This Week in Small Business: Learn from Game of Thrones and an Oklahoma sandwich shop
We’ve scoured the news and blogs throughout the week to bring you this lineup of useful articles. You’ll find tips you can leverage today and information that will keep you ahead of the curve. Marketing and sales Social Media Marketing Have you tried to do a Twitter chat? Brad Friedman says it’s like hosting a party to grow your small business…without the liquor tab, I suppose. If your Pinterest marketing efforts need a kick in the pants, don’t miss these 50 fun ideas. By combining Facebook Ads with email addresses, automation, and predictive analytics, marketers can develop a strong social strategy. Ohad Hecht shows us how it’s done. On the other hand, the London School of Marketing has released a new whitepaper claiming that Facebook advertising is now a “lost cause” for marketers. Content Marketing Top Rank CEO Lee Odden gives us an “A-to-Z” list of content marketing tools we can use. Content Marketing programs can eventually fall into a boring rut. Tracey Parsons suggest four ways to reignite your passion. Email Marketing Although email marketing is somewhat less gory, there are lessons to be learned from Game of Thrones. Growth hacking If you would rather concentrate on growth hacking rather than regular marketing strategies, here are 35 tools to arm yourself with. Tips and tricks of the trade: 13 growth hacks you should be able to use right now…or very soon. Video, SEO, Mobile and more Tiffany Monhollon gives us four signs that we need to be doing a better job tracking marketing ROI. See if #4 rings a bell… Focusing too much on keyword rankings for SEO could lead you down a very bad path. Here are five ways your business could be harmed. Video continues to grow in marketing importance, but which platform is best for you – Wistia, YouTube or Vimeo? Fail fast and kids can smell fake are among the insights outlined in the highlights of a large marketing conference. While on the subject, in case you missed the March Search Marketing Expo West conference in San Jose, here are some takeaways from three speakers. Take your mobile marketing to a new level with deep linking; it will be necessary for ongoing success. The speed at which television is evolving makes it difficult for anyone to fully understand. Noted entrepreneur John Rampton takes a look at how its evolution will impact SEO and marketing. Leadership, management and productivity Google and Amazon are in the middle of some tech version of a Sumo wrestling match. Does the battle benefit small business? The weather outside isn’t so frightful anymore, so it’s time to pull together our summer reading list. Here are 10 marketing books to consider. You’ve claimed your business in Google maps…right? Have you done the same for the Apple Map app? Review this list of the top HR blunders small businesses make and internalize the advice on how to avoid them. A Web.com survey found that small businesses have an advantage over their big box competitors in security issues, and consumers are noticing. Small business staffing is critical. Here are the pros and cons of hiring an agency to handle all of it versus managing the process in-house. Google has warned us about a significant algorithm update (April 21) that will lean heavily toward mobile. Is...
read moreSeven Savvy Tips For Making Your Next Employee, Your Best Employee
Almost 30 percent of the small business owners surveyed in the last NFIB Small Business Economic Trends Report said they had at least one job opening they hadn’t been able to fill. That was one of the highest numbers reported in the last 40 years. If you count yourself among those looking to hire, you may have to do a little more to find the ideal employee than you have had to do in previous years. Review these seven tips and see if you’re missing any opportunities to bring your next MVP onto your team. View recruiting as marketing. You carefully tend to the image and increased reach of your business to enhance your likelihood for boosting sales. You don’t go out looking to make a sale only when your pipeline is empty. Take the same approach to hiring. Make your company appealing and visible to job seekers. Be active on social media. Broadcast the message that yours is a place where people want to work. Treat current employees right; if you do they will tacitly and overtly communicate that they are happy with their jobs. The vibe will spread. Develop a great company culture. You need to provide a workplace where people want to be and be a boss people want to work for. If you’re Mr. or Ms. Grumpy, you have a major problem. Not only will it be difficult to recruit people, it will be difficult to retain people. Sometimes it’s the little, inexpensive perks that can create a “cool factor” that makes yours the place to work, like ice cream every Friday or group outings to an occasional sporting event. Be creative. Let your employees know you have or anticipate having a job opening. Put your needs on your employees’ radars. If you have 10 people working for you, you can have 10 recruiters out scouting candidates for you. Quality people tend to hang out with quality people. If your best workers recommend someone, there’s an excellent chance that the candidate will be a winner. Make it easy to apply. Honestly, most of the great employees have jobs right now. You need to let them contact you after hours. Savvy companies include a “Work for Us” link on their websites. You could also make it one of the options on your voice mail menu. If a candidate needs to come by after normal hours, make it happen. Attend local job fairs. One of the smartest things you can do is to always be in the hiring mode. Keep your feelers out. Sometimes it’s wise to hire a fantastic candidate before you have an opening, for the benefit of your company and to prevent the competition from snagging this gem. Even if you don’t hire immediately, maintain contact and cultivate the leads. Try a temp agency. A lot of wonderful employees have started out as temps. One great quality of people willing to temp is that they aren’t afraid to put themselves out there. They want to work, and that’s the first quality you need for a great employee. Almost everything else can be...
read moreTips and Apps to Assure Your Employees’ Safety and Health
Occupational health and safety: There’s an app for that – and there’s also a month for that! April is National Occupational Safety Month, so it’s a good time to revisit what you are doing to help protect the safety and health of your employees. Not only is protecting your employees from injuries the right thing to do, the cost of workplace injuries is very high in lost productivity, workers’ compensation claims and more. And if you have an app addiction there is software you can load up on your mobile devices to help you with some occupational health and safety functions. Smart Media Innovations offers a free Occupational Health and Safety app for both iOS and Android devices that provides good overviews, training videos, recent safety news and other features. This page of freeware includes some apps related to health and safety, such as the Environment monitor for Android devices, which measures noise levels and the iOS ChemAlert app, which will answer many of your chemical safety questions. The question of compliance Along with the practical matters of making sure your facilities and procedures are designed to keep your team safe, there is also the issue of compliance. Businesses of all sizes need to be certain that they are adhering to the regulations that govern their industry. Generally speaking, there are federal regulations imposed by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) and state regulations. The first question you need to answer is whether you are governed by the general federal OSHA regulations, or the more specific OSHA-approved state regulations. The US Department of Labor will help you out here with its overview of state plans. If your business is regulated by a state plan, you’ll need to find that agency’s website for more information. If your state comes directly under OSHA regulations, the next step is to determine how your business is classified and then begin drilling down to find the regulations that cover your facilities and the type of jobs performed. Again, the Department of Labor has a “Quick Start” webpage that will zero in on your specific industry and help you understand your compliance obligations. A free eBook Of course, quick start guides are exactly what they claim to be and don’t offer a comprehensive assessment. For more details, OSHA has an excellent 56-page PDF “Small Business Handbook” written to “help small business employers meet the legal requirements imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, and achieve an in-compliance status before an OSHA inspection.” A web-based HTML version is here. The document has a good table of contents so you can quickly get to the areas that concern your operation. It also includes excellent checklists that will help you be sure you aren’t overlooking any important details. Finally, although workplace safety gets special attention in April, this is truly one of those 365-days-a-year topics. There is no room for laxity when it comes to protecting our...
read moreHow to Collect Your Overdue Debts
Small business owners are blessed by legions of customers and clients who pay their bills on time without ever having to be reminded. However, sometimes that’s not the case so you need to be ready to deal with people who are ignoring their financial responsibility to you. And because the majority of our customers are never a problem, it’s easy to be unaccustomed and unprepared to solve any payment problems that might arise. Let me start with a general but very important piece of advice: Have all the facets and procedures of your billing and follow-up clearly established and adhered to. This system must run like clockwork to conveniently handle the great customers and to persistently deal with the occasional deadbeat. Don’t tackle billing problems on an ad hoc basis. Be prepared so you don’t have to make it up as you go along. In the same way, always be aware of how much you are owed and how those debts are aging. Let’s outline some principles and strategies to use when you run into payment problems. We’ll start out with the soft touch and then ramp it up. Be personal. If a bill is being ignored make personal contact with the debtor. If your business involves account reps, have the rep make a phone call to see what is happening. When the client attaches a familiar face and voice to the problem, it’s more likely to get resolved. Be knowledgeable. Find out if the company or individual is having financial problems. It’s important to be able to sort out honest people in difficult situations from dishonest or negligent individuals. You may not want to keep the second group as customers. If you have a good customer who has encountered a rough patch, it’s probably worth your time to come up with a payment plan. Be consistent. You need to handle all your billing activities consistently and in a timely manner. I recommend billing as soon as possible after services are rendered or product received. Follow-up notices should go out precisely as scheduled. Define exactly the point at which a person picks up the phone and makes personal contact. This makes the process fair for everyone and ensures that it happens. Be creative. I know a medical group that has a separate department with a separate mailing address called “ABC Medical Associates Collections.” They send out a letter reading something like “ABCMA Collections” has received your bill for $99.” The note then explains the facts of the situation, requests payment within 10 days or the information will be forwarded to a credit reporting agencies. Red “overdue” stamps and highlighter pens also get people’s attention. Be serious. Let your delinquent clients know that you will take them to small claims or superior court, depending on the amount of debt. Or you may want to turn them over to a collection agency or get a lawyer involved. Don’t allow these to be idle threats; be sure you take whatever action you have threatened. You didn’t start your small business to be a bill collector, so none of this is anything you want to do. However, sometimes it becomes necessary. Don’t shrink from your financial responsibility to your...
read moreHow To Find The Best Path To Bring Your Product, Service to Market
It’s an interesting time in product invention and development. When a good idea comes to an inventor or entrepreneur, two opposite paths are being walked today. One is to guard the idea closely, the other is to spread the idea far and wide. The direction you choose depends on what kind of idea you have, how far you have developed it and your resources – both financial and business acumen. Apple is famous for being secretive and filing patents more often than Lady Gaga changes costumes. However, if you need others to work with and put the right spin on your concept, crowdsourcing or networking can be the fastest way to get something accomplished. When you have a physical invention, securing a patent – or at least beginning the process – is important. If your invention is software, the patent laws are rather murky, and quite controversial. You need an expert to let you know your likelihood of receiving a patent. The patent process There aren’t many shortcuts around the patent process. However, the first step in any patent process is seeing if anyone has already patented your idea, or something quite close to it. Google has an excellent patent search feature, so you can enter important words and phrases to see who else has gone down the same path. If you’re certain that you’re onto something truly original and that it qualifies for a patent, you can file the paperwork yourself. You need to be able to fully describe everything about your invention. Nolo Press has a more detailed description of what you’ll need to do. The companies that spend a lot of money advertising to inventors, trying to get them to sign up for their patenting and marketing services, tend to pile up poor user reviews. They receive fees for their services and few inventors ever make money. If you have a great idea that is marketable, people will pay you to help you develop your idea – we call these folks venture capitalists. If, on the other hand, you’re paying fees to people, they are probably the only ones who will ever make money off your idea. The subject of venture capitalists brings us to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. If you have a great idea, the first step is to turn the corner from idea to viable product or service. Cambrian House was one of the pioneers in “open innovation.” They developed technology to crowdsource R&D, product innovation, brand collaboration and business improvement. Others in this general area are Wazoku and Ideatrr. Send in the crowds Once you have an idea that is beginning to look like a viable business, there are many crowdfunding sites to choose from, or you can bootstrap it with the group you have pulled together during the idea crowdsourcing step. Many times, it’s not the “big idea” behind the product or service that determines success; it’s its form and marketability. For example, Isaac Merritt Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine. Elias Howe did and Howe held the original patent. However, it was Singer’s various improvements that made propelled the sewing machine to widespread marketability and popularity. So whether you think you have the “next big thing” percolating in your brain, or just some important tweaks or new applications for an existing product...
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