This week in small business: Hot chili peppers, Shark Tank, automation tools, and more
In this week’s collection of curated content, you’ll a look at a chili pepper “empire,” see how to break through that stubborn SEO wall, and get a lot of information to help you automate your small business marketing. And that’s just for starters. Leadership, management, and productivity The difficulty of finding talent has been a small business complaint for a long time. Here are four strategies that will help you recruit the folks you need. Marketing and sales Small business marketing demands are ever increasing. Can marketing automation save your content strategy? And if you need specific info on automation tools, this article by Sujan Patel will get you started. You can pick up some tips and insights by the way The Tile Shop uses data to design its marketing strategy. Be sure you’re taking advantage of all these 10 ways to grow your business through social media. Steal a few pages from the playbook of these four brands who excel at marketing to Millennials. In this post sponsored by MasterCard Biz, I give you seven creative ways to increase sales in your store. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation We’ve read a lot about “social entrepreneurship” in recent months. Jake Hayman wonders if we’ve seen its end in this Forbes article. Want small business success? Maybe you need to unleash the inner entrepreneur inside each of your employees. If you believe you have a winning formula for a startup, why not enter Miller Lite’s “Tap the Future” contest? Shark Tank’s Daymond John was promoting it recently in Chicago. Hot growth: Here’s how one Baton Rouge entrepreneur engineered an international pepper empire that he never aimed to build. Hit the wall in your SEO efforts? Learn how to break through it. This infographic delivers a wealth of information on the state of female entrepreneurs: an interesting slice of startup life. Politics, government, and the economy See if you agree or disagree with Michael Green in his Harvard Business Review article, “Why Americans Are So Angry Despite America’s Strong Economy.” The latest Bank of the West Small Business Growth Survey cites uncertainty and burnout as key concerns, yet most see rewards from business...
read moreHow to find where you fit in the live streaming video for small business picture
The last couple of years has seen an explosion in the number of ways individuals can live stream video via the Internet and this has created some confusion when it comes to live streaming video for small business. What app should you use? What content is good to stream? Let’s look at each of those questions. Players in the small business live video streaming game Periscope. This app is owned by Twitter and that gives it a built-in universe of potential users. Apple TV now includes Periscope videos. Periscope is a mobile app and a lot like Meerkat. Meerkat. This app put mobile live-streaming video on the map. However, it’s not much of a player anymore because Periscope was able to gain significantly more market share, has more influencers using it, and more repeat users. (I read that Periscope was the eighth rank iOS download, while Meerkat came in at number 368. That must hurt.) Facebook Live. This is built into the Facebook mobile app – you don’t have to download and install it separately. That, and the fact that it’s a Facebook feature, gives Facebook Live a lot of advantages. Also, your video sessions become videos on your timeline. Google+ Hangouts. You can create a Google+ video “hangout” with either your computer or any mobile device. Video hangouts become videos on your YouTube channel when the live streaming ends. Blab. This streaming video service works a lot like Google+ Hangouts with the finished streams available for viewing on the Blab website. Blab creators seem to be envisioning people creating their own regularly scheduled programming so it almost becomes a kind of television channel. You sign up for blab with your Twitter account. YouTube. You can live stream directly to YouTube, but it’s not quite as easy as the “point and click” methods above. When it comes to streaming video for small business, I think most owners will want to use one of the easier methods first and maybe later consider a live program on their YouTube channel, especially if they find that Google+ hangouts work well for them. Ustream. This is a paid service and currently, the lowest priced plan is $99 per month, so it’s probably not the first live streaming option for small business owners. However, it supports HD video and is used by a lot of major video content producers as well as local businesses, music venues, for example. Uses for small business live streaming video The biggest reason to use live streaming video in your small business is to enhance your relationship with your customers or clients. Therefore, any activity that does that and lends itself to video is worth trying out. Here are some of the major categories these fall into: Tutorials. You can teach your audience about new services, new products, new ways to use existing products, and generally offer tips. If you’ve published a blog entitled “9 Ways to Use the New JC Skyhook,” you can probably communicate some of those nine ways via a live streaming video in your small business. Behind the scenes. A restaurant might want to take its fans and followers on a tour of the kitchen when it’s at its busiest. The head chef might be able to share one or two tips. These could be...
read moreAre You Making the Same Dumb Marketing Mistakes as This Guy?
The most important rule when you’re trying to accomplish something is this: Stop making dumb mistakes. As soon as you stop making the dumb mistakes, you can start to make progress. But if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again, progress is impossible. I know that many of you right now are saying something like, “Duh, Susan. We all know this.” Yes, I know it seems like a no-brainer, but people often continue to do things that don’t work, either by habit or because they just don’t know any better. I bring this up because I recently was talking to a professional in the mortgage business who has been working like crazy to improve the position of his website in Google search rankings. Is SEO always important? First, that seems like the thing to do, right? We’ve all had it beaten into our brains that we need to get our websites listed high in Google search rankings and the way to do that is via SEO. But let me tell you right now that improving your SERP (search engine results page) through SEO is a long-term project. And, if all your competitors are also busy improving their SEO, it may be virtually impossible to make much headway! This well-meaning and hard-working mortgage business owner has spent a fair amount of money and time publishing weekly blogs and he has some long-tail keywords that he is using. That, in and of itself, is a great thing to do. However, it won’t bring fast results and if his competitors are doing the same thing, then… Now let’s think about his potential clients for a moment. He offers a variety of home mortgage options. I believe his prospects fall into two general categories: Home buyers who are actively buying right now and will make a quick decision on a mortgage offer, and Future home buyers who want to get a feel for the process and what to expect when they’re ready to buy. For the first group, SERP can be critical. If they are the type of people who use Internet research to guide their buying, being on the first page of search results is very important. This guy needs to get his business URL under their noses and give them a reason to click on his link. If he goes to a paid search engine marketing campaign, that’s a way he can do this – no matter what his organic SERP is. Marketing for the long term But what about this second group? Are they worth pursuing? I suspect they are and this is where a different marketing strategy must be employed. In this case, what the mortgage business owner needs to do looks something like this: Present an offer crafted to match the interests of future homebuyers. Use the offer to encourage newsletter signups. Use the newsletter to establish the mortgage company as the trusted experts in the field and to occasionally encourage prospects to buy property. Essentially, with the three steps above, he would be building a community of potential clients. He might even consider adding a forum to his website. To date, this mortgage professional’s marketing strategy has been mostly geared toward grabbing the “hot” prospect. That’s a tough game to play and virtually impossible...
read moreHow to make your sales goals real and yourself accountable
“A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Samuel Goldwyn. There are a lot of quotes and adages that reflect the idea Samuel Goldwyn was getting at. The heart of the matter is this: When we get serious about something, we put it down in writing. Until something is on paper (or perhaps the computer screen today) it’s nothing more than an ephemeral idea. Writing it down in a place where you and others can read it, makes it tangible and real. When it becomes a physical thing, it is something that can be engaged and become part of your real world experience. These are some of the reasons I always stress the importance of the process of writing a business plan. But in the same way that a business plan helps hold you accountable to the big picture of developing your business, a personal/professional journal helps hold you accountable for other goals, and today I’m going to focus on sales goals. Making sales goals real You may have some number in the back of your head that you would like to reach in sales. That’s fine, but it’s not concrete enough to make a difference in your life. You need to express your sales goal on paper, preferably in a journal. Then each day you need to review the actions you took the day before to reach your goal as well as express your plans for the day that will further your efforts in achieving your goal. Until you have your sales goals in writing, you haven’t really committed to them. When they are written down, and you visit them on a daily basis, they move from being “feel-good” ideas to hard goals. You see, you can’t be held accountable to a vague idea; it would be like trying to judge the winner of the Olympic high jump competition without a bar being set across two standards. And continuing with the image of the high jump, consider this: If Olympic athletes were merely jumping through thin air, virtually any of them could feel like they were doing well…perhaps even setting a new world record on each jump. There would be no motivation to improve! Motivation by sales goals A jazz musician friend of mine once told me about the time he went to a small “clinic” being conducted by noted jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock. He was in college at the time and the audience was all young college students. One starry-eyed, idealistic budding musician asked Herbie Hancock about what made him compose. Was it beholding the beauty nature? The hustle and bustle sounds of New York City? What was this cosmic force? Not even taking a moment to think about it, Herbie Hancock answered, “Deadlines.” That’s actually very similar to what sales goals are. They are a kind of deadline that you either make or don’t make and this is the key to why writing them down and making them real is important: They can’t motivate us until they are real. Motivation is what setting goals is all about. You can’t be motivated by something that is not real. Here’s the way the process goes: You come up with a sales goal and write it down in your journal. The goal motivates you to start working...
read moreWhat a ballpark hot dog vendor can teach us about sales
NPR’s Planet Money once followed the top vendor at Fenway Park as he plied the stands and introduced listeners to a slice of life that’s a microcosm for sales everywhere. But before we get into the habits that make Jose Magrass the highest-earning vendor at Fenway Park, there’s another lesson here that management needs to hear. Decentralize decision making Today, the way vendor assignments are determined at Fenway Park goes like this: By seniority, vendors name what product they want to sell and which area of the ballpark they want to sell it – a kind of crowdsourcing of products and territories. Selling a popular brand of beer, like Bud, behind home plate is always the first choice. On a cold day, selling iced lemonade anywhere would be one of the last choices, and one that a newbie gets stuck with. However, this is not the way it used to be done. In an earlier time at Fenway Park, a management guy in an office somewhere would decide what would get sold and where it would be offered. When they decided to let the people closest to the action – the vendors – make those decisions, guess what happened? Sales skyrocketed! Surprised? Probably not. But it’s hard for upper-level management and owners to let go of their decision-making powers. Take some time and see if there are decisions being made in your business that could be improved if they were made by the individuals closest to the situation. Why Jose sells the most The perennial sales champ, Jose, does not have the most seniority. In this episode of Planet Money, some 20 other vendors were able to choose what they sold and where they sold it before Jose stepped up to the plate and took his swings. He grabbed hot dogs and ended up earning some $400 in just a few hours of work that evening. Here’s how he excelled: He was completely focused on selling hot dogs, He was always scanning the seats for prospects, He always moved fast and efficiently while prospecting and between sales, He delivered the hot dogs and customers’ change quickly, and He worked the longest hours. Jose is an example that if you can squeeze in a few more sales on a regular basis, you can dramatically increase your income. At the end of the game, while other vendors were hanging up their shirts, Jose was working the exiting crowd for a few more sales. His was the last shirt back on the rack. Because Jose had developed a two-handed system for assembling the hot dog and dealing with money, he was able to complete the transaction faster than other vendors and move on to his next sale. Other vendors failed to understand that a series of small efficiencies, when applied over time, can yield tremendous results. But perhaps Jose’s most important trait is the first item on my list above: He was completely focused on selling his hot dogs. Let me tell you exactly how focused he was: Even though Jose is a baseball fan, at the end of the game he had no idea who the Red Sox were playing that evening. Consider that and then consider how much time you, or others on your team, are distracted by social media. Enough said....
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