DIY Marketing Month: Time for Small Businesses To Break Down Walls!
June is do-it-yourself (DIY) marketing month, so let me toss an idea out to you: How about putting on your classiest office attire – suits for guys, dresses for gals – printing out some flyers for your business, attaching the flyers to your clothes and then go running in a local race. Make the race a marathon and not only will you be promoting your small business, you’ll be getting yourself in fantastic shape! Sound crazy? Well, a guy in East Northport, New York is pretty much doing just that, except he’s selling out the ad space on his clothing. The crazy idea got him a major write-up in Runner’s World, plus he’s making some extra money through the ad sales. A much more common variation of this is to outfit your car with branding that promotes your small business. At the high end, you have car wrappers and at the low end you have magnetic signs. Turning your car into a rolling advertisement for your small business can be very cost effective. According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, one vehicle wrap can generate as many as 30,000 to 70,000 impressions a day. Of course that is highly dependent on how much driving is done and the roads traveled. In any case, when compared to the cost of impressions generated through other advertising media, wrapping your car has the lowest cost. I’m tossing this idea out there because as a small business owner you need to leverage the areas where you have a potential advantage over – or equality with – big businesses. Thinking a little “outside the box” is one of those areas. Big business likes more conservative marketing plays. Social media is truly the great equalizer between big and small business. You can devise DIY social media campaigns that resonate with your prospects just as easily as any major corporation. In 2014 Constant Contact sponsored the Small Business Online Marketing Contest hosted by the City of Chicago Treasurer’s Office. The winning entry was designed to boost Nut Health’s followers and likes on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. People could win a $100 Whole Foods gift card if they “liked” the Facebook page and pledged to add 1.5 ounces of nuts to their diets. Nut Health boosted its Facebook likes for 129 to 2,433 and generated 729,000 impressions with 6,400 interactions by 5,700 unique users. The women’s clothing boutique, Milk Handmade, moved inventory, rewarded its best customers and booked $1,000 in sales with a “Secret Sale” that allowed customers to take half off everything in the sales rack. The offer only went out to its email list and it used the simple subject line, “Our Little Secret.” It got a 43 percent open rate and 10 percent click-through rate. These are just a few of the kinds of ideas small businesses can try during DIY marketing month. I would only add one cautionary note: Don’t let June be the only month when you work hard to come up with creative DIY marketing ideas! Image: The Model Mill (Reeve 062828), ©2006 National Museum of Health and Medicine, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: The graves of failed startups, Facebook’s new local marketing and rockin’ but humble women entrepreneurs
Leadership, management and productivity Whistle through the graveyard of epic startup fails at autopsy.io. Learn from the mistakes of others…before it’s too late! General Stanley McChrystal knows what’s required of leadership if you want people to go to war with you. He gives good advice in this short video. Bosses like to play it safe – leaders practice taking risks. Discover seven ways to go from boss to leader. There wouldn’t be a company if you didn’t start it, but are you the best person to lead it into its next stage of growth? Brains can be bought, but hearts and minds have to be won. Leadership lessons from Caroline Lim. Ron Karr poses some questions for us to answer so we can change our attitudes and find ways to succeed even with limited resources. Marketing and sales Email marketing still rules. Here are 10 simple tips that will make yours more effective in your small business. Not everyone has the talent or knowledge to be a social media manager. This article runs down five must-have skills. Are you planning to stage an event? Check out these five ways to use Twitter to get the publicity and signups you need. And speaking of Twitter, everything you wanted to know about growing your Twitter following but were afraid to ask will probably be in this extensive curated guide. Recycle. Reuse: How to Optimize Your Older Blog Content for Long Tail Conversion. Find out where small business is headed in the world of social media marketing in this article with graphs and everything. With its “Place Tips,” Facebook is making a huge play in mobile local marketing. Can it benefit your small business? Believe it or not, there is power in hashtags. They propelled one Twitter chat to reaching 49,993,695 people in one year. They’re calling the under 35 group “Generation C” for “creation, curation, connection, and community.” Learn how to reach them with your YouTube content. How important is mobile marketing? It now accounts for 45 percent of all email clicks and 22 percent of all email-generated revenue. And this MarketingLand article puts the global mobile movement into some telling statistics. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Emily Weiss is one of the women who was unhappy with the beauty industry. When she started her skincare and beauty products line, Glossier, she did it differently. Is the ideal person to help you with your startup not someone you particularly like? If so, you need to check out these four tips. Knowledge is power. Here are five reasons many small businesses fail in their first year. And continuing with the numbered list motif, here are seven myths entrepreneurs should walk away from. Okay ladies, are you ready to turn your side hustle into your official small business? Here’s a checklist to consider. Creative ideas are the coin of the realm today. Josh Linker shares his perspectives on how to nurture and grow them. Female entrepreneurs are too modest, according to a new study by Cambridge University, despite beating their male counterparts on most entrepreneurial traits! Politics, government and the economy Small business owners are reporting sales up over the last three months. Let’s keep the forward momentum. The good news was echoed by job opening numbers – they hit a record high. Travis...
read moreAre You Ready if Obama Redefines ‘Exempt’ Employees?
If you watch any of the true crime shows, you’ll notice that when the bad guys gain entry to a home, they usually break in through the back door. Politicians operate the same way. We’re seeing that right now with President Obama giving marching orders to his regulators and administrators with the hopes of achieving goals that he cannot accomplish through democratic, constitutional means. One of these that’s coming up soon could severely reduce the profitability of many small businesses. It all has to do with employees who are classified as “exempt.” These are salaried workers who are categorized as either administrative, executive or professional, and make a minimum of $455 per week, or $23,660 per year. When those requirements are met, these employees need not be paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours per week. Minimum salary could more than double President Obama wants to increase the minimum salary requirement in this equation. The numbers being discussed range from $50,000 per year to as high as $56,000 per year. (Can you tell that most of the advocates for a much higher salary threshold live and work in the Washington D.C. area, where the salary-reality is out of whack compared to most areas of the nation?) Unable to push through a wholesale raise in the federal minimum wage, President Obama is using the regulatory authority of the Department of Labor in an attempt to force employers to raise wages. Small business, big business and workers in both realms would feel the effects of this change. I don’t have a crystal ball to accurately predict what the outcome will be if the DOL is able to double the salary threshold. However, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most employers will simply reassign workers or reclassify these positions as hourly and cap hours below 40 to avoid overtime costs. (Ironically, many employees have already had their hours reduced to less than 30 to avoid Obamacare mandates. The president must realize that these measures end up hurting workers more than helping them. Right?) Flexibility may be lost Generally, these kinds of salaried positions give greater flexibility to both employers and employees. One week, extra hours may be required. The next week, fewer hours may be necessary. At every place where I’ve worked, employers understand this and allow their exempt employees to take time off after they have pulled long shifts. Further, some states have already set a higher salary threshold and this is how our republic is supposed to work. In the same way, many states have set a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage. Again, this is the way framers envisioned the US Constitution functioning, and if allowed to work, it works! I think the entire debate reflects how poorly politicians understand business, economics and management. Most business leaders know that iron-fist, top-down management is counter productive. However, our elected officials in Washington operate under the misguided belief that they know what is best for everyone: Anything deemed bad must be outlawed, anything deemed good must be...
read moreDon’t Let ‘Not a problem’ Become Your Small Business’ Problem
“It’s my pleasure.” Those words cost nothing and they should be part of the DNA for any company. They should roll off the lips of retail and service industry employees automatically. And even in B2B settings, the sentiment they express should be part of all customer interactions. You’ll hear these three words if you’re spending $500-plus a night at the Ritz-Carlton. You’ll also hear them if you buy a $5 chicken sandwich lunch at Chick-fil-A. In my opening paragraph I used the word “automatically” and I think it’s the key to great customer service. However, not only should expressing something like, “It’s my pleasure” be automatic, anticipating the customer’s need should also be automatic. And to make it automatic, it must be made proactive. Let me give you an example. I was in a well-known high-end restaurant not long ago and found myself in a situation where getting standard items like butter and a glass of water was like pulling teeth. Each time I asked for something, the waiter responded, “No problem.” Well, it might not have been a problem for the waiter, but it was becoming a problem for me, and other customers. This small situation illustrates two of the points I’d like to make. First, the standard needs of the diners in this restaurant should always be anticipated. The wait staff is certainly in a position to proactively anticipate details like the need for water and butter. When customers have to make a specific request what should be standard, it degrades the experience. But it can get much worse. Consider this: If customers have to ask for something, then on a certain percentage of those requests, the server is going to get distracted and forget. It’s just human nature. When that happens, the customer either asks again or just drops it. In either case, the customer is left with a bad impression – the kind of ill will that gets mentioned on review sites like Yelp. The second point I’d like to make concerns manners and etiquette. “It’s my pleasure” is a phrase that works just as well at the Ritz as it does Chick-fil-A. “No problem” is not an equivalent phrase. I understand – and welcome – the cordial familiarity we have in our country, but when you’re serving the public, you need to pattern your language in a way that is pleasing to people from all backgrounds and with a wide range of expectations. Further, it’s always good to think about what idioms like “No problem” truly mean in their literal sense. Would my waiter have said, “It’s not a problem for me to get you a few pats of butter”? I hope not. He wasn’t being asked to jump through a flaming hoop. If he expected to get a good tip, getting the butter should not have only been “no problem” it should have been his “pleasure.” I recently heard a waiter discuss how some of his customers once objected to his greeting. He said something like “Hi guys, I’m Charlie and I’ll be serving you.” The customers were all somewhat older women on this occasion, and they told him that they didn’t like being called “guys.” He realized that he needed to have a standard greeting that was polite, welcoming and suitable for...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Curating content, enlightening leadership faux pas and get into a top Chinese University
Find out why Americans prefer NOT to work for a family-owned business. (Is yours family owned?) Discover what’s really important about content curating. Add these three things to your to-do list today, and while you’re at it we have six leadership mistakes you need to learn from. Leadership, management and productivity This article on leadership really resonated with people this week. It outlines six mistakes that teach important lessons. There’s no shortage of things to get done when you own your own business. But take a moment and double check if these three items are on your to-do list. They are closely related to success. SaaS (software as a service) can help you save a lot of time and money – especially if you consider your time as money. Check out these 10 online invoicing services for your small business. Digital marketing strategist Sam Edwards lists six attributes required for effective leadership…and they all start with the letter “c.” Big Bird would approve. If you haven’t moved your invoicing online yet, review these 10 options. This may reflect on the way some manage their small businesses: Americans prefer not to work for a family-owned company. Off loading risk via insurance, developing the right systems and using solid contract procedures are some of the ways you can reduce risk in your small business. Small Business Basics: How to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a marketing campaign. Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Okay, then are you smart enough to get into one of China’s top universities? Take the test and see. Do you need to bring in some managers from outside your core group? It happens in a lot of startups. Here’s guidance. Every small business owner should be able to implement these four ways to make leadership development part of their company culture. Marketing and sales This 2015 B2C marketing survey is nearly 40 pages long. You can download it to see where we are and get recommendations on where we should go. More on the topic: Michael Brenner, B2B marketing expert, opines on creativity, technology and the future of storytelling. One seminal truth he shares: The purpose of content marketing is to earn your audience instead of buy it. Here are four things that you really need to understand about content curating. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then these five steps for getting massive engagement with your visual content should pay off handsomely. This podcast and accompanying article reveals the inside information on Twitter marketing by the author of Twitter Power 3.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. You bust your buns getting people to your website, only to have them bounce before they get to your good stuff. Here are 14 ways to reduce your bounce and increase engagement on your ecommerce site. Pay-per-click advertising can really level the playing field between big and small businesses. Here are tips to give your small business the edge. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Tim Berry, Founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software and bplans.com, says there are three dangerous myths associated with entrepreneurship. See if you agree. Which US city has the highest percentage of women-led startups? If you think the answer is obvious, fahgettaboudit! Finding a pain point and...
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