Personal branding and social media: The potent one-two punch
A smart personal branding and social media program make it easy for people to find your needle in the haystack – whether that “needle” is you personally or your business. There has been a growing trend in recent years to associate business owners – their personal brands – with the companies they run. This is true for organizations both big and small. This may seem like it makes it more difficult to elevate the exposure of your company, and there is some truth in that. However, this slight disadvantage is outweighed by the fact that your personal brand is portable; you take it with you no matter what your current pursuit might be. Personal brand, social media symbiosis This underscores the importance of properly managing the connection between personal branding and social media. To do this you must: Establish your personal presence on the major social media platforms, Launch a website with a URL built around your name, such as SusanSolovic.com, and Claim the email address firstname@firstnamelastname.com. I know that it’s not a perfect world and getting an ideal exact match for your name on all of these platforms and as the domain name for your website, might not be possible. The easiest way to lessen this problem is to start by finding the best possible domain name available for your name. That will make it somewhat easier to achieve a good measure of consistency across all the platforms where you are present. Let’s continue to examine the importance of consistency. Not only do you want to develop a naming scheme that gives you the maximum amount of personal brand consistency across the Internet, you want consistent words and images as well. Social media 911 Some of you may be thinking that these are minor points, but let me give you a problem I encounter almost every day: I want to credit a someone who has written what I consider to be a good article and share the author’s Twitter handle. Often, the author’s Twitter handle will not be included in the biographical notes of the article – if any biographical information is offered. In this case, I’ll try to find the author on Twitter. Usually this is fairly easy, but many times I find an individual who has two or three different Twitter accounts. If (and this is a big if) I decide to dig more deeply, I often discover that various accounts have been started and then abandoned. When this happens I usually give up on crediting the author. That’s too bad for the person who took the time to write an otherwise good article. However, if accounts are consistent and the person’s head shot is consistent, then it is easy to identify the right person. It also sends a unified message to everyone who visits these various profiles and websites. Attention to brand details If you have ever worked with a large corporation, you know how much attention they pay to the care and feeding of their brand image. They insist on certain colors, a specific logo, a style of language, etc. Why do they do this? Because it’s good business. Giving your customers and prospects any visual or verbal clues that cause them to be confused about your brand will have, in the long run, a...
read moreThis week in small business: Up your e-commerce game
While there is a lot of good general information in this week’s batch of curated content, I think anyone involved in e-commerce is going to be especially pleased with many of the offerings. Leadership, management, and productivity The best sure-fire way to boost the bottom line is to reduce costs. If you’re into e-commerce, Munira Rangwala’s instant money saving tips will be welcome indeed. Laura Emily Dunn interviews Lisa J. Donahue, Managing Director, AlixPartners, for her Women in Business Q&A series. It was a pile of bad news that ultimately sparked Karen Lynch’s success. Suzanne Bearne tells the story in BBC News. Think you should move your business? Zuckerberg says he wished he would have stayed in Boston. Patrick Riley explores the issue in “Loyalty vs. Location: Why Startup Founders Should Stay Put.” Marketing and sales Anyone involved in e-commerce needs to hear what Armando Roggio has to say about the nine critical content marketing tasks for e-commerce. And how about strategies to keep your e-commerce customers coming back? Lindsay Kent gives us five ways to build e-commerce brand loyalty. The simpler the better and that makes George Stenitzer’s one-page content marketing strategy very appealing. Alfred Lua reveals the 60 marketing tools the guys at Buffer use. I like that Tamanna Mishra focused on B2B companies in her article on 2017 social media trends. Neil Patel is one of the top experts on digital marketing, so you need to read what he has to say about homepage SEO. Writing for Forbes, Brock Blake outlines five ways small business owners can leverage social media for growth. April the Giraffe must have world-class marketing and PR people behind her. Find out how April became an Internet sensation in this article by Tor Constantino. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Discover what you missed this time around and be ready for the end of the next quarter! Read Chris Myers’ Forbes piece, “Three Things That Should Be On Every Entrepreneur’s End-Of-Quarter To-Do List.” Take your elevator pitch to the next level. Check out Peter Economy’s article on how one entrepreneur got Mark Cuban’s attention in a matter of minutes. I give Leah Wald an “A” for writing on a topic that I’ve never seen addressed before: “Determining The Right Amount Of Transparency For Your Startup. The countdown is happening – 10, 9, 8… – so you want to make sure everything is in order. You need Peter Schroeder’s 55 pre-launch tips for your...
read moreAnswer this one question to find the difference between an entrepreneur and a small business owner
Which would you prefer: To stand back and admire a beautiful wall you had built brick-by-brick, or To imagine what that a beautiful brick wall would look like in an area where the people had never before experienced brick walls? In many important ways, how you respond to that question will embody for you the difference between an entrepreneur and a small business owner, and where you land on the continuum between the two. As a society, we need people who prefer both of those scenarios. The work involved with each is difficult and requires its own set of skills. There is significant risk along each path. People fail at both. Like risky business? If you take the most pleasure in building something to completion, you shouldn’t feel that you’re any less important than someone who is willing to take greater risks. And, if you’re a big risk taker, don’t feel bad that you usually don’t like to stick around to see projects to their ultimate ends. There are, however, some individuals who relish both aspects of this commercial yin-yang relationship. There are risk takers who are so passionate about a single industry or product that they put everything on the line in the beginning – to get their business going – and continue to invest themselves until the business is fully developed or they come to the end of their career. But, I think that more often the responsibility of long-term growth and management falls to others, making the stories of founders who get booted out all too common. And this brings us to the reason why understanding and appreciating the difference between an entrepreneur and a small business owner is important. If you currently own a business, or if you are in the process of planning to open a business, what perspective are you working from? Are you planning to get the business going and then position it to sell – or hand over management to someone else – and move on to your next project? Or, do you envision your business to be your life’s work for the foreseeable future or perhaps until retirement? Choosing the right plan How you respond to these questions will have a large impact on the type of business you found and the way you manage it. If you believe that the entrepreneurial route suits your personality best, you need to start a business that comes with a greater degree of risk. Your plan, product, or service needs to be more unique and have a greater “upside” potential. You need to demonstrate that its potential is obtainable, but you don’t have to “carry the ball across the goal line.” Tom Taulli has a good article on Forbes that covers a lot of the essentials for selling a startup. If you want to build a solid small business and stick with it through all of its growth cycles, you don’t need to take as big a risk in the beginning. However, as you work to establish your business and navigate the economic cycles, you will certainly find yourself coping with enough risks to keep you challenged! Here’s another difference: If you’re taking the entrepreneurial route, you would be inclined to make a “go-no-go” decision more quickly. You need to get a minimum...
read more7 ways to find out what your customers are thinking and build loyalty
“I don’t feel like you value our relationship…” Those words have been spoken at the break up of many marriages, friendships, and even family relationships. While they may not be spoken, the feelings those words express also reflect why many customers and clients stop doing business with companies. The challenge for small business owners is to make sure customers and clients know that their relationship is valued and one of the best ways to do that is to ask people what they think. Here are seven ways to find out what your customers are thinking using both online tools and in-person strategies. Live chat. It’s not difficult to get a live chat feature built into your website today. If you get a lot of traffic and your website is central to your business, explore your options. (Sara Angeles does a good job describing some of the best providers in her Business News Daily article, 7 Live Chat Solutions for Small Businesses.) I’m using this term in its broadest sense. If a web-based tool would work for you, directing customers to a survey can be done a number of ways including via a pop-up, email, or mobile device. However, telephone surveys are also good and I especially like the “casual follow-up call” when it comes from an important employee or owner, not a survey company. Suggestion box. We all know about “employee suggestion” boxes, how about doing the same thing for customers? You can also build an online suggestion box into your website. Review software. As with live chat, there are good third-party review apps available for your website. Social listening. Monitor the Internet for mentions of your business or for hashtags that directly relate to what you do. When something hits your radar screen, jump into the conversation in a positive and proactive way. Your social media channels. Respond to comments made to posts on all the social media channels you use. Feedback cards. I mentioned using a suggestion box above. You can make it easier for your customers if you hand them a feedback card. Alternately, you could put a stamp on it so customers could simply drop it in the mail. Another important tip is to solicit an opinion soon after you have an interaction with a customer. If you’re in a service-based industry, following up every time you render your service with a request for a rating and general comments is a good...
read moreEmail marketing graphics: Opposites are attractive
I always find it interesting when seemingly opposite strategies can be successful in a given situation. We see this today with email marketing graphics. Some businesses invest a great deal of time and effort crafting beautiful emails that are loaded with gorgeous images. Other businesses are sending nothing more than the most plain, text-only newsletters. The crazy thing is that both strategies can be successful. Let’s start by looking at the minimalist approach. Here’s one of Neil Patel’s recent newsletters. Few people know more about online marketing than Neil. Given the fact that he has been sending this style of email newsletter for a long time, we can be certain that it’s performing well for him. Note that Neil’s newsletter has no email marketing graphics. He even uses a typeface that looks like it came out of my old Underwood manual typewriter. However, that traditional type face and the fact that it’s an all-type email give it a personal touch. It’s almost like receiving an email from a friend or relative. I’m tempted to point out that it’s a very short email. However, I have seen successful online marketers use all-type newsletters like this that were fairly long. But generally, I think shorter type-only email newsletters are preferred. And, if you send these kinds of newsletters, you can send them often as long as you are providing value with each short email. Follow this simple format Open quickly Deliver the value Say goodbye There’s no secret to any of that. Keep the language personal and a bit breezy and you’re home free. But here’s the brainteaser: These short text-only emails work well for online marketing, but so do those loaded with email marketing graphics. Below are a handful of the many templates available at Constant Contact and Mail Chimp. They make it easy to fill your emails with beautiful photos and graphics. There are certainly some commercial areas that benefit more from graphics than others. But there’s no commercial area that can’t, in some way, leverage graphics to its benefit, yet not everyone uses them in their emails. I’m pointing this out so you might consider some in-depth A/B testing. However, don’t cut your test short. Divide your list in half and send one group emails that are dense with email marketing graphics and the other half emails that are bereft of email marketing graphics. Keep this up for a couple of months so the groups get accustomed to the style of the emails they receive. After you’ve established these routines, do a little experimenting: What happens when you send an image-rich email to the text group and vice versa? Do you get a one-time bump in the response rate? These kinds of tests can give you a small edge that will add up to a major increase in profits or website visits over...
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