6 Technical Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Learn

In an increasingly fast-paced world, becoming an entrepreneur is tougher than ever. Having soft skills is no longer enough for a business owner to succeed in the entrepreneurial realm.

There are many types of skills needed to be an entrepreneur.  You’ve to be a good decision-maker, understand finances, and practice good productivity habits. You also need to learn to delegate and possess critical thinking skills. You must Let’s look at some of the best technical skills every entrepreneur needs.

1. Social Media Marketing

It is a well-known fact that people commonly browse social media channels when browsing the internet. Nowadays, the majority of your target audience uses social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can, and should, advertise your brand to a larger audience by using social media to ensure your business reaches people who may want your products. Customers can write comments on social networking sites, which helps build customer rapport.

With the use of YouTube videos, Instagram reels, TikToks, and other visual media, you can easily spread the message of your brand. Social media interaction not only establishes a brand identity, but it often brings more traffic to your website, which can result in more sales. Some social media platforms, such as Instagram, even offer options for sellers to post their products directly on the platform without using a website or other selling platform. Social media can help you market your business to a broader audience.

Here are a few steps that entrepreneurs can take to use social media marketing effectively:

1. Do research. You may better understand which social media platform  would be best for your brand by researching each option, its capabilities, and its general audiences. For example, the audience of LinkedIn (a professional networking site used to connect with fellow professionals and apply for jobs) compared to the audience of Pinterest (a craft and hobby site intended to create digital mood and inspiration boards) will be completely different. Depending on your business, your business may be more compatible with one social media platform over another.
2. Create consistency in your posting structure. Create content at regular intervals and schedule your posts according to time zones in which your target audience will be online. Monitor the analytics of those posts and determine what day, and what time of day, your posts perform best. Structure your posting schedule around the results of your analytics. If your posts perform better in the afternoon, schedule posts for the afternoon.
3. Explore sponsored advertising opportunities. One example of this is Facebook ads.
4. Consider what tools you use, and how they translate to social media creation. To optimize your social media marketing, be sure to research all of the tools available to you when it comes to content creation, designing logos and graphics, and post scheduling. You may schedule your posts using Buffer, for example. For designing posts, Canva is fantastic.
5. Measure your performance using analytics tools. Receive reports on your followers, page views, likes, comments, shares, and top hashtags. You can make use of tools such as HubSpot and Google Analytics. Additionally, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have built-in analytics systems.

2. Remote Project Management Tools

Today’s startups employ people working remotely from all around the world. To have a competitive edge as an entrepreneur, you need to understand how to use and manage them.

Slack, for example, is a fantastic project management tool. You can create new tasks and distribute them to your team. You can send reminders to your team members to keep them on track. Slack also offers file management tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and One Drive. Within Slack, you may create multiple channels for different tasks and teams.

Here are a few tips for getting better at using Slack:

1. To navigate quickly, use shortcuts.
2. Use SlackBot to create reminders.
3. Use the “deep work” option to eliminate distractions.
4. Organize your channels. One way to organize them is by department. For example, the marketing department might have a separate section.

3. Basic SEO

Websites that have been optimized for search engines are ranked higher by Google. This not only lifts your company’s website but also helps it appear more reliable source. SEO makes use of keywords to make your websites more visible. Your website will outrank rival websites by using optimized language, giving you more business opportunities. SEO is essential for startup websites to increase sales.

The biggest error that marketers make is assuming that algorithms are able to make their content broadly available without the help of SEO. This is false; SEO optimization of a website is very important.

4. Data Analysis

You can make sense of every decision that your customers make with the help of data analysis. Understanding data, such as informed reports from Google Analytics, can help you tailor your business to your clientele and understand how to make business decisions more effectively and efficiently. Understanding the trends and patterns that data analytics reveal helps enhance the consumer experience, as well. By examining the reasons why customers rejected their product or service, companies will be better able to eliminate distractions.

Data analysis answers various questions, such as:

1. Which promotional offers are most effective?
2. Why are the customers not making purchases?
3. What web pages (or products) are visited most often?
4. What is the average order amount?

5. Basic Coding

Although it’s simple to hire an IT professional for coding, business owners who are familiar with the basics typically have an edge.  An entrepreneur can quickly address simple problems without the need for assistance from a third-party vendor. For instance, understanding Java can assist business owners in understanding website development. Python, on the other hand, is one of the most widely learned programming languages.

Even if you have a tech team, learning to code can help you communicate with customers more effectively by understanding their problems and developing a better strategy to enhance production.

6. Email Marketing

Marketing is a way to communicate your message to your target audience. Email marketing communicates commercial messages via email. This includes informing consumers—or interested individuals—about new product launches, promotional offers, discounts, partnership opportunities, and affiliate opportunities, as well as announcing other business-related news or sending thank-you notes.

Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of advertising, despite being one of the oldest, as a result of cell phones. Now that email is available easily, people check their email as frequently as they check social media. And, often, consumers expect to find email deals for businesses. Marketing via email has the potential to be one of the most profitable ways of marketing for small businesses if done correctly.

Some dos and don’ts of email marketing:

1. Instead of purchasing an email list, encourage consumers and clients to sign up voluntarily.
2. Send a welcome message as soon as they subscribe.
3. Instead of sending generic messages to everyone, segment your target audience and provide targeted messages based on their wants and needs.
4. Recognize the time zones of your customers. Pick the ideal time of day to send emails. Sending them in the morning before people leave for work or in the evening after they get back is generally encouraged. But, this depends on what type of communication you hope to provide.
5. Only send the email after you’ve double-checked it. Watch out for broken links and typos. Be considerate of your audience, and be sure to have someone else proofread your email to be aware of any blind spots you may have.
6. Use reports and analytics to gain insight.

7. UX/UI Design

UX/UI Design is critical for entrepreneurs as it directly influences how customers perceive and interact with their products or services. Good UX/UI design enhances user satisfaction by improving usability, accessibility, and the pleasure derived in the interaction between user and product. It plays a crucial role in making a user’s journey smooth, intuitive, and enjoyable, thus directly influencing conversion rates and customer retention.

As entrepreneurs typically start with a limited user base, optimizing UX/UI design can be the differentiator that drives growth and fosters user loyalty. Furthermore, it fosters a deeper understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and pain points, enabling entrepreneurs to make data-driven decisions.

Lastly, UX/UI design is cost-effective, as addressing issues at the design stage is often cheaper and less time-consuming than resolving them post-launch. Therefore, having UX/UI design skills is vital for entrepreneurs aiming to create high-impact products or services.

This article was first published in 2022 but has been updated and expanded.

Also read:

10 Essential Skills Needed to Be an Entrepreneur

How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills in Entrepreneurship

7 Critical Thinking Skills Needed for Entrepreneurship

Pirbhat Haddad

Staff Writer: Pirbhat is a digital content creator and a writer. She began her small venture at the age of 16. Although she had to quit it, she ended up learning a lot about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Her educational background in Business administration has provided her with an adequate amount of knowledge on a vast variety of subjects. She now likes to talk about developing productive habits, succeeding with people by studying people skills as well as applying marketing strategies.