Leverage Packaging – Physical and Digital – to Brand Your Small Business
Cats typically value boxes over the content that comes inside the boxes and we’ve all see the posts on Facebook that prove this fact. As a small business owner, if you ship anything, you might want to adopt some of that “cat attitude.” I say this because I recently heard some interesting comments about the boxes that a small business is using to ship its merchandise. The people who run this business display an incredible attention to detail and that goes all the way down to how items are shipped. The company has designed beautiful and sturdy boxes that feature its logo. They look so good that people save the boxes. They use them around the house and they also save them to reuse later when they know they’ll be sending Christmas gifts, for example, to out-of-state family members and friends. Every time a person sees one of these boxes, it helps brand the company. (Obviously a notion shared by Amazon.com!) And not only does the box “imprint” the company’s logo in the viewer’s brain, the quality of the box imparts a message as well. A lesson for small business Are you getting all the mileage you can out of your logo? This is one of the lessons small business owners need to learn from the global corporations. They treat their logos like royalty. They defend them from any incursion and they constantly put them on display. If you create any packaging, you should consider stepping up your game a bit so it does more than move your product from Point A to Point B. If you think hard on the subject, you’ll probably remember some boxes or bags that you have reused over the years. Of course, the classic cigar boxes are the greatest example of this. Today these are collectibles and can be worth several thousand dollars. I also remember little pouches that candy came in when we were children that we often reused for different purposes. In addition to any physical packaging that you use, consider your digital packaging as well. Work hard to keep a consistent, branded look to all of your webpages, email and social media platforms. When you look marvelous When you do this, I think it does more than just keep your small business logo in front of potential customers, I also think it sends a subliminal message that says you business is real and that you take care of all the details. It gives a feeling of “consistency” and this is one of the main things people want to sense when they strike up a relationship with a new and so-far unfamiliar business. If you carefully tend the image of your small business, it’s likely that you’ll give the same amount of care to your customers. The opposite is true also. If your branding is schizophrenic, people won’t know what to expect when they contact you…so they just won’t take that critical first step. Image: “Cat in a Box,” © 2008 Peter Huys, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:...
read moreNeed a Growth Strategy? Avoid These Epic Fails
What do startups and mature SMBs have in common? The need to develop and implement an effective growth strategy. This always proves easier said than done and that is in part due to the fact that growth strategies are rather elusive, almost like shapeshifters in science fiction. You think you see one at a distance, but when you get up close it has morphed into something entirely different. In an effort to help you avoid the trap of chasing growth strategy shapeshifters around endlessly, let’s look at a several strategies for growth, that aren’t really strategies at all. Chasing the hot growth market There’s always a new market that’s growing like gangbusters and it’s tempting to want to get a piece of that pie. Heck, the market is growing so fast that even if you got just a small share of the market, it would propel your growth to the next level. An acquaintance of mine was running an Internet bookselling company in the early days of Amazon. An investor kept pumping money into the operation and he was inching the company’s way toward profitability, and he made it one quarter. With his head finally above water, he felt that growth and added efficiencies would keep the company moving forward. Virtually the next day a new player entered the field that was willing to sell books at a loss to gain market share. The problem with chasing the red-hot growth markets is that they attract others like porch lights attract moths, and with the same eventual outcome. Fast growth with no margins is not a growth strategy, it’s a recipe for disaster. Adding more muscle “If 10 sales people can generate revenues of $10 million, then doubling the sales force will give us $20 million in revenue. It says so right here on my spreadsheet!” If the real world only behaved as nicely as our spreadsheets. Merely giving your sales and marketing people a mega dose of steroids and boosting their muscle mass, will not have the desired results. Adding bodies isn’t a growth strategy. If you study World War I, you’ll discover that the nations virtually backed themselves into the conflict because they sent so many soldiers through the same paths that they couldn’t get away from one another if they wanted to; the area was too crowded and it forced bad decisions on leaders. They had no room to maneuver. They had to fight. To bring this into a business setting, if there’s a new area you would like to “attack,” you need to know its potential, how many people it will require, have them trained and understand what kind of “maneuvers” they’ll need to be able to make once they make it to the “battlefield.” You see, it’s not about increasing input, growth comes by increasing throughput. Buying all the railroads on the Monopoly board Acquisitions can seem like a quick way to achieve growth. We read about them all the time in the financial pages, so shouldn’t we do it too? It’s difficult to get acquisition information about SMBs, but I can tell you that with publically traded companies, I most often see a failure rate of 70 percent when it comes to acquisitions. There’s a hidden problem that occurs when you flip on the...
read moreWomen: How to Let the World Know About The Businesses You Own
“The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand that Rules the World.” That well-known saying is the title of a poem by 19th Century American poet William Ross Wallace. And if you look at the dramatic increase in women small business ownership, today you might say that the hand that rocks the cradle is attached to the arm that is pulling the American economy out of the doldrums. According to data released by the US Census Bureau in August 2015, between 2007 and 2013, the total number of US firms grew by merely 2 percent. However, over that same period, the number of women-owned businesses grew by 27 percent. It looks to me that when going get tough, women don’t go shopping – they go out and start their own businesses. That impressive growth rate, by the way, means that women entrepreneurs are starting about 1,200 business every day. With those impressive figures in mind, it’s appropriate that October is National Women’s Small Business Month. According to the Association of Women’s Business Centers, there are nearly 9.1 million women-owned enterprises, employing some 7.9 million workers and generating more than $1.4 trillion in revenues. Further, revenue and employment growth among women-owned firms tops that of all other firms, with the exception of the largest, publicly traded corporations. Success creates opportunities and the success of women-owned businesses creates more opportunities for women and I recently saw an example of this when I was browsing the aisles of the local Sam’s Club. Sam’s Club and Walmart are featuring the official Women Owned Logo in both stores and online. The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) in the United States and WEConnect International globally are certifying women majority ownership as well as responsibility for operations and management, and issuing a logo that shoppers can watch for. I know that there is a significant group of buyers who like to support small businesses owned and managed by women, but in addition to that, companies are increasingly on the lookout for women-owned sources of supplies. Qualifying for the official Women Owned Logo can be the first step to becoming a qualified supplier for a wide range of larger industries. I think our society in general has become more sensitive to supporting new groups as they begin to compete in commerce. Also, Millennials are noted for their sensitivity to social awareness and making it a priority in their lives. If this holds up as they grow older, I believe that something like being officially designated a women-owned business will be even more valuable. In some cases, a designation like this could be the noticeable difference that gives you an edge when it comes to making certain sales. The bottom line is that if you qualify for the Woman Owned Logo, going through the application process could be a very smart business...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: 41 Lifecycle emails and a desert island list…for starters
It’s like everyone had busy schedules this week so they couldn’t write paragraphs; they went for lists and single sentences instead. You’ll want to print out some of these and tape them to your refrigerator. Marketing and sales The 41 lifecycle emails listed in this post will keep you busy and ringing up sales for a long time. Pressed for time? These 15 one-sentence chunks of online marketing advice that you can use today were written with you in mind. Everyone knows they have to do social media marketing, but many are making a variety of small mistakes that are sinking their efforts. See if you’re guilty of these errors. Small business retailers: If you want 2016 to be even better than 2015, take these four tips to heart. Purposeful content marketing beats the shotgun approach everyday. These five tips will help. Leadership, management and productivity Hollie Hoadley of CSConsulting shares her “desert island list” of five small business tools…given your desert island has an Internet connection. Do you know the location of the nearest Small Business Development Center? This article by Ty Kiisel will make you want to seek it out and head over there. If you have a unique value proposition, your small business can command premium prices. Get the full picture in this article on Steve Chou’s “My Wife Quit Her Job” blog. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Bizfi came out with an API that lets partner companies offer direct lending solutions to their small business customers. Politics, government and the economy We’ve been watching the stock market go up and down like a fourth grader’s yo-yo. But do all these Wall Street fluctuations make an impact on Main...
read moreDiscover How These Two Web Design Trends Can Boost Your Engagement
If you’ve ever wanted to say something like, “As far as I’m concerned all web designers can go to you know where!” – it looks like your request has been granted. Okay, I’m not talking about what immediately popped into your mind when I wrote that opening with the reference to the “h-word.” I was actually referring to two hot (there’s another word that begins with “h”) web page design trends that start with that letter: The Hello Bar, and The Hero Image. Web designers have been leaning heavily on these two trends recently and if you don’t know what they are by their labels, you have certainly seen them both…a lot. Turbocharge your CTA The Hello Bar is that thin red (usually) band that appears at the very top of a homepage that advertises something, such as a sale on an item or an pitch to sign up for a newsletter. The Hero Image is a very oversized graphic that takes up most of your screen when you load a website’s home page. While one of these is very tiny and the other quite large, they are both popular right now for the same reason: they have impact. Even though the Hello Bar is small, it grabs your eyes and almost seems to cast a spell on you and make you go click on it. The Hero Image just smacks you in the face and says, “Look at me!” It’s usually a great image that gives us an immediate feel for what the site is trying to accomplish. Hello Bar is a third-party service that offers a free plan (displays ads) or premium plans (no ads). There are also various plugins available for WordPress sites that accomplish the same thing. If you aren’t getting the results you want with your website call to action, do some additional research on your Hello Bar options and start testing. This footwear site really illustrates what the Hero Image design is all about. If you would like to have one of the new single-page design websites, a Hero Image might work well for you. You’ll note with this footwear site that its design urges you to keep scrolling down. This tactic was developed to overcome people’s reluctance to clicking and being forced to load additional pages. Send in a hero I think that Hero Images are best suited to ecommerce and blog sites. A great image will immediately engage a visitor and if you’re selling a product, you can usually communicate a lot with an oversized image. If you have a new website in your future, or are considering a redesign, give some thought to how you might use a Hello Bar and/or a Hero...
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