Starting a small business is a great way to get financial independence as well as sovereignty over your career. However, starting a small business is much more difficult than merely coming up with a name for your business and a product or service to sell. Being a business owner is liberating, but it comes with a lot of responsibility as well.

If you’re planning on starting your own business, you have a long road ahead of you, but it’s a road that can lead to great success and happiness. However, running your own business means you’ll have to be a jack of all trades for your company in the early stages. You have to come up with a business model, find your niche, develop a marketing strategy, and find ways to boost your influence and credibility in your industry. Continue reading to get some tips to help you launch a successful business.

Find your niche.

While being a small business owner is rewarding, it’s far from easy. From the very beginning, you have to have a plan to grow your brand so you can compete with other local businesses that target the same customer base.

One of the most important steps of planning your business is finding your niche in your industry. For instance, if you wanted to open a pawn shop, you could grow a business selling return pallets of B stock goods. B stock goods are products that are like-new but have were returned for a reason other than defectiveness.

When people return products—even if the products are in perfect condition—the retailer can’t sell them at full price. Seling B Stock products in your pawn store would set you apart from many of the local businesses in the pawn industry because you’ll also have new products for sale. As a liquidator, you can get truckloads of premium quality goods at a fraction of their value and make a profit selling them below retail value.

Finding your niche is all about finding ways to separate your business from your competitors. When your business has a distinguishable business model, it has the potential to grow a cultic customer base.

1. Get the proper licenses.

When you launch your small business, you want to make sure you do it legitimately, and that means you have to properly register your business with your state and get the proper licenses. Even though the United States is a free market country, you still have to go through the proper channels to launch your company.

2. Seek legal advice.

If you’re a newbie small business owner, you should consider getting legal advice to ensure you don’t skip any steps when launching your company. Corporate lawyers like Malliha Wilson work to help their clients stay in compliance with local, state, and federal regulations. You may not be a fan of lawyers, but as a small business owner, your business lawyer could be your best friend.

3. Develop a social media marketing strategy.

From the moment you think of starting a business, you need to start working on your marketing strategy as well. Visibility is everything from small businesses, so if you want to grow your customer base, you have to make marketing a top priority. Of all the clever marketing strategies for small businesses, using social media is the most effective.

Average Joes and Janes have used various social media channels to launch burgeoning careers as social media influencers. Big businesses go for big-name celebrities to market their brands. However, small businesses often utilize social media influencers to increase brand awareness and generate website traffic.

You may think that you need a large budget to market effectively, but nothing could be further from the truth. Just like you can travel to Hawaii without flying, you can market without a single dime. Paid ads do indeed generate more traffic than regular social media posts.

However, you can start marketing within your social media networks and encourage others in your network to share your posts. You should also give out samples of your products to some of your friends and family so they can share your products on social media with people within their social networks. Even if you do decide to boost your social media posts by paying for boosting, it will cost a fraction of what a 30-second spot on television costs.

4. Create content.

You can also use blog posts as a way to establish your company’s credibility as an industry expert. Posting engaging content is a great way to climb up search engine rankings and generate website traffic. You can also use podcasts and Youtube videos to put out content about your industry. The key is to create engaging, informative content that shows your company’s expertise.

5. Promote customer loyalty.

Of course, the most important element of your business is customers, and while all companies want to bring in new customers, for small businesses, loyal customers are more reliable. Even though you want to increase brand awareness and visibility and grow your customer base, it would be a good idea to focus on creating loyal customers.

One of the best ways to promote customer loyalty is to offer discounts and freebies to your customer base. The more incentives you offer your existing customers, the more likely they are to frequent your small business regularly.

Also, it’s a good idea to offer discounts to your customers for bringing new customers—word of mouth is still the best marketing strategy. When your loyal customers bring referrals to you, they’re really doing most of your marketing for you.

Running a small business isn’t for the fate of heart. However, entrepreneurs find ways to set their small businesses apart from their competition. If you want to make a lot of money as a business owner, you have to find your niche, develop a social media marketing strategy, and promote customer loyalty.