This week in small business: Learn from the failures of others…
Two entrepreneurs share their failures in this week’s cornucopia of curated content. The wise will learn from their missteps. On the positive side, you can build your knowledge with some great books and we have several articles that offer solid marketing advice. Dig in. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation In this Forbes interview, serial entrepreneur Ryan Blair shares four lessons he learned from bankruptcy. Continuing in that vein, here are five regrets of a failed entrepreneur. Here’s an overview of five books by women entrepreneurs that will give you a big helping of inspiration. One entrepreneurship mantra is to “move fast and break things.” Well, things cost money, so here’s something to think about before you start moving that fast. Leadership, management, and productivity Want to get the most creativity out of your marketers? Check out these office setups. Annie Pilon lists 10 often overlooked elements of running a successful business. Women: Here are two questions to ask when you feel intimidated by male colleagues. Marketing and sales Hands across the water! Facebook debuts new tools and features to help small businesses expand globally. Steve Jobs didn’t have an MBA, but nonetheless, there are things you can learn from Apple’s marketing…10 things according to Chirag Kulkarni. Omnichannel. It’s more than a buzzword – it’s what is driving the future of marketing. This Outbrain article not only delivers some wonky graphics, it has some good advice regarding the intersection of content marketing and SEO. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Mark Kovac makes the point that the good sales teams are the ones that know when to stop selling....
read more5 ways social media marketing benefits stretch beyond sales
Savvy small business owners are getting adept at using social media marketing to boost sales. (If you want a great overview of the major social media platforms you can leverage, check out this infographic.) However, there are social media marketing benefits that go beyond immediate sales. It’s important that you understand the big picture of social media marketing so you can use its attributes in the best ways to improve your small business. 1. Boost your business’ value When a company is bought and sold, and even when investors decide to buy a stock, they need to consider the “intrinsic” value of the business. A Coca-Cola bottling plant would have a higher value than an Acme Cola bottling plant, even if they had the same machinery in the same size building sitting on a piece of land of equal value. The Coca-Cola brand has intrinsic value. A strong presence in the social media, with lots of followers and fans, will make your small business more valuable than a similar small business with a paltry social media presence. 2. Improve customer insights If you keep an eye on which of your posts resonate with your followers and which fall flat on their face, you’ll start understanding your customers and prospects better. One of the most important things to do with any social media marketing effort is to make sure that it aligns with your customer persona. If it doesn’t, then something needs to change: either you’re drawing the wrong fans into your social media world, or your business needs to tweak its products or services. 3. Improve customer service When you’re attentive to your social media channels they can be used to greatly improve your customer service. You’ll find that many customers voice their problems on social media before they’ll try to contact you through more traditional means. In fact, sometimes you may pick up a minor complaint and be able to handle it before it becomes a major problem. Both Facebook and Twitter have proved to be useful for social media customer service. Twitter has some advantages; you can use it for private messaging and therefore take your conversation out of the public’s view. Social media “listening” is important for customer service and for improving insights into your customers. Simon Tam has a good rundown of some free social listening services and sites in this Huffington Post article. (Topsy, by the way, is no longer with us.) 4. Become an Influencer If you’re like most small businesses you’re the brand and your social media marketing can, in the long run, greatly enhance your position in your industry and/or community. This benefit of social media marketing will open doors for you. Others on social media will turn to you (or your social media posts) for advice and therefore reposting. You will be able to leverage your status to give you access to new ventures and you might be able to eventually build a business or income stream through your personal brand. 5. Improve your SEO When you do a good job on the social media platforms, others pick up your good work and repeat it. Also, when you promote a content marketing item through your social media channels, if it’s good, others will link to it from their websites. This...
read moreHow to make your small business website a powerful business website
I estimate that only 20 percent of all small business websites are really flexing their muscle – and I’m being generous with that 20 percent figure. This is even more dramatic when you consider that about half of all small businesses don’t even have a website yet. If you do the math, you’ll see that by my estimates, only 10 percent of small businesses are really using their websites properly. That’s the bad news. The good news is that when you start doing things correctly on your website, you gain a huge advantage over the 90 percent of small business owners who are dropping the ball. One of the functions that small business websites often fail to do is collect email addresses. Your email list is the foundation of online marketing power. Even if you don’t exactly know how you will use your email list, start collecting addresses ASAP and at least send out a very short but informative newsletter each week. Small business website owners hit three stumbling blocks when they decide they want to start building an email list: Getting the code necessary to collect email address put on the website, Creating an offer to give visitors an incentive to sign up, and Establishing a relationship with an email marketing service. I’m going to focus most of this article on the second point on that list, but let me point you to a couple of other articles to help with the first item above. To jump start your list, check out the hacks in this article that don’t even rely on code. And for more information on opt-in popups and their timing, I wrote this piece not too long ago. Finally, for WordPress sites, there are many plugins available to create opt-in boxes, etc. Adam Connell gives an excellent rundown of the 10 best in this article over on bloggingwizard. How to create an appealing offer The best way to encourage signups is to offer a useful and interesting free download that touches a nerve with your prospects. You start this process simply by asking yourself, “What do my customers want to know?” Spend some time brainstorming that question and write down all your answers. After you’ve done that, take it a step further and use the Internet to actually see what questions people are asking and what they are thinking about that relate to your product or service. Go to the question sites Quora and Yahoo Answers are two sites where people post questions and others post answers. I logged onto Quora and entered the term “home remodeling.” If I were a local remodeler, this might be my starting point. Here are some of the questions I found: How do I style my small bathroom? Is remodeling a kitchen before selling a house a good decision/investment? Why is home renovation important? Is it safe to buy kitchen cabinets online? How should you hire contractors for home remodeling? You can look at all the questions and answers and get a feel for what people are saying and how much interest the questions sparked. You could then take what you think are the most engaging questions and turn them into a downloadable white paper or e-book to use as an offer to get people to give you their...
read moreTrain your team in these important marketing skills
Do you wonder what kind of training you need for yourself, or what kind of training you should provide for your team? The folks at Venngage shared an important infographic with me recently and for many small business owners, it can shed a little light on what kind of skills you and your team should be acquiring. Over the last few years, small business owners have consistently complained about their difficulty in hiring good talent. I believe one of the areas where this is most critical is in certain marketing areas. The Vennage infographic I’m referring to breaks this down. You can see from the set of graphs above, that the tightest job markets are for marketers with data analysis or coding skills and for those with creative skills. If you’re trying to find those highly skilled individuals out in the open market, you may be out of luck. However, there isn’t any reason you or some smart members of your team can’t pick up some of those skills. Your local junior college may offer some classes that would provide a good foundation. It doesn’t take a lot of time to pick up the basics of HTML and CSS, for example, and those skills would help you keep your web presence first rate. If you have anyone with a good head for math, statistical analysis will prove to be invaluable for small business owners looking for an edge in the marketplace. Having a command of Google analytics is also critical for businesses today. You can find all kinds of tutorials online that go into Google analytics. Spend a little time finding the resources you feel would work best for you or your team. Bone up on it yourself and consider giving interested individuals on your team release time to learn in depth about Google analytics. On the creative side, demand is being driven by content marketing. The necessary skills here are writing, graphic design, and video. Merely having someone on staff who can write an occasional blog and creatively update your social media pages will give you a big boost. Continuing education and training are important in every area of your business, but this is even heightened in marketing because that field is evolving so quickly. If you fall behind too far, you might not be able to catch up in time to save your...
read moreWhat’s the best online title generator? We put them to the test…
When I started to research online title generators, it dawned on me that they are a bit like your coccyx – pretty much everyone has one, but no one pays much attention to them. (Did I send you to your online dictionary for that coccyx reference? In case you don’t remember your high school biology, it’s your tailbone.) Yes, I know I’m exaggerating a bit when I say that everyone has a title generator, but frankly, there are a lot of them spread out over cyberspace. I don’t think they get too much use, but this article hopes to change that. If you’re having trouble getting traffic to your blog articles, use some of these title generating pages for inspiration. However, the best way to do this is to consult the title generator before you write your article. It may suggest an interesting spin to put on the topic you are planning to write about. To have a little fun, I pitted these eight title generators in a title-generator cage match to the death in order to see which one came up with the most engaging article title. Here’s how I did it: I searched Google trends for the highest ranking product I thought someone would be trying to create content for and therefore attract prospects for said product. (I selected GoPro Karma.) I entered that product into each title generator. I selected the first title that I thought had any chance at working. Sometimes I had to fudge a little because not every title generator has the same set of options. Also, some of the headlines would need a little tweaking to make them work grammatically. Here are the results: WEBSITE TITLE Sumome What You Should Know About GoPro Karma The Best Title Generator Learn To (Do) GoPro Karma Like A Professional Portent How GoPro Karma is part of a vast right wing conspiracy Tweakyourbiz Apply These 7 Secret Techniques To Improve Gopro Karma Hubspot Why We Love GoPro Karma (And You Should, Too!) THREE CLONES Internetmarketingcourse Tests Now Show Our GoPro Karma Can Help You Dawnmarrs ditto Thoughtrod ditto The three at the bottom, that I’ve labeled as “Clones” seem to be the same algorithm. I don’t know which site is the originator, but the same input is required in each case and the results I got were about the same. This “down and dirty” cage fight is a little unfair to Sumome, because it offers several flavors of blog titles: numbered lists, how to, explanatory/why, strong/controversial, fun/playful, and DIY headlines. Also, Hubspot (and some others) wanted a couple more words, but providing those would have been outside of my arbitrary rules. Sorry, Hubspot (and some others). For ease of use and quantity of titles generated, I really like The Best Title Generator and the title generator at Tweakyourbiz. I think the single best title (although it would take one minor word change) was generated by The Best Title Generator. I would reword it like this: Learn To Use GoPro Karma Like A Professional. The Tweakyourbiz title would be great with just a little rewording. Something like this would work very well: Apply These 7 Secret Techniques To Improve Your GoPro Karma Videos. The least useful one seems to be the title/idea generator at Portent. It only gives you one title, but I...
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