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10 Golden Rules for Digital Entrepreneurs of This Decade Digital private-enterprise cultivates as internet access boosts. Discover what you require in order to commence an online production

By Prasad Shejale

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Someone has rightly said "A true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.' Well, that's true. In a way, they are also dreamers, the only difference being that they take their dreams very seriously, put in efforts and work on it to transform them into a reality.

It takes a lot of efforts, dedication, focus and sacrifices, to be an entrepreneur and, a successful one.

Here are listed some fundamental basis that can help you sail through this bumpy ride in digital world and ace your way to the top.

1. Customer Is King

This is true for anyone, whether you are a digital entrepreneur or any other business owner. Customer experience is the most crucial aspect that defines the success of your venture. It is important to be abreast with customer feedback and alter your strategies when required. It is necessary to cater to consumer's concerns rapidly to avoid any surplus consequences that can deeply affect the business. Building client loyalty should always be the main concern as it is reasonably much easier to retain old customers than attracting new ones.

2. Think Digital First

As a digital entrepreneur, one must always work around the digital innovations to build a universal business. Also, it's essential to always have internet as precedence whenever you plan strategies. The new-age consumers are born with internet around them and their first impulse has always been the internet. You need to adopt with this behaviour too. Since your customers are on digital platforms, you need to be able to tap every opportunity to connect with them. As customers drastically shift to digital platform to meet their demands, it is also crucial to understand this and the changing customer journeys. This journey has been rightly explained in Kotler's 5A model – awareness, appeal, ask, act and advocate. All these stages have to be considered for digital execution and tweaked if necessary.

3. Understand The Secret Ingredients For Effective Content

The process of developing effective content isn't easy. It starts with in-depth research and analysis of data. It's vital to understand the brand's core values when creating content. It is also equally important to understand the brand's target audience and their traits while developing the right content. This will help in distributing personalised experiences to target audience. While we take care of all these things, the content needs to be creative, appealing and interesting for the consumers. Overall strategy planning must be done accordingly to deliver a flexible plan which best suits the brand's personality as well as keeps up with the consumer expectations. Storytelling is a key-skill to connect with the audience.

4. Be Present And Active Everywhere

In today's time, businesses need to stay active on traditional as well as modern platforms since your audience is everywhere and you surely don't want to miss out any opportunity to convey your message to your consumers. Focus on devising an integrated marketing communication plan that considers all possible touchpoints and varied personas of your audiences while ensuring that the brand values and style is not lost. With the importance of social media rising at warp speed, almost all businesses have joined these platforms to get maximum reach and create a higher impact on the audiences with suitable content.

5. Internationalise SEO

With the rising importance and popularity of vernacular content, multilingual SEO is something that can significantly help your brand more searchable across various markets. It helps you to tap multiple locations, languages and hence widen your reach that is beneficial for both, the business as well as customers. It also provides your brand with a great platform for showcasing your skills and capabilities on a global level.

6. Measure Channels

As a digital entrepreneur, you should track the content post delivery to study its reach and impact. Various tools are available to monitor your content and get useful insights. This will help you understand and loopholes and rectify them in future strategies. Also, it enables you to stay on track and recognise the effectiveness of multiple channels you use for sharing content.

7. Accept Failure

Failure is an inseparable part of a business, and one should always accept downfalls (if any) and learn from them. It should never be considered as the end. Instead, it should push you to begin afresh, and better. Learning from the mistakes and using them for designing your future steps will always help you flourish and grow in the ecosystem. Accept any failures and never ever let them stop you or divert you from your journey.

8. Hire The Right Talent

Having a good team of people who believe in you and your vision is bound to thrive and grow. Your team is the most critical part of your dream that can help you turn it into a reality. Hence, it is essential to pay special attention to hiring the right set of talent. Your responsibilities don't end with just hiring the talent. You need to keep them motivated and interested in the work to maintain consistency and gain fruitful results.

9. Stay Updated

In this fast-growing world, tracking trends and keeping up with them truly helps to stay one step ahead in the game. Also, with trends, one needs to be adaptive too. Since trends are often short-lived, they need to be picked up quickly and acted upon at the earliest to achieve maximum benefit. However, you should be careful with the usage of trends and understand it correctly before implementing it in your strategies to avoid any backlash. Apart from that, you should always be updated about the happenings of your industry. It can help you design as well as tweak your strategies from time to time and help you keep your business in sync with the changing consumer preferences/ choices.

10. Personalisation

The new age consumers are digital centric and have wavering choices.To target such audience; brands must offer unique yet personalised experience to retain their attention. These customers are also very vocal about their opinions and don't hesitate to talk about their likes/ dislikes on online platforms. Hence you should be very careful when introducing the product/service. Focus on providing quick resolution to any issues raised to avoid unwanted online disputes which can hamper the public image of the brand.

Prasad Shejale

Founder & CEO, Logicserve Digital

Prasad Shejale, Founder and CEO of Logicserve Digital, is a lover of all things digital. For him, digital is a huge universe with abundant possibilities of using every tool and platform for the benefit of end customers.

An IIT Chennai alumnus, he has been instrumental in growing a small team of the company into a high performing, result-oriented group. He brings with him a vast experience and exposure to Indian as well as Global digital space. His sound knowledge of the industry and his intuitiveness makes him a go-to person for any solutions and converting ideas into reality.

Prasad is an expert in product innovation & management, data modelling & predictive analytics and has been an influential leader in scaling up business ventures.

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