How To Win the Webroom Shopper
Very recently I wanted to buy some plant watering spikes. Those are the things you screw onto an old one-liter plastic soda bottle filled with water and then poke them into the ground so they’ll slowly water a plant. I forgot exactly what they were called and was curious about brands and pricing so I did a search on Google and found what I had in mind. Next, I clicked the Google “shopping” link because I wanted to buy some. After I got the shopping results, my final step was to click the “local” option so I would get a list of local stores that had them in stock. Zilch. And so begins our lesson in webrooming. Showrooming vs Webrooming While showrooming gets most of the press—that phenomena must have a good PR guy—more people webroom than showroom. A recent survey found that 46 percent of shoppers showroomed last Christmas season while 69 percent webroomed. I better define some terms before I get too far. Showrooming is looking in stores for an item, then buying it online. Webrooming is doing what I did…or tried to do: finding an item online then buying it locally. Now come on guys, somebody in town must have the plant watering spikes I was looking for! The fact that I couldn’t find a local source online underscores the single most important thing to learn if you want to have a crack at the 69 percent of shoppers who admit to webrooming: you have to kill in local searches. Cover all your bases We know that with the increasing reliance on mobile devices, local searches are becoming the dominant focus of online marketing. Please note that the local search failure I experienced in my hunt for plant watering spikes occurred on a desktop computer. This underscores the several critical elements of a fully successful local search strategy. You must be there. No stores showed up as offering plant spikes in a local search. Are garden centers in my town ignoring local searches? Maybe, maybe not. However, if they’re targeting local searches, they are failing at point number two. If you sell products, upload product feeds. There are several places online where you can upload your catalog, such as comparative shopping sites. To get included on Google, you need to go through the Google Merchant Center and you pay when people click on your item. All of these services require formatting a product data feed. Developing the system for compiling the product feed is usually something you only need to do once. After that, it’s just a process of updating and re-uploading your feed. You must broadcast widely. There’s a huge array of websites and online directories that mobile device surfers use to find local products and services. Get into as many as possible. If you want someone else to do the work, check out services such as MyBusinessListingManager, Universal Business Listing, Localeze and Yext. Some of these are paid, some free. I’ve only given you the most basic details here. I suggest you do your homework and become an expert on dominating local search results. Do that and you’ll be master of the webroom...
read moreAre Your Followers Hitting the Twitter Mute Button?
“Excuse me, honey. What did you say? I wasn’t paying attention.” These words—or some very similar—are uttered in living rooms around the world every evening and now Twitter is bringing the same phenomena to its online world. The latest version of Twitter’s iOS and Android apps includes a mute feature. Simply put, when you hit the Twitter mute button for people you follow, you’re still subscribing to their feeds, but they are removed from the content you see until you “unmute” them. If you’ll let me go back to comparing the Twitter relationship to a marriage, the danger with the Twitter mute feature is that it could be a trial separation that leads to eventual divorce. You don’t want that, so it’s smart to know what kind of Twitter behavior can prompt your small business followers to hit the mute button and this is where it gets a little tricky. Tweet frequency Frankly, all the conventional wisdom tells us that we need to tweet rather frequently to get the kind of branding horsepower out of it that we desire. Many social media mavens recommend as many as 14 tweets a day, Monday through Friday. About half that on the weekends. If you’re consistently churning out 14 tweets a day, is that enough to push the needle on the “Annoyance Meter” into the red and motivate followers to hit mute? The general answer is no, but here’s the caveat: Your content must be consistently informative and/or engaging. When you give some thought to your Tweets, this shouldn’t be a problem. And your primary thought should be a question you ask yourself: Will my followers like this? Step outside of yourself for a moment and try to honestly judge the quality of your content from the perspective of your follower. What to avoid Here are some instances when I think your followers would be inclined to mute you: You’re at an event and you get so overwhelmed by the experience that you go into “moment-by-moment tweet mode.” Everything you’re seeing and hearing is knocking your figurative socks off and you want to share it. Don’t. Be more thoughtful. You aren’t Beyonce getting ready to go onstage at London’s O2 Arena. In situations like these, collect your thoughts, take photos when appropriate and publish solid content throughout the social media platforms a little later. This also allows you to make better, more strategic use of the information you’ve gathered. Someone engages you in a long public conversation. This shouldn’t be a major problem for small businesses, but be sensitive to the fact that the general public won’t care about prolonged “back-and-forths” between you and anyone else. If you see one of these starting to take off, switch channels before users hit their mute button. Although I’ve outlined some dangers of Twitter muting here, there are also benefits. For example, you can give someone a courtesy follow and not have to actually see that person’s tweets! Just don’t let that happen to...
read more4 Great Ideas for DIY Marketing Month
The calendar on the wall says it’s June while the calendar on my smartphone says it’s Entrepreneurs Do It Yourself Marketing Month. For most entrepreneurs every month is DIY marketing month, but as summer rolls in, we take a little extra time to consider marketing. I don’t want to highlight or honor this month with a rehash of social media marketing tips that you see almost every week. I’m going to pull out a few “gems” that I suspect some of you are overlooking. Testimonials One of the most powerful, easy and inexpensive marketing tools in the world is testimonials. If you look at any great service provider’s website, you’ll probably find testimonials on the home page. If you have some customers who are big fans, see if you can feature their testimonials prominently on your website. Use real pictures of these folks. We can all smell stock photos from a mile away. Be honest. It’s always, as the adage goes, the best policy. For retailers, product reviews serve this purpose, and when they are from a verified buyer, they truly become a testimonial. Comment on forums It is amazing how much traffic you can generate for your website when you post informative comments on forums related to your business sector. When you register to make comments on popular forums, often they will allow a link to your site in your “signature.” Do some research to discover which forums would perform the best for you and then spend a few minutes every day, scrolling through and reading new posts. Major forums give you statistics on the most visited topics and often tell you how many people are actively browsing. Concentrate your efforts in those locations. Create beaucoup landing pages If driving qualified customers or clients to your website would significantly enhance your marketing efforts, create landing pages to match every possible interest your leads would have. Hubspot did a survey of 7,000 businesses and found an interesting relationship between the number of landing pages and number of leads captured among both B2B and B2C businesses. The increase in leads wasn’t very significant when businesses went from one to five or even as high as 20 landing pages. However when the number of landing pages hit 40 and above, leads increased by five to six times. Start an affiliate program Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer is probably most famous for persuading his friends to whitewash the fence for him. Lining up others to sell your products won’t make you an icon of popular culture, but it will increase your cash flow. Research the various ways you can get an affiliate program going. There are plenty of third party providers as well as plugins and other software solutions. Maybe right now you don’t have something that you feel is appropriate to offer in an affiliate program. Do a little thinking and find a product that dovetails with your existing product line or service. Use it as a lure to build an affiliate program and then when leads see what else you offer or do, you have a good opportunity to up-sell/cross-sell or turn them into steady customers. Have any great DIY marketing tips that you’re willing to...
read moreAll I Need to Know about Small Biz I Learned in a Donut Shop
True Story. A friend stopped by his neighborhood donut shop the other day and found a new featured offering temptingly in the glass display case. He bought two; one for himself and one for his wife. His wife loved this new creation so much, the next day she dropped in and bought a dozen for co-workers. This taste treat isn’t totally new, but this donut shop was the first to make it in their hometown. Maybe you’ve had one. It’s the cronut. Dough is layered croissant style in the shape of a donut. It’s then deep fried and frosted any number of ways. In all honesty, there are few products as long-established as the donut, yet—according to Wikipedia—a bakery in New York City invented the “cronut” a year or so ago…although there are others who lay claim to the basic idea of fried croissant dough treats. Lesson #1: No matter how long your product line has been around, there are innovations waiting to be made. This neighborhood donut shop is not part of a chain. It’s been in business for years and when the strip mall where it’s located recently did an extreme facade makeover, local residents rose up and demanded that it’s old neon sign—with its animated “O” in “donuts”—be allowed to stay. There’s a major Krispy Kreme in the city, but it hasn’t put a damper on the business of this donut shop. It’s been going strong for 30 years and will probably survive for another 30…as long as they can keep finding family members willing to get up early enough in the morning to have fresh donuts ready for the commuting crowd. Lesson #2: When a large corporate competitor comes into your turf, it’s not instant doom. When my friend dropped in and bought his first cronut, there was another transaction going on in the donut shop—someone was buying a party cake. This shop has figured out a way to up-size the magic of the traditional donut into cake-sized offerings. This “innovation” is different than the cronut, because it opens a new market for the donut shop. Few would order two dozen donuts for a graduation party, for example, but people would order a unique donut-like cake. Lesson #3: There’s always a way to diversify and broaden your customer base. This donut shop is located within a block of a high school. With apologies to First Lady Michelle Obama and her quest to improve how our kids eat in school, this proximity to several hundred teenagers all throughout the school year guarantees this donut shop great traffic. Lesson #4: There is no substitute for bringing enthused visitors to your brick and mortar location or to your website. You may have noticed some upscale donut shops over the last 10 years or so. Many of them came and went. (I think some morphed into cup cake boutiques.) However, I bet your city has an old-style donut shop that’s been around for decades. While the donut shop described here has made some innovations and diversified, it hasn’t strayed far from what it does best. Don’t mess with a winning formula…right New Coke? Lesson #5: As they say in Texas, “Dance with the one that brung ya!” We offer these lessons from the halls of the American donut shop...
read moreIs Your Small Business Conducting Exit Interviews?
At a recent women business owner conference, I participated in a roundtable with other women entrepreneurs to discuss common challenges. The dominant topic, which surprised me, was employee recruitment and retention. Many women expressed concern about hiring an employee, training them and then watching them leave after a short tenure. The High Cost of Employee Turnover. Employee turnover is expensive. Human research professionals estimate the cost of turnover ranges from 50 to 200 percent of an employee’s annual salary. Furthermore, an employee resignation can impact the morale and productivity of your remaining team members. Don’t you think you owe it to the health of your business to examine the true motivation behind an employee’s departure? That’s why it’s so important to conduct exit interviews. Exit interviews can be as eye-opening as customer complaints. They provide an opportunity to gather information about your company that might otherwise be difficult to obtain while someone is working for you. The interview may cover issues such as benefits, working conditions, opportunities for career advancement, the quality and quantity of the workload, and relationships with co-workers and supervisors. To conduct a successful exit interview, set aside about one half hour in a quiet, private area. Because it’s difficult to conduct an exit interview, carefully plan what questions you intend to ask and what information you’d like to obtain. Start off by making the employee feel comfortable. You don’t want to make the meeting confrontational. Questions to Ask a Departing Employee * Why are you leaving? * How would you suggest we train your replacement? * What were the most challenging issues in your job? * How would you improve job satisfaction here? * What did you like most about your job? * Were you happy with the pay and benefits? * How do you feel the business is run? * Were there any policiesthat made your job more difficult? * Would you recommend working for this business to friends? Why or why not? * What did you dislike most about your job? If you consider the employees a valuable part of your team, be sure to ask if there is anything you can do to make her want to stay. You might be surprised by what you learn, and the entire conversation may turn into a negotiation. For example, suppose an employee is leaving because she wants to be able to work from home, but she’s afraid it won’t be acceptable. You may be able to arrange a schedule that works for both of you, and the employee will be saved. However, don’t be disappointed if that’s not the case. By the time someone has made the decision to resign, it’s probably too late to do anything about it because that’s a really big decision. Putting What You Learn to Work If you aren’t comfortable doing the exit interview yourself, or if you don’t think the employee will be honest with you, consider using an outside human resources professional. In fact many small companies find this is actually more productive. Small business owners typically have close relationships with their employees and as a result, the employee is often more comfortable with someone from outside the firm. Finally, use what you learn. If you get negative feedback, don’t be defensive. Investigate the information and if you discover a problem — fix it. It may protect you from...
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