Business First Family Business, Accounting, Finance, Investing, Marketing And Management
Imagine you’ve got a billion-dollar idea. It’s the idea that the world never had but needs now. This idea is so complex and intricate that it’s almost art. At the same time, the idea is so simple and obvious you can’t believe you hadn’t thought it up before. What is this incredible idea without a solid business plan to make it happen? Is it an investment? A future? A life change? Is it even a certainty? No. It’s still just an idea. Your idea is the seed, but it’s the steps you take to turn that idea from a thought into a business that matters the most.
As an entrepreneur, turning your idea into a business can be a tasking and tiring process. Of course, there are several online entrepreneurship courses to help you. Follow the steps below to turn your idea into a business.
Discover The “Why” Behind What You Do
Your idea should cover the “what” your business will be doing, but it’s also essential to understand the “why?”. Your “why” will be the core values that informed your choice to start a business, and understanding those is essential to building an authentic brand identity around your work.
For example, say you are a remote worker, and you wanted to start a service where you work from other people’s homes to look after their pets during the day. What will you be doing? Passive pet-sitting. But WHY will you be doing that? Because you love animals, and you know your soothing presence around them stops them from feeling anxious when their owners are away. Why is that important to you? Because animals feel the same way people do, and they never deserve to feel alone. And THERE is your why!
Rather than building a brand around “I watch your dog,” you can build a brand around how no creatures deserve to feel scared or anxious. When the “why” behind your idea is clear, your brand will resonate with like-minded people, and you’ll always have a loyal base of customers who believe in the same things you do. To get a little extra help with this process, you can download Dawning Digital’s FREE Branding Starter Kit.
Build A Brand Identity
Have you ever tried to describe a crazy dream you had to someone and mid-way through a sentence, thought “darn, this isn’t so impressive, is it?” That’s probably because ideas can be challenging to communicate effectively without a visual element. That’s where your brand identity comes in! You want to create a set of visual components, like logos, icons, color palettes, and brand fonts, that tell your audience the “why” behind your idea. Going forward, it’s going to be crucial to stick to the brand identity you’ve created at this step so your brand stays recognizable.
Take your time here, and try to develop something that truly resonates with your discovered “why,” as well as appeals to your target audience. We suggest gathering tons of visual inspiration from websites like Pinterest and looking at it all together. Then, pick out what you like about each of the examples you’ve chosen, and start creating from there! By building your visual elements after establishing your brand’s purpose, you’ll be packaging your idea in a way that is beautiful AND meaningful.
Build A Website
What’s the first thing you do when you hear about something new and exciting? You Google it! Now that your idea has been named and dressed up in an appealing brand identity, it’s time to give the brand a home. What better place to do that than the world’s most extensive directory, the internet? Building a website sounds like a scary undertaking if you’re not a trained developer, but in 2022 there’s a wide selection of site-building tools that makes creating your digital space not just easy, but fun too! We’d recommend starting with WordPress, an easy-to-use and incredibly customizable site builder. You can handle this aspect of the idea-to-business process yourself or recruit a web-building team to help out.
Your site has two primary goals. The first one is to communicate who you are adequately. This means your “why” and the details of your offerings, and how interested parties can get involved. Your website needs to communicate the problem your idea solves, and explain how you solve it! The second is to convert. You need to capture your audience, get them interested in who you are, make them desire your offering, and then hook them into conversion with the correct phrase or button at the right time! You can create conversions through your site being easy to navigate, interesting to look at, and containing clear, direct calls to action.
Get Marketing
Now that your idea has a place to live, it’s time to start inviting guests to come to have a look! This means getting your brand out in front of as many eyes as possible and actively inviting your target demographic to come to see something new. There are many ways you can do this, such as mobile marketing, but we’ve found that the best way to build meaningful connections with a large audience is by using social media marketing. Your social media presence will establish a personality for your idea that people become drawn to and invested in. It will also allow you to interact with people through your brand, to show them how authentic the “why” you’ve defined really is. There are a range of freebies and educational blog articles to help make navigating social platforms as a marketer easier. In this step, your idea truly comes alive. It’s not just YOUR idea anymore. It’s a business that’s shared between and experienced by people. Well done! You turned what was a thought into a tangible entity that’s adding value to the world.
If you’ve got entrepreneurship ideas, we think it’s worthwhile trying to show them to the world. After all, there’s so many brilliant ideas you can execute right now. If you choose to take the plunge and follow these steps, your business can have a solid, meaningful foundation upon which to build and grow. These steps can simplify the business starting process. In fact, there are various tools and platforms that can bring your brand from concept to commerce in as little as three months. Certainly, follow these steps to turn your idea into a business and make your dream a reality!
