the UK in 2014 to work as a corporate lawyer. In March 2017, she was admitted as a solicitor of England and Wales.

Beyond her career, Kachi enjoys a wide range of hobbies that have led her towards starting her blog – Kachee Tee. KacheeTee.com is a different kind of lifestyle blog that features everything that women would go through. From relationships, travel, career, beauty, fashion, blogging, food and most recently parenting – this blog has a little bit for everyone.

Through her blog, Kachi hopes to inspire her readers to learn to live intentionally and have fun. In this interview, she gives us a glimpse of her blogging journey and her great plans for the future.

Tell us about your blog – KacheeTee

I started KacheeTee.com with zero ideas of what I was getting into. My need to get an outlet to write was constantly consuming my thoughts. So, I decided to give it a go and two years later, I am still blogging!

Before starting, I was oblivious to how big the blogging industry was. This was good because not knowing the task ahead kept me from quitting earlier on. Over the years, the blog has evolved from just sharing my own stories. I now also share other people’s experiences, journeys, and stories.

Due to my curiosity about a lot of things, my blog has more of a holistic lifestyle blog. It was important to me to create the kind of blog I’d love to read which is easy to read and I can relax while reading.

What was it like publishing your first post?

I published my first blog post on Facebook for my friends to read. Though I was nervous and almost regretted my decision to ‘come out of my shell’, my friends were very receptive. Many of them subscribed to the blog and sent messages of how they were looking forward to the next post. At this point, I couldn’t quit.

It’s been a learning curve and an interesting couple of years. Now, my posts are much different to the initial ones. But, what’s remained consistent is the amount of passion and effort poured into every single post.

What values have been critical to your personal and career growth?

My top three values are – Excellence, Integrity, and Christian faith. I have a genuine desire to truly excel at most things to the best of my ability and this constantly pushes me.

To me, excellence also ties in with impact. I am very keen to inspire, educate and add value in some way. So often, in my career and personal life, I ask “what’s to be gained from this?“. This has guided everything that I do from my career to even on my blog.

I strongly believe, where there’s value, there’s often growth. In all this, I’m conscious of acting with integrity and authenticity – making sure I stay true to who I am and don’t lose my voice. Finally, my Christian faith and beliefs guide me all the way and I believe is very instrumental in my growth.

In everything you do, it's important to strike a fair balance and identify what are your current priorities Click To Tweet

How has your lifestyle blog impacted you?

Launching my blog is definitely one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. But it’s had a lot impact on my life. It’s given me confidence and made me believe in myself a lot more. I’ve also met many amazing people!

But interestingly, I’ve also developed a creative mindset I didn’t think I had. Even when I’m tired, my mind is always spinning all these creative new ideas for the blog.

Overall, the blog has brought a lot of fulfillment in my life. During my 28th birthday – the first after I launched my blog – I received many overwhelming messages from people saying how much I’d inspired them through my blog. This was a great sign of how fulfilling my blog is.

You’re a very busy Motherland Mogul. How do you manage it all?

Two words – balance and support. As an adult, it is important to know how to balance the many things that demand your attention.

In everything you do, it’s important to strike a fair balance and identify what are the current priorities. There have been times when my priority was work or family, and my blog had to take a back seat- and that’s okay! The most important thing is to become organized and resourceful.

It’s also instrumental to have the right kind of support. My husband knows I enjoy being a lawyer and a blogger, therefore, being able to do these things allows me to be a great wife and mother. He’s happy to give his 100 percent support when necessary. I’m also very open to other kinds of support – from outsourcing the house chores to volunteers who edit blog posts.

What kind of partnerships and environments are necessary for bloggers to thrive?

Blogging is hard work! Many bloggers put in time, effort and money to produce great content. However, without engagement from their audience, fellow bloggers, and brands, it becomes tough.

Therefore, support is very important for the growth of a blog. Support can be engaging with the content to partnering with fellow bloggers to get advice and even create content. Though sometimes it may be uncommon for lifestyle bloggers to collaborate with others, it’s important as it helps reach new audiences.

Does living in the diaspora influence your style of blogging in any way?

Living in the UK does influence my style of blogging in a couple of ways relating to content and standards. Knowing that my blog is being read by a diverse set of people, I especially pay attention to ensure my content is relatable, and the language is not overly limited to Nigerian/ African lingua.

This does not mean that I refrain from telling our stories or experiences. On the contrary, living here propels me to tell more of our stories and push for greater representation and diversity in blogging.

Finally, being in the UK exposes me to a higher standard of professionalism and expectations. I’m constantly challenging myself to write better and produce a blog that I can introduce to anyone, anywhere.

What are your goals for the future?

Essentially my goal is to build a blog and platform that is so much bigger than just ‘Kachi’. I plan to do this through increasing readership across Nigeria and wider Africa – as well as Africans in the diaspora.

However, knowing that there is a lot of content out there sometimes scares me. But I’ve realized it’s not just about me. I’m ready to build a team to help me take this blog to the next level in terms of quality and quantity of content. I’d also love to create a network where bloggers can share knowledge and exchange ideas through seminars, workshops, events or even virtually via podcasts.

Finally, I’d love to partner with more brands, companies, and organizations to reach my target audience and add value. From parenting to travel, fashion, lifestyle, and careers – there’s so much opportunity for such mutually benefiting partnerships.

What three movies do you think should definitely have sequels?

Me Before You. I cried so much watching this movie, and perhaps a sequel where I get to laugh a lot might be good. There’s a book sequel now (haven’t read it yet though), so we just might get a movie sequel

Black Panther. I absolutely enjoyed the movie and I think a sequel that further raises the issue of diversity and representation is very much welcome! Rumor has it, there’d be a sequel and I hope we see more of Shuri – loved her.

Pretty Woman. I’m not sure what the plot of the sequel could be, but I’d pay to watch it. Such a classic.

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