5 Ways to Boost Your Business Using the Connection Economy
I believe it was Seth Godin who, a few years ago, coined the term “connection economy.” The idea is that value is generated by making connections rather than pumping widgets out of the tail end of an assembly line. I might put a little sharper focus on this and say that for almost every small business owner, the potential for value is created by making or strengthening connections. Mammoth social media platforms like Facebook do, in fact, derive much their value by the sheer number of creations they create. I’ll point out that these enterprises achieve billion dollar valuations before they do anything with their connections to actually make money. But, in any case, the value of connections in this connection economy is indisputable. The questions then is whether or not you are participating in and benefiting from the connection economy. Let’s look at tangible ways you can take advantage of the connection economy today. 1. Social media For many – if not all – small businesses, connecting with customers, prospects, suppliers and others via the social media can deliver tremendous value. Note that even via this short list of connections, I’m suggesting how you can “segment” your social media contacts. To use social media in the connection economy, you need to understand who you are trying to reach and what your goal is when you reach them. In other words, it wouldn’t make any sense to consider established customers and brand new prospects in the same way. Further, you might establish social media relationships with suppliers as a way to improve your competiveness; suppliers may, for example, use their social media channels as pipelines for insider tips and other useful industry information. Taking this a bit further, Alignable is one social media platform whose purpose it is to create and enhance relationships between businesses. Connecting with similar small businesses can be extremely helpful, for example, when you’re trying to determine which cloud services would best suit your business. 2. Review sites When you’re using your social media accounts, you’re broadcasting information about your small business and trying to spur people’s interest. When customers say something about you on a review site – or their own social media accounts – they are taking over the microphone. You need to recognize these instances as opportunities to create connections. I often scan the hotel reviews on some of the travel sites. I always notice the hotel owners who respond to criticism and those who ignore it. These kinds of sites are a major component in the connection economy – don’t let the connection “drop.” An important attribute of the connection economy is to recognize that it’s not just about your direct connections, it’s also about the onlookers and others who will hear things via word of mouth. Take advantage of the review sites and even create strategies that will tend to point your customers toward posting reviews. 3. Forums Forums are probably the most overlooked avenue for engaging prospects in the connection economy. Some successful small businesses have started because their owners first established themselves as experts on the forums. This post explains the technical side of including a link to your small business website in your forum posts. However, the point I want to stress here is that you should...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: The post-work economy, mobile marketing for service companies, customer loyalty and more
Is it possible that tomorrow will see the death of the work-based economy? Ben Schiller seems to think so. But, perhaps of more immediate importance is how you’re leveraging today’s technology to wow your customers and boost their loyalty. Leadership, management and productivity Are you delighting your customers through the best use of advanced technology? Check yourself against these four benchmarks. Any small business owner looking for financing needs to understand how to best use data to get a good loan. Do you know how “truth and honesty” advertising law impacts your social content? Start by being sure you aren’t making these three huge mistakes. Your online reputation is priceless. Here are 15 ways to manage it using SEO. Looking for new apps to help run your small business? This article looks at a wide variety of app categories. If you ever speak in public, you need to review these five questions before you start to pull together your talk. Marketing and sales Is your website ready for that big marketing campaign you’re planning? Here are six ways to prep it. Intrigue marketing. The name alone sounds, well, intriguing. Read how Neil St. Clair explains it. Retweets are free, so it’s smart to maximize them. Here are the five fundamentals that will lead to more retweets. Have an established website? If so, you probably can use these SEO tips. We all need opt-in forms and here are 10 creative places to put them on your website. John Rampton gives us four essentials to wring results from our content marketing budgets. Are you using emojis for anything other than expressing your glee after viewing a Facebook cat video? You should be using them in your marketing. Here are some ways. Most businesses are services business. Most Internet access is via mobile devices. Therefore, this article on mobile marketing for services businesses will prove to be quite useful! We know how important video marketing is, so it’s equally important to stay on top of how it’s evolving. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Want to live the dream? If so, check out these seven ways you can turn your blogging hobby into a real business. Politics, government and the economy Have all the economic rules changed? Ben Schiller seems to think so in his article, “Welcome to the Post-Work Economy.” If so many economic indicators have been positive for quite a while, why is there so much anxiety out there? Dave Shaw...
read moreThe four requirements for a sales team to succeed on ‘auto pilot’
In a previous post, I outlined how many small business owners and solopreneurs alternate between looking for clients and working for clients. When they’re busy with projects, they stop filling their sales funnel with prospects. To break this cycle, you need to automate funnel filling and there are two modes of automation: setting loose a team to do it and applying technology. Typically a combination of these two methods is used. Let’s look at setting loose a team to keep prospects coming through your front door. Your “team” may start out to be one person…or less: At first it may be one person working part time for you. However, it’s very important that this person is brought onboard in a manner that allows him or her to work “automatically.” In other words, if you’re the person who supplies the product or service, you want to concentrate on what you do best. Your sales team needs to be able to work efficiently on “auto pilot.” However, I’m not saying that your sales team doesn’t need supervision. I’m just saying that when the right leadership and management elements are in place, your sales team will do a great job with minimum supervision. Here are the required elements to create an automatic sales team: Hiring well, Having a strong company culture, Putting hires through a good training program, and Providing and maintaining up procedures. Hiring well I’m a firm believer that it’s more important to hire wisely than it is to hire quickly. The first step is to know exactly what you want, but here we’re focused on sales, so what you want is someone who can sell. However, this person will vary widely between small businesses. Ultimately, I believe you need a person who is dedicated to helping others and who sees your product or service as the “help” your prospects need. If they see themselves as solving problems for others, they won’t be perceived as hardcore sales people by your prospects. Keep personality and temperament in mind to help you be certain that your new hire will be a good fit. Company culture And as we discuss fit, you need to have a strong company culture established to give your new hire something to fit into. Otherwise, every new hire you bring on board will try to shape your culture. Because we’re talking about the early days of your small business, you may be the company culture. Keep that in mind and document what is important to you. Come up with a mission statement that captures the essence of what your small business is. Tip: If you have been doing sales, record successful phone calls so new sales hires can hear how you sound when you’re discussing your product or service. This will help you maintain the right tone in your company culture. Training program The above tip gives you one element for your sales training program. Again, since we’re talking about the early stages of your small business, you will be a large part of your training program curriculum. Nonetheless, your training needs to be standardized and there are a lot of Internet-based tools and strategies that can help you achieve this – even if you’re small. Much of this standardization will be in the form of procedures and...
read moreHow To Be a Jedi Search Master and Generate Leads on LinkedIn
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about B2B companies successfully marketing through LinkedIn. In fact, this is such a growth area that companies like Linked In Selling are filling up a social media marketing niche devoted to this platform. If you’re not ready to sign on with an agency to generate leads from LinkedIn for you, you’re probably at least ready to do some exploring yourself so you can get a feel for the potential. The first step in learning how to market through LinkedIn is to become an expert at using its search tool. This is the single most important LinkedIn skill for sales professionals to master. However, even before attempting to master LinkedIn searches, you must understand where your best prospects are coming from right now. When you have sales success, where does the conversation begin? Who are the best people for you to speak to in a company? Do an honest, unbiased analysis of this. When you have that information in hand you’ve completed your first important step in learning how to use LinkedIn for sales leads. Without that information, you’ll be wandering in the dark. Your next step within the LinkedIn platform is to focus your search on “people” and navigate to the advanced search page. You’ll find the icons you need to click at the top of your LinkedIn homepage. LinkedIn’s standard advanced search gives you a lot of filters you can use to zero in on the kind of people who give you the best odds for making a sale. But you should consider at least their entry-level premium membership if you think generating leads through LinkedIn has potential. I should also say that you can upgrade your membership for a month to try it out and then downgrade if you don’t feel the extra expense is worth it. The screen shot below shows you the standard filters as well as the seven additional filters you’ll get if you upgrade. Let me give you an example of how the premium filters could prove useful. With the standard filters you can target people who work in a specific industry. However, there’s a good chance that the product or service your company sells fits best with companies of a certain size. You can narrow down your search results by company size with one of the premium search filters. Explore all the filters. For example, people who are actively involved with or following any LinkedIn groups related to your industry might prove to be very valuable contacts for you. Once you have found some leads on LinkedIn, the obvious next step is to make contact with them. If you have some shared contacts, one of the best ways is to get an introduction via your shared contact, or at least get that person’s permission to mention him or her when you send an “in-network” message or invitation to connect to your prospect. However, you may want to contact this person outside of LinkedIn if you have a good sales email or other preferred means of contacting prospects. In that case, navigate to the person’s profile page and click on the “Contact Info” link. Very often people will list their email addresses and sometimes even a phone number is given. Finally, bring others on your sales and...
read more4 Shopping Apps To Keep Small Business Retailers Ahead of the Competition
Local small business retailers have been witnessing this scene for a few years now: Shoppers roam their aisles finding good merchandise. They scan the barcode on their smart phone and then use a price comparison application to see if they can find a better deal…often online. The routine is called showrooming; if the search starts on the Internet and ends in a local store, it’s called webrooming. My question for you is: Are you leveraging today’s powerful shopping apps to your advantage with the same efficiency as your customers are? Here are four product search apps that will deliver the competitive analysis you need to position your store pricing properly for your market. By the way, as these shopping apps have evolved in recent years, most now include a local store price comparison feature that will be of special interest to many small business retailers. Red Laser. This is probably the grandfather of the shopping apps. It was certainly one of the first to let users scan barcodes to make their comparisons. It now includes an “around me” function. If you have local competitors you need to stay on top of, this is one of your better choices. (All of these shopping apps depend on merchants uploading inventory and pricing information to various databases. If you or your competitors aren’t doing this, the information you receive via any of these store price checker applications will be incomplete.) ShopSavvy. Along with the standard features you would expect in a price comparison application, ShopSavvy also has a Chrome browser plugin, which may make it more convenient for the manager of a brick-and-mortar store to use on a daily basis. There are two other features that make ShopSavvy a shopping app that deserves careful consideration. It has a “price alert” feature that you could use to get a sense of when the competition stiffens on an important item in your inventory. It also employs “geofencing” so you can get a really good sense of what your closest competitors are doing with their pricing. PurchX. One of the main features of this product search app is the reviews and the way it encourages users to offer reviews. However, most small business retailers will be more interested in the raw pricing information than earning rewards for writing reviews. Amazon app. Of course the 300-pound gorilla of online shopping had to put out its own price comparison app, and as you might expect, it’s pretty slick. Although it includes non-Amazon retailers, I suspect that overall, the final shopping experience is better for retailers with products on Amazon. Being able to tout features like Amazon Prime while delivering comparison data to the user has to be an advantage. Below are current user ratings for these four shopping apps. Your customers are using mobile price comparison application software to get the best information on the products they want to buy. Using the same tools they use is an easy and inexpensive way to get the basic information you need to stay price...
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