This Week in Small Business: Spring Cleaning, Moms, and Many Marketing Tips
’Tis the season to be spring cleaning (even your financials) and honoring moms everywhere (including those who found million-dollar companies). Add in a passel of marketing tips, and you have enough bedtime reading to last all week. Leadership, management and productivity Executive Vice President of Wells Fargo, Lisa Stevens, lays out three tips for giving your small business a financial spring cleaning. If you want to become big, you need to think big, so here are four things you can learn from big business. Would you know it if your small business website had been hacked? Just to be sure, read this article. There’s a lot of activity and competition in the “messenger” arena and Facebook Messenger could be a big deal for customer service purposes. These are the seven leadership lessons from Star Wars that you’ve been looking for! Find out what the average credit score is for small businesses and see what it means for you. Not our favorite subject, but an important one: 4 potential lawsuits to watch out for in small business. Marketing and sales Here’s a list of 25 ways to get local people into your business. Start with number one and try them all! Huyen Truong outlines six simple SEO tips to boost your ranking in Google. It’s time to stop measuring social media marketing via “vanity metrics.” Graham Gullans, co-founder and COO of LiftMetrix, gives you the single metric you should be watching. Any improvements in your email marketing will pay significant benefits. Check out these content tips to boost engagement. Marketing may soon get so personalized that it targets only you, says PR professional Derek Newton. Along those same lines, Dom Nicastro suggests using automation for 1-to-1 customer engagement. Great copywriting is fundamental to website success. Here are 11 copywriting hacks that should improve your conversions. Don’t be afraid of marketing metrics. Here are five ways you can master them! Lindsay Kolowich bravely details the pros and cons of various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Have an hour to spare? If so, try these 15 ways to boost your small business social media marketing. If your small business marketing planning process is a mess, this article will help you straighten things out. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Kaitlin Bradley delivers a good essay on how marriage doesn’t mean forgetting your dreams. Moms rule! And to prove it, check out these 15 moms who founded million-dollar businesses. Which side of 50 are you? If you’re close to or north of 50, you’ll appreciate these five small business to start after you make the half-century mark. Founders: Avoid these marketing mistakes startups often make. Politics, government and the economy The presidential primary season seems to be making party regular nervous about the outcome. It also seems to be keeping small business owners from expanding. It looks like we’re in the middle of a two-faced, Jekyll and Hyde economy and how you see it depends on which statistics you prefer to believe are important. Get some clarity in this...
read moreAsking for Business Referrals: 7 Proven Ways that Work Today
In business some things never change, like the power of a personal referral or word-of-mouth advertising. Then again, some things in business are constantly going through changes, like the way those personal referrals are gained and communicated. Let’s take a quick tour through current best practices for winning those ever-so-powerful personal referrals. 1. Ask. Simply asking customers for referrals is the traditional, time-honored strategy for getting business referrals. It’s based on the fundamental truth that if you don’t ask for something, you won’t receive it. Most of the following strategies, by the way, can generally be filed under the broad label of “ASK!” There are a few tips that can help you become better at asking customers for referrals. First, be sensitive to situations and relationships and craft your requests based on those factors. For example, it’s appropriate to ask established clients and customers for referrals as well as brand new clients and customers. However, the way you ask needs to be different. With new clients you would want to say something like, “I want this to be a long-term relationship and will always do my best to meet your needs. If I do that, can I count on you for some referrals?” With established – and happy – clients, you can take a more direct approach. 2. Leverage your links. Any email that goes out from your business with a special offer – or great content – should include an easy way for recipients to share it with their friends. The same principle applies to things such as “Thank-you” pages or other web pages that could be appealing to the friends of visitors. Make it easy for them to send these offers to others. 3. Establish a referral program. Award perks to established customers or clients who refer people to you. A good way to boost this is to incorporate it into a feedback or survey system. When you get positive survey results, conclude the survey with a pitch for your referral program that clearly states the benefit for the existing customer. 4. Give a perk for giving gift cards or gift certificates. Restaurants and movie theaters are doing this a lot today: The people who buy a gift cards also gets a small gift card themselves. Of course, many people end up buying the gift cards for personal use, but hey, that’s good for sales too! 5. Be a referral giver yourself. The Golden Rule – Do unto others as you would have others do unto you – is good to follow when it comes to referrals. If you’re always asking for referrals, but never offering them, how can you expect your clients to give you their support? Start banking some goodwill. Don’t expect an immediate double-digit ROI, although you might be surprised! 6. Exploit LinkedIn connections. Organically build your LinkedIn network and then find connections you share with individuals you would like to be introduced to. You need to be sure that the people you approach when you’re asking for a referral or introduction don’t feel like they’re being used, so be sure that you have an honest relationship with them. Always ask if it’s okay that you mention their name when you used the LinkedIn message service to send prospects a note. 7. Track your success. This is probably the...
read moreThe secret to writing killer small business taglines
We devote a lot of space here presenting a wide range of marketing plans and sometimes they can be very involved and demand a lot of planning, careful execution, and even financial investment. However, when I reflect on my success, I have to give a lot of credit to four little words, my tagline: THE Small Business Expert. While a lot of my marketing efforts change, evolve and require constant care and feeding, my tagline – like the Energizer Bunny – keeps going, and going, and going… (Hey, there’s another tagline!) So my question to you is: Do you have a great business tagline? Any tagline? If you already have a tagline for your brand, take a good look at it and see if you think it’s serving you as well as it should. While it’s fantastic to have a tagline that’s so good you never have to change it, it’s not a crime to polish it up from time to time or even start over fresh. Your noticeable difference To craft the best tagline for your business, focus in on the one thing you want to be known for…and this isn’t as simple as it seems. Going through the exercise of discovering this “one thing” will take you deep inside of what your small business is all about. You can’t write a great brand tagline without distilling this essence. Let’s look at a slogan FedEx used for quite sometime: When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. If many of us were tasked with writing a tagline that expressed this idea, we would come up with something like: The fastest overnight delivery service! Or maybe we would suggest: The most dependable overnight delivery service! The difference between okay and fantastic Why is When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight better than those two merely okay attempts? Here’s the reason: Not only does the FedEx version convey speed and dependability, it adds an emotional element with the words “absolutely positively.” You’ve probably used that phrase before. Remember how your heart was racing when you said it? There was some desperation in your voice. I evoke some emotion and attitude by my use of capitalization in my tagline: THE Small Business Expert. When one plus one is way more than two! The point I’m making is that you need to go beyond merely naming the “attribute” you want to communicate. You want to make it memorable in another way, and adding emotion, attitude, humor, or an appeal to the senses can accomplish this. Let’s look at some of the best brand taglines and see what they add: Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Humor and senses. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The happiest place on earth. Think outside the bun. Humor Just do it. Emotion and attitude. Mmmm mmmm good! Have it your way. As you look at your business tagline see if you’re touching people in a way that will make it memorable. If you’re able to communicate your main message and leverage one of these other elements – emotions, humor, senses, etc. – you’re touching people in two areas of their brains, and they will remember...
read moreDiscover Small Business Opportunities By Taking an Old Idea and Making it New Again
Not long ago a friend was reminiscing about how he and his wife bought their first video camera when their son was about to be born. It’s a common story for a certain generation. At the time, they were on the cutting edge of the technology because they purchased a camera that took MiniDV tape cassettes. (I would bet that many reading this won’t know what MiniDVs were.) The fascinating thing about personal video is that today everyone records video almost daily, but almost no one goes out and buys a video camera. The function still exists (although it has evolved greatly) but the means of achieving it has changed dramatically. Old ideas made new through technology This type of evolution is important to understand because it often provides business opportunities. New businesses are founded and old businesses are transformed or enhanced by recognizing how a new technology (or changing social conditions) can be applied to an old idea. Let’s look at some. The agora In Ancient Greece, the agora was the public space where local residents would find the market. It could also be a meeting space. Pull this idea forward a couple thousand years and you have eBay, Facebook, Etsy and other public markets and meeting spaces. The overarching concept that you need to grasp is that people have a built-in need to trade, buy, and meet freely in groups. This human need will never change, but the means for fulfilling it will change as new technologies are developed. Radio If you’re a big fan of “A Christmas Story,” you’ll remember the scenes where the family gathers around the radio to listen to their favorite programs. Podcasts fulfill this same function today. The difference is that by virtue of the Internet, we’re able to listen to programs that interest us on our schedules – we don’t have to adhere to the schedules of the broadcasters. Small business owners should note the rising popularity of podcasts. Think back to those old-time radio shows. What is notable about them? They usually had one single sponsor. If you establish a podcast, you will be that single sponsor. They can be great advertising. Home delivery There was a time when milk trucks ran morning routes and the neighborhood grocer would deliver your order the same day you phoned it in, or sent your kid down with a list of items. The rise of the supermarket killed home grocery deliveries to a great extent, but technology is bringing it back. Amazon and others are working hard to leverage technology and logistics to make home deliveries common again. Lots of innovators are busy in this area and I suppose it won’t be long before drones or self-driving vehicles are out making deliveries all day long, and it won’t be just groceries. Messaging With this one, I’m not going to harken back to “the good old days.” I’m just rolling back the technology to an earlier era on the Internet. For many of us, the first Internet messaging app we used was ICQ. When you say the letters it sounds like, “I seek you.” Slack and HipChat are taking the basic messaging function and tossing in the kitchen sink by integrating it with a wide array of other apps. This is less a case...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Mount up, Rev your Engines and Get Ready to Win the Small Business Race!
A lot of advice this week is directed toward helping you tune up your website. So as we go into racing season – the Indy 500 and Triple Crown events – get your web presence running efficiently at full speed and stretch out your lead over the competition! Leadership, management and productivity One of the big advantages of a WordPress website is the plethora of plugins available. Check out these 24 must-have plugins for your small business site. And if you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, review the findings of this study that looked at 200 million page crawls. If you’re in retail, you need to understand how employee satisfaction impacts your bottom line. And in any small business you need to grasp the relationship between customer loyalty and expectations. Discover how the right analytics can strengthen your customer engagement. This guide to understanding your buyer’s journey will help you do better market research. Marketing and sales When you’re thinking about monetizing your website, consider these alternatives to Google’s Adwords. Jayson Demers gives you seven simple changes that can make your website more visible to search engines. Jason Acidre says that search engines are moving to brand-related metrics to determine search results rankings. If that’s the case you need to use modern SEO to build your brand authority. Facebook is still the Mac Daddy of social media platforms so these 11 little-known marketing features could be valuable to your small business. This Search Engine Watch article sums up LinkedIn’s Jason Miller’s talk on how to achieve “face-melting content marketing ROI.” If you’re a life-long veteran of advertising, direct mail, and cold calling, you may not appreciate the hidden value of content marketing. One writer stopped publishing on LinkedIn, but he thinks maybe you shouldn’t. Find out why. The biggest barrier to social media marketing can be finding the time to get it done. Brett Relander has some ideas how to solve that problem. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Planning a new startup? Maybe you better locate in one of these cities that are proven to be best for small business. This Nashville small business is doing a great job at competing with the big names in the fashion industry. See how they’re doing it. Politics, government and the economy Small business owners don’t like it when leadership is unsettled. That’s probably why this year’s presidential election cycle is so vexing for SBOs. Capital One Spark gave me early access to some survey results and asked me to look them over for a post. What fascinated me was that while there is a somewhat gloomy attitude among small business owners, younger owners – and especially millennials – have a positive...
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