The hardest part of running a business in Nigeria is not really in attracting customers and getting them to see what you sell, as many thinks, the real result is when you have a perfect strategy to move them from people that make inquiries or first time callers, to warm prospects and finally make them become not only paying but repeated customers’ which is the real sales that drive business growth. I always tell website designers and developers that the era of building an interactive and quality graphics webpages with the purpose of driving traffic to your website has passed, what we are right now is a “conversion era” – learning the working steps to build a website that actually makes sales.

This article will help you understand the ground process of building an online marketing system that attracts targeted buyers who are already looking for what you sell and convert them to real product buyers. This is a sale funnel few SMEs know how to use and as such have ended their marketing struggles.

I would like to share the biggest mistakes you may be making which might be responsible for your low sales.

- Your website is poorly designed and is completely unconnected to your overall marketing objective.
- You have no measurable growth numbers that reveal your real growth drivers; for instance, you don’t know if you are loosing customers because of low traffic t sales, how people find your website online, why they buy your products or how many competitors you have, an alternative providers your customers might be running to, etc. This is very important for SME owners to scale up faster on a lean budget.
- You don’t have a lead collection strategy and an email marketing plan to connect with your customers weekly.
- You don’t have a content marketing plan which is the first stage of growth planning for early startups.
- You think cash is the biggest resources to market your budget to new customers.

If any of these mistakes apply to your business, it’s time to do a critical analysis and take a “U” turn, otherwise, you may be running a business you are not in charge of, which could fail at some point in the future. Failure is not even the problem of SMEs right now but the fact that they don’t even know the specific reasons their business didn’t grow is a major concern; which means there is the tendency that their next startup could fail if such errors aren’t corrected.

In my few years of studying successful startup growth and marketing strategies, I realised that there are just three key skills new business owners must master if they want to grow their business and scale to a multi-million Naira income status. These skills are not thought in business schools, rather you learn them by following successful business strategies online.

Here are the growth driving skills every successful startup CEOs have: Learn more: www.powpedia.com