Entrepreneurship changed a lot through the course of history and nowadays young entrepreneurs face сompletely different challenges than their peers 10 or even 5 years ago. No one can deny that technological development influenced the responsibilities of all the jobs. Thus, in order to be able to manage a business, staff, and launch successful products entrepreneurs need to enhance their tech competencies to stay competitive when it comes to business opportunities. So here are the skills that will be beneficial to have in your entrepreneur’s resume!
5 Basic Technical Skills for eCommerce Entrepreneurs
Google Analytics
Since it’s the most popular tool to manage the customers’ activity on the website, measure the success of the promotions and track users’ behavior the most of the companies use Google Analytics to gather insights on how their product or service is performing. While it may seem pretty straightforward, there are a lot of settings one needs to be aware of. Running Ad campaigns properly, setting up goals, tracking users are processing to the checkout, utilizing the Tag Manager for creating custom events in addition to the ones that already exist in the system (such as tracking the users who pressed certain buttons, track the order of pressed buttons or actions performed on the website ) are just to name a few. Knowing how to use GA properly and interpret the given results will help to see effective strategies and improve the marketing funnel.
Basic coding skills
While some people may consider this skill not obligatory, learning PHP, Python HTML/CSS, or other core web technologies along with their understanding will significantly reduce the time for putting your ideas into life. You don’t need to become a professional web developer but being able to explain to your contractors the ideas and business logic of how the code should function will help to deliver high-quality projects on time and save additional costs for extra time of your employees. Moreover, with this stack, you will be able to develop simple landing pages on your own and quickly fix some critical issues that may bring your website down.
Project management
It’s one of the most important skills when it comes to working on the tasks that involve people and deadlines. If you are a startup owner sometimes you will act as a project manager as well. So it’s critical to know how to manage people, risks, and deadlines to ensure that your project will be finished in time and you can count on the next investment round.
It’s not about obtaining the certifications (although becoming a project management professional is a well-respected career) but rather to understand how to breakdown the project into parts, manage the task dependencies if several teams are working on the same project and add reasonable time paddings when it’s applicable. Working with any project management software (such as Jira, Trello, or Asana) will give you the benefit of making forecasts and spot the minor things that may potentially ruin the whole project.
Social media marketing
One more essential skill for entrepreneurs is to run up social media marketing activities carefully to be able to make the most from the initial investment. One of the most important things here is to learn how to set up Facebook ads properly. It’s possible to create ads that will run on other social media such as Instagram as well from one account and every entrepreneur should know that.
It’s necessary to know the peculiarities of budget allocation for the campaign such as the wider audience or location, the more budget needs to be allocated while it may happen that it’s not the correct strategy. Also, on Facebook, it’s possible to segment the audience by such parameters as gender, age, interests, and modify the size of target ads recipients.
Prototyping (Wireframing)
Mastering this skill will make your cooperation with designers and developers more productive, as there will be no need to decline another mockup. Being able to properly prototype your idea will make the requirements more clear for people who would fulfill it. It is especially useful when developing digital products and working with interfaces.
Many people perceive it as a skill related to design only but in fact, it’s the ability to schematically describe the core functionality of the interface or the application and dependencies between the users’ actions and their results rather than creating design elements and flows. It’s more about the ability to match the set of features you would like to have with their visual representation and interrelation of all the components of the given task. I.e. if you have an eCommerce website where you want to add new functionality or test some hypothesis by changing the elements look and position, it would allow you to get the final results that satisfy your needs much faster.
There are many tools that facilitate prototyping. Starting from tools where you can organize the screenshots (POP) to the ones that allow modeling the flows based on the device you use (Balsamiq), some people use UML diagrams for prototyping (usually, prototyping an application or a program structure), but you can start prototyping without any devices using just paper, pen, and your imagination.
While in the past everyone knew that in order to be a successful entrepreneur one needs to read and compile the financial reports, manage the budget, and have great entrepreneurial intuition, now it’s not enough. In the upcoming years, this list for sure will expand, however, possessing the above-mentioned skills would give you сomptetitive advantage on the market right now laying the great foundation for further development.
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