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 moreWherein I Attempt to Explain Conflicting Survey Results!
Survey says! It’s a catch phrase that’s been in the American lexicon since Richard Dawson started hosting Family Feud in 1976. The show’s main hook is the embarrassing answers contestants give when they try to guess survey results. It can be equally as embarrassing trying to explain survey results, even when the surveys come from solid sources. For example just today I tweeted that one survey found that small businesses added 35,000 jobs in May while another said small businesses weren’t going to hire in the coming months. Sageworks makes it their business to know what privately-held companies are doing, and these are generally the smaller and medium sized businesses that propel the economy. They recently reported that both payables and receivables have been creeping up over the last year compared to the previous six years. At the same time a Constant Contact survey found that small business revenue is on the rise. What gives with all these seemingly conflicting data? Plus or minus how much? The first thing we need to note is that it’s darn tough to know exactly what’s happening in small businesses. They aren’t required to make the kind of reports that publicly held companies are required to file. So it comes down to surveys and despite the confidence levels statisticians put on their work, they can be wrong. However, there is an explanation for these contradictory results: small businesses do what’s necessary for success. For example, with the growing payables and receivables, some experts suggest that small businesses have merely found a way to work around banks’ current reluctance to loan money. Small businesses are essentially loaning money to each other! This makes a lot of sense when you have long term relationships with suppliers and customers. You know that they are credit worthy and maintaining the relationships is beneficial for all parties. Surveys vs real life In a survey this shows up as growing payables and receivables; in real life it shows up as a growing willingness to work with one another when things get difficult. I think it’s an admirable trait. Of course, there are times when payments need to be collected, and I’ve given some advice on that in the past. One way to take the error out of surveys, is to average the results of similar surveys conducted by different pollsters. And although I haven’t done this formally, I’ve been seeing a lot of surveys indicating profits are up in the small business sector. We know that employment hasn’t shown any dramatic increases, so it shows that small business are learning to do more with less. Often when we come out of a recession, businesses of all sizes are quick to forget the lessons that the recession taught; they can become too anxious to hire and otherwise increase overhead. While many may complain about this recovery, at least small businesses seem to be holding on to the lessons it taught us. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good...
read moreHow Many Natural Disasters Does It Take to Ruin a Small Business?
A major hurricane—winds at least 111 mph—hasn’t hit the United States since 2005, and I’m not forgetting about “Hurricane Sandy” and the devastation it caused. Technically, Sandy wasn’t a hurricane. However, we should take Sandy as a stark warning that stands in the midst of some pretty mellow years in terms of hurricane damage. While I’m not a fan of saying “we’re due” for a major hurricane, I am a fan of saying small businesses should take disaster preparedness somewhat more seriously. It’s always easy to think that bad stuff is going to happen to “the other guy.” But remember, to everyone else, you are the other guy. Many businesses that were caught unprepared during Hurricane Sandy took a long time to recover, even when they didn’t suffer substantial damage to their physical plants. More on that below. Hurricanes and more For East Coast businesses, NOAA offers a general guide to hurricanes and hurricane preparedness that you can download for free. It’s good, especially in its ability to scare you to action. To get a more comprehensive picture of natural disasters, including tornadoes, wildfires and floods, go to Ready.gov. And once you’re sufficiently concerned, head over to the Small Business Administration website and go through all the information and materials they have specifically for getting your business ready should a disaster strike. Hurricane Sandy hit more than 23,000 New York City businesses and most of them had fewer than 50 employees. Disasters like that claim about 40 percent of the businesses they hit, according to FEMA. Just as it takes a solid business plan for success in business, it takes a solid disaster plan to come through these terrible situations and land on your feet. Please backup your data It’s no secret that many small business owners still refuse to take data backup seriously and when disasters like a Hurricane strike, it’s easy to lose valuable business information forever, even if the roof doesn’t get blown off your building. Until a few years ago, many backup devices were vulnerable because they were typically kept in the same location as the devices they were backing up. But now, with cloud backup services widely available and inexpensive, there is really no excuse for any small business to lose important data during any kind of natural disaster. We need to add a word of caution here, however. If you’re located in a hurricane or flood zone, it’s not very helpful if the data center you use for backup—or your web presence—is only one block away. When you sign on with any data center service, find out where their facilities are located and how well they are prepared to deal with natural...
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...
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