This Week in Small Business: Small biz loves Facebook, marketing automation, how the gig economy will shape 2016, and more
The gig economy, the experience economy and checking your list to see who has been naughty and nice are just a few of the useful topics covered in this week’s curated content. Leadership, management and productivity It looks like small business owners are pretty much loving Facebook as an advertising vehicle and are propelling the social media giant to equally giant profits. Get up to speed on what the “loan constant” is, if you ever plan to sit across from a small business loan officer! Are you giving your customers the experience they need or want? See how Kate Spade has revamped the luxury brand experience. And if you need a tool to help you innovate your customer experience, consider surveys. You don’t want “another satisfied customer,” you want enthusiastic, emotionally connected customers, says the authors of this Harvard Business Review article. Marketing and sales Ho! Ho! Ho! It’s time to cut the naught and keep the nice contacts on your email list, says Matt Walker. We learn about agile marketing. We learn about content marketing. In this article, agile marketing meets content marketing. Rohit Arora points out three lessons small business owners can learn from Cyber Monday. Might Instagram be the ideal marketing platform for your small business? Ema Linaker addresses that question in great detail. With the price of today’s data plans, can your mobile customers even afford to see your ads? If you might hire a direct marketing company to work with, make sure you read this article first. Here are 10 simple tweaks you can make to your blogs to help you generate some sales. Marketing automation is one way small businesses can adequately compete with large enterprises. Here are six automation tools that boost leads and conversions. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Big data isn’t just for big companies. Startups can use big data to understand their markets, products, and consumers better than ever before. Even small business entrepreneurs need to care about cybersecurity. You can’t pretend that it won’t happen to you. Politics, government and the economy The emerging “gig economy” should be one of the major influences 2016. Sharon Florentine talks about what’s hot, and what’s not. The “gig economy” looks at the worker side of things. The “experience economy” is changing consumerism. You may want to get in on...
read moreHow to make your small business brand promise and deliver on it
I had the privilege of speaking to a great group of Denny’s franchise holders recently and as I was preparing for the event, I reflected on the many times over the years that I had eaten at a Denny’s. If you’re like a lot of Americans, you have found yourself on a long road trip – probably with your family – and you needed a place to eat. Suddenly you see a Denny’s and you pull off the highway, having no second thoughts. Why can you pull into virtually any Denny’s anywhere with that kind of confidence? The reason is that the company has created an unspoken brand promise to America that goes something like this: Denny’s promises a pleasant dining experience with consistently good food reasonably priced in a bright, clean facility. Denny’s didn’t have to voice its brand promise, but that’s okay too. FedEx has used slogans such as, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” That is obviously a brand promise. Whether spoken or unspoken, a brand promise goes to the core – the heart and soul – of a business. A quality assurance professional friend of my told me that one of the ways they joke about a bad business is to say, “Acme Widgets: Where quality is our slogan!” If you can’t think of what your small business brand promise is, you need to do a gut check and maybe even ask yourself why you’re in business in the first place. You see, if you can’t define it, your customers will never feel it. Ask yourself this question: What special and valuable expectations do my customers have of my business (or that I want them to have) that I will meet every time without exception? This will be what you are known for or would like to be known for. You may have heard of The Wieners Circle in Chicago. It’s a hot dog joint that is famous for its char dog, cheddar fries and inability to tolerate any hesitation from customers. If you order a tube steak there, you better be ready to weather some verbal abuse along the way. People go to The Wieners Circle for the experience. The hot dogs are great and the service is, as one customer put it, “brutal.” That’s their promise and they always deliver. I mention The Wieners Circle because it’s obvious what sets them apart from all the other hot dog stands in Chicago. If your brand promise isn’t apparent, people won’t pick up on it. And if it’s not consistent, people will end up disappointed by your business. To focus in on your small business brand promise you need to know: What your value proposition is, What your noticeable difference is, and How these two attributes are embraced and embodied by the culture of your small business. Those three things need to be working together in harmony to deliver a brand promise that your small business customers and clients are going to sense and, hopefully, fall in love with. You may want to capture it in a tagline that communicates to customers, but you also want to capture it in a few sentences or paragraphs so you can communicate it to your team. It should be part of your training. It should be part of your...
read moreHow to multiply yourself through small business automation
I’ve written on my site and in my books about what I call the Mytop Theory™ – multiply yourself through other people. It’s a great way to approach hiring in your small business. With the incredible evolution of cloud services and mobile apps, small business owners can now affordably “multiply themselves” through automation, and this is true if you’re a one-person shop just starting out, or have a fairly large team working for you. There are new software as a service (SaaS) providers popping up every day, so this short introduction is far from comprehensive. However, I want to give you a glimpse at the range of small business automation tools you have at your disposal and encourage you to dig a little deeper – you may find that someone has created the ideal service for your niche. Social media automation In terms of the number of services and apps available, social media automation is probably the biggest single category. I recently was talking to an upscale professional social media service provider and entry level pricing started at north of $1,000 per month. I’m sure the company was excellent, but honestly, a smart small business owner armed with the right apps can get at least that much value – and probably more – for less than $25 a month, or even free. Finding content to share is one of the most important and time-consuming jobs in social media branding. There are several small business automation tools available for free or small monthly fees. I like the free Juice app, which looks at your Twitter followers and recommends about 10 pieces of sharable content each day. I also like Hootsuite Suggestions, which requires a subscription. But it integrates so well with Hootsuite, that it’s probably worth your money. It will automatically slot suggested content into the ideal time slots over virtually all your social media accounts and platforms. If you have a series of Tweets that you like to send on a revolving basis, or a list of Tweets you want to blow through one time, Tweet Juke Box is perfect and you’ll probably be okay with the free version. Set it up and walk away! Loading and managing your sales funnel Second to social media management, when you’re looking for cost-effective small business automation, you’ll probably want to get into the various levels of customer relationship management SaaS. For smaller teams Pipedrive is often the perfect fit. It’s simple and effective. Your employees will be able to master it quickly, which is a big plus in the small business environment. When your budget grows and you need more bells and whistles, as well as more nuanced CRM, Infusionsoft is worth a look. It not only has all the CRM features you’ll want, but it brings small business automation to marketing. It allows you to build in “if-then” logic and it even lets you identify your hottest prospects through how they interact with you and your materials online. But you need to get people into your sales funnel or pipeline before your CRM system can do anything with them. If your small business contacts prospects via phone, you might want to investigate a predictive dialing service such as Calltools. The automation feature built into it helps eliminate the time your...
read moreHow the Next President can be the ‘Small Business President’
Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, III served under three presidents – Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter – and now he is the chairman and founder of McLarty Associates and chairman of the McLarty Companies, a fourth-generation family transportation company. That’s an incredible resume and I think it proves that he’s a “straight shooter,” a practical man and a man who understands how this country works. He just wrote a piece for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that’s an open letter to whoever becomes our next president, urging that person to be the “small business president.” That’s wonderful advice, but not easy advice to carry out, and here are some reasons. Writing for the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council recently, economist Raymond J. Keating outlined a survey of small business leaders that detailed various ways state small business development programs go wrong. He wondered if they are more a boost to small business or merely political grandstanding. My fear is that if our next president takes McLarty’s advice, the net result will be more political grandstanding than support for real small business. Here are some of the findings in the study that Keating discussed. Too much money is spent on big incentive deals that end up hurting state finances. Spending is biased toward big businesses. The voice of small businesses isn’t represented in state capitals. Small businesses that want to grow aren’t getting the help they need. Current state economic incentive policies are ineffective in promoting economic growth. We’ve documented the problems, excesses, and misappropriation of “small business” grants before, and I have no reason to think that this kind of thing will soon stop. Too often our leaders create a commission, a department or a special board, or fund spending in a certain area and they point to those things as “accomplishments.” An elected official might boast to voters by proclaiming, “Since I was put in office, we have created – and fully funded – the Boost Small Business Board!” That sounds great to voters, but the real issue is to find out if it has had any real impact on small business growth or creation. The irony here is that in scenarios like the one I’ve just described, the politician is essentially using our money to buy our support: our tax money goes to the government, the government spends it to hire bureaucrats to fill out a new board, and then the elected officials tells us that he (or she) has done something special for us. Keating very succinctly described the kinds of things government can do that would really help small business: What actually matters for entrepreneurship and small business growth from a policy perspective is to establish a climate in which entrepreneurs, businesses and investors are free to innovate, invest, compete and grow, with the market guiding resource allocation rather than government, thereby driving economic, income and employment growth forward. That means keeping tax and regulatory burdens low, property rights protected, and government limited but as effective as possible in its legitimate undertakings. Unfortunately “establishing a climate” is far less appealing to politicians than creating a program or handing out grant money. When you hand out a $1 million grant you can get one of those oversized checks made and have your photo snapped...
read moreHow the Internet of Everything Can Greatly Improve Business Travel
This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own. When you get into the slowest moving line at the supermarket, serving dinner late is about the worst thing that can happen. Have the same bad fortune at the airport and you could end up spending the night in the terminal. Savvy business travelers are going boldly into an era where the Internet we’ve all grown accustomed to using everyday is being wed to the Internet of Things (IoT) and evolving into the Internet of Everything (IoE). This emerging and immersing (I’ll explain why I used that word in a moment) technology is in the process of greatly improving airline travel. A common scenario Picture yourself on a business trip. It’s a weekday morning and you’re getting ready to head to the airport to make your next flight. Your smartphone is running the app of the airline you’re flying and you’ve probably checked in using the app and have your boarding passes on your home screen. You and your airline have already shared a lot of information with one another and you’re still hours away from your flight…if you haven’t overslept or the airline hasn’t changed the flight schedule. If there’s been any hiccup in your airline itinerary, your stress level is going to start increasing and problems begin to mount for the airline. Imagine an airline that can tell how far you are from the airport and realize that there’s no way you’re going to make your flight. You could be automatically alerted. The airline could automatically book you on the next available flight and know that it has an empty seat that it can now sell to another passenger. All of that is possible today and in this case, you haven’t even wandered into the airport’s IoE yet. Airports and airlines are busy finding ways to leverage the IoE using your smartphone, strategically located beacons, various sensors, smart signage and other interconnected technologies to improve the travel experience. This translates to a vastly improved customer experience for passengers and greater productivity for airlines, airports and vendors within airports. A digital valet Wouldn’t it be great to arrive at a busy airport and be assigned a personal valet whose job it is to make sure your travel experience is optimized? Airports from London to Dallas and airlines like Virgin Atlantic and American are beginning to leverage the power of the IoE to do just that, except the valet is digital, not flesh and blood. Let’s take a simple example, but one we all can relate to. You arrive at the airport and need to get to your gate. Beacons within the terminal can sense your presence and trigger a message to your smartphone that verifies your gate number, tells you how to get there and recommends the shortest security-check line along the way. It may also recommend some food options as you walk the aisles based on the time of day and the type of airport meals you typically opt for. Further, smart signage – vendors’ and the airport’s – can tie into the IoE and deliver messages customized to the preferences and situations of travelers in the immediate area. Mapping airport usage As this beacon-equipped airport terminal is connecting to passenger smartphones, it’s also...
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