Mobile Website Design: Target Your Least Loyal Customer
Have you noticed all the one-page websites that seem to be taking over the Internet? They have the advantage that they don’t require any clicking on the part of the user, which leads to wait times while pages load. In other words, web users are a finicky and impatient bunch; everything you can do to streamline your website and make navigation seamless (or not required at all) is a smart move. Mobile site are perhaps the most egregious offenders today. This is especially true when the mobile site of a small business isn’t really a mobile site at all – just the regular site being displayed on a painfully small smartphone screen. When sites won’t load I ran into this problem recently when my husband and I were out on the town and I decided to check the Monday night specials at one of our favorite restaurants. The site flat out wouldn’t load. Fortunately for the restaurant owner, we like the place enough that we went anyway. Many others, however, don’t have that kind of loyalty, especially the prospects who owners desperately need to get through the doors. Here’s a simple tip: Design your web presence with your least loyal, most flighty customers/prospects in mind. If it works for them, it will work for everyone else too. There are some social currents that just won’t be turned back and the trend toward mobile is one of those. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine some businesses designing their mobile sites first and then adapting them to a larger screen format. Get those walk-ins If your small business relies on customers walking through the front door – as in the retail, hospitality, or food industries – don’t leave your mobile site up to chance. If you designed your site more than a few years ago, there’s a great chance that you don’t have a separate mobile site that renders differently than your regular site. Here’s a homework assignment for you: Navigate to every corner of your mobile site and also have friends and family members do the same thing. Keep a critical eye focused on how easily you are able to navigate and how quickly pages load. Be sure that your landing pages work in the mobile world. Remember that you’re familiar with your site. Can prospects who come to your website for the first time while using their mobile devices understand it, get their questions answered and do the actions you would like them to do? Be sure to have some people who have never visited your website among your testers. Go into analysis Finally, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site – or you seldom review the statistics – get on board. You’ll find out how many visitors are accessing your website through mobile devices, along with a lot more critical information you can use as you optimize your site. Image: “Virato Multiscreen” by dw capital GmbH – Own work (Original text: Eigene Grafik (Design: Massimo Mosna, dw capital GmbH)). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia...
read moreCould Your Small Biz Benefit From a Mentor? Enter the Pitney Bowes SmallBiz Mentorship Contest
Could you use a mentor to help you grow your small business? You could win one of the best in the business by entering the Pitney Bowes SmallBiz Mentorship Contest. (#PBSmallBiz) Two lucky winners will receive customized, one-on-one mentorship from one of two leading small business experts, Brian Moran and Marsha Collier, who have teamed up with Pitney Bowes to help you ignite your business. It’s simple to enter. All you need to do it “like” the Pitney Bowes Small Business Facebook page and then post why your company would benefit from a mentorship program. (Keep it under 200 words, please.) What You’ll Win: – Three one-hour consultations via phone or Skype between September 25 and November 20; – Review of your business plan and evaluation of key stress points; – Actionable recommendations and follow up; and – Final evaluation of progress and additional recommendations to help you find the success you imagined. You have until midnight, September 22, 2014 to enter. Winners will be selected 40% based on the number of ‘Likes’ on their post and 60% at the discretion of the Mentors and Pitney Bowes. Winners will be announced on our Facebook page on September 24. Every business can benefit from a good mentor. So what are you waiting for? Good luck!...
read moreShould Your Promote Your Star Employee to Management?
Have you noticed how few Hall of Fame baseball players end up as managers after their careers end? In the same way, if you look at the managers who have made it to the Hall of Fame, you aren’t going to find any of the game’s biggest names. A recent managerial inductee is Tony La Russa, who I enjoyed following for years as he guided the St. Louis Cardinals through many championship seasons. However, as an infielder in the major leagues, La Russa’s lifetime .199 batting average doesn’t even put him over the Mendoza Line. The problem with great players is that they can’t relate to the average players. They expect everyone to live up to their standards. The same problem can pop up when you’re selecting managers for your small business. Also, different business situations require different managerial strengths. Let’s look at some attributes that will help you determine who on your staff should do well when promoted to manager. Leadership All managers should have some leadership skills, however, there are some environment swhen it needs to be one of the manager’s strongest skills. If you’re in a turn-around situation, opening a new area of business or are experiencing difficulties in one department, strong leadership is required. Organizational skills Good organizational skills will be needed at times in any managerial position, however sometimes they are critical. If you sense that efficiency is suffering, you need to bring in a manager who can see past the clutter and get the machine running smoothly. Ability to control Are personnel issues holding back your company? Leadership and organization are required, but the ability to maintain control is highlighted. To keep control, you need someone who can have frank conversations with employees without losing his or her cool, which brings us to the next quality. Proper temperament Anger has no place in management, although almost everyone suffers the occasional bout of anger. Sometimes “star” employees are also the most passionate employees. They can have a difficult time controlling their emotions. If you’re planning to promote such an individual, before you make the move, have a long talk about temperament and make sure the person knows your expectations. Communication skills Excellent communication skills are a hallmark of most great managers. If you’re in a technical industry, your most skilled techie might be your best employee. However, this person may have very poor communication skills – and no desire to develop them. Don’t promote your tech wizard just because he or she has been so valuable as an employee. Teaching nature Along the small business growth curve, there are times when you want to replicate certain people. If you have a star employee who has a natural ability to teach others, this person could make a good manager. On the flip side, there are people who like to keep their special knowledge to themselves to maintain their superiority. Watch out for them, even if they excel at their jobs. Choosing the right individuals for promotion is as much an art as a science. Keep these qualities in mind and try to avoid a real-life demonstration of the Peter Principle: Promoting people to the level of their incompetence. One final word of advice. When you have “Hall of Fame” employees, you can find other ways...
read moreHigh Touch and High Tech Helping Independent Restaurants Succeed
“Sorry, we are closed.” Everyone has seen this all-too-familiar sign hung in the darkened windows of your favorite local eatery. Although this time, it’s not just until tomorrow morning’s kitchen prep, now — it’s for good! Personally when it comes to dining out, I prefer independently owned eateries. Why? For starters, I think the food is just better than the standard fare at most chain restaurants. But it’s more than that: The atmosphere is typically warmer and more personable than you find in the cold, cookie-cutter chains. Unfortunately, these wonderful independent restaurants, built on the backs of hard-working entrepreneurs are struggling in today’s economy. Approximately 59 percent of new restaurants fail within their first three years. Surprisingly the rates climb even higher for more established eateries with nearly 70 percent closing their doors after ten years. Yet despite the odds, there are many independent restauranteurs who are not just surviving, they’re thriving. What’s their secret? It’s a combination of high touch and high tech. Here are some examples to help you succeed. * Tech-Savvy Marketing – Millions of people in the U.S. today are tied to their mobile devices. So smart restauranteurs are using mobile marketing to reach their customers in a timely and cost-effective manner. My husband gets text messages from one of his favorite restaurants alerting him of the daily special, a discount or a special event. The initial investment to start a mobile marketing campaign is minimal, but it does take time to collect patron’s cell numbers. Remember, you need to obtain permission from customers before including them in a text messaging campaign. But it’s an excellent way to stay connected to your customers. * Compelling Internet Presence – Recently I was traveling in Hawaii, and I picked up the usual tourist magazines to find great places to eat. Because I don’t like tourist traps, I turned to the web for more information. I was surprised to find many of the restaurants had no website at all, or if they did, their sites failed to provide helpful information about their menus, hours and special offerings. One of the restaurants even had inaccurate information which I learned when I arrived for breakfast and found they were now only open for lunch and dinner. Whether you like it or not, your restaurant is popping up on the web via local review sites and restaurant directories. If you aren’t controlling the your web presence, you could very well be losing business. * Get Social and Create a Buzz – One of the first things I do when I decide to try a new restaurant is check out their Facebook page. I like to get a sense of the restaurant’s personality so to speak. Social media is a smart way to build buzz about your restaurant. Not only can you stay engaged with your current customers, but your regulars can help you spread the word by sharing your messages. A restaurant in my neighborhood posts a special word each day. If you mention the word when you go in, you receive a special discount or a free goodie. * Sweat the Small Stuff– I think one of the key factors in a restaurant’s success is the face that welcomes you every time you walk in the door. Let’s face it...
read moreFree Tools to Troubleshoot Your Website Performance
Remember when the Internet was young and innocent and everyone had counters at the bottom of their pages that revealed the total number of visitors? That seems so long ago now. Judging the performance of your site today is much more complicated than checking an odometer-style counter in the footer. And if you aren’t getting the results you had hoped for, straightening things out can be a major project. But here are some free tools that you should wield yourself before you cave in and take your site to an expensive website mechanic. Uptime Does your web host provide excellent uptime? This can be difficult to judge. They all advertise 99.9 percent uptime and greater. The only sure way to monitor your site’s uptime is to have it monitored. However, Hyperspin has a ranking that includes many hosts. It’s basically a compilation of data the company has gathered for its clients. Web host servers come in a variety of flavors, the most important of which are “shared” and “dedicated.” In other words, are there other sites on your server or does your site have the whole server to itself? Note these categories when you check Hyperspin. Mashable has a list of 10 free services that will monitor your site. They alert you when they find the site down. You can have most of them hunt for certain words on pages which helps you isolate possible trouble spots such as plugins failing to load. If you love DIY projects and only need the most basic alert, check out this simple uptime checker that uses a Google docs spreadsheet. Visibility The second basic attribute to monitor is your visibility on Google. Much of this is a reflection of your search engine optimization (SEO). Start by simply doing a search on Google for your domain name: www.yourdomainname.com. The vast majority of results should be pages from your site. A freelance writer friend of mine does a blog for a real estate company. He recently discovered that the company’s entire site was not being indexed by Google. No one at the company had any idea. He alerted them and it was quickly fixed. Copy and paste some complete sentences from various pages on your site and Google them. If they are unique, they should appear first in the search results. You’ll also discover if anyone is pirating your content. SEO Much is written everyday about SEO. Here I just want to cover a few basics. Sites such as SEO SiteCheckUp and WebSeo Analytics will scan your site and give you a free report. You should address any issues they discover with the understanding that SEO today depends on your increased “authority” in your field, not just fixing a few things on a one-shot basis. The SEO SiteCheckup report gives you a keywords cloud. Look at it carefully and see if it reflects what you believe are your most important keywords. Also, perform Google and Bing searches for your keywords and see how well you rank versus your competitors. Use the two free SEO tools – and there are others on the Internet – to analyze your competitors’ websites. See where they may outperform you. This is basic stuff, but it can’t be left to chance. Let me leave you with one more “self check”...
read moreNew Business Plan: Four weddings and a funeral
If you follow me, you know I’ve discussed thinking about new market opportunities for your product or service as a way to grow your business. You may remember the blog I wrote about baking soda. Well this one takes the cake – no pun intended. Funeral homes are hosting weddings. I grew up working in a family-owned funeral home, and honestly this is an idea I wouldn’t have seen, but it makes sense. If we can believe HBO’s series, “Six Feet Under,” independent funeral homes are having a hard time staying alive. According to industry sources, many are starting to think outside the box and are finding ways to repurpose their facilities. Occupancy problem According to US Funerals Online, funeral home facilities lay empty around half the time and a funeral chapel is a lot like a hotel room – there’s no way to collect rent on yesterday’s unoccupied funeral chapel. So far, no “hotels.com” has popped up to handle excess funeral chapel inventory. However, if you stand back and look at a funeral chapel solely in terms of its infrastructure, you’ll see that it’s basically a rental hall with a lot of upgrades built into it. They often have musical instruments on hand, such as an organ or piano, the ability to handle flower arrangements and more. Further, many are decorated in a style that lends them quite well for other ceremonies or events, such as weddings. To take advantage of this trend, funeral homes across the country are repurposing, rechristening and renaming part of their facilities as “family” or “life” centers. One of these is The Avacentre in Cedar Rapids. The Avacentre happens to be at the same location as Brosh Chapel funeral home, but you can’t tell that by its promotional materials. “I’d say probably now 90 percent of people that call the Avacentre would be in an age bracket from probably 20s up until 50s (and) don’t really know there is something else going on in that building. They really don’t care,” Matt Linn, owner and president of both businesses, told The Gazette. Not only is The Avacentre expanding its business by drumming up weddings, it’s going after corporate events and virtually any other type of party. Back to basics The takeaway from this is to look at the “bones” of your business. Define what you do in the most generic way possible. Funeral parlors essentially provide meeting places. Who else can use a meeting place? What is the most basic function of your service or product? With a little tweaking, who else could use it? Business success can ultimately become a numbers game. With the funeral home business, the numbers highlight the potential additional earnings available through a horizontal expansion. People only get one funeral, but many today celebrate several marriages over the course of their lifetime… Image: 1959 Cadillac Superior Landau side loader Hearse, © 2012 Dave S, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
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