Robots to the rescue: Tapping Artificial Intelligence to power your small business
Are you one of the many small business owners who could use some help, but can’t afford it? Maybe you’ve run the numbers and concluded that: Bringing someone on part time would bust your budget, and Hiring an overseas virtual assistant would siphon away cash that you need to invest in other areas. What can you do? Bring a robot on board. The rise of ‘bots’ Remember when robots started doing jobs in manufacturing? We have all probably seen the pictures of robotic arms painting new cars at the major car manufacturers’ assembly plants. Today, even those of us who don’t need mechanical robots can take advantage of “robotics” by using online “bots.” Instead of gears, bearings, and sensors, these bots use digital code and “artificial intelligence” (AI) to perform tasks for us. You may have seen articles about Facebook messenger bots. Many businesses and even individuals have developed bots that interact with friends and fans who message them through the Facebook messaging system. For some inspiration on how these might work for you, look over the great Facebook Messenger bots described in this PC magazine article by Eric Griffith. Meet GrowthBot I want to introduce you to a bot that Hubspot has created and is free right now, although I can certainly imagine them charging for this someday soon. It’s of special interest to any small business that does digital marketing. They call it GrowthBot and you’ll find it at GrowthBot.io. Let me show you how Hubspot’s GrowthBot can do some of the work you might hire someone to do, or pile onto the workload of an existing team member. In many ways, you can think of GrowthBot as being an online expert that’s available to you via chat. (I need to mention that GrowthBot integrates with the business communication/messaging app Slack.) For example, if I were a real estate professional, I might want information to inspire a blog or just information for my benefit. I could ask GrowthBot something like, “What’s the top article in mortgages?” and I’d get the five top articles by social shares. More jobs you can give GrowthBot Other specific requests or questions Hubspot lists that you can ask are: Tell me about [Person’s email] Company Info on [Company website domain] Show me the top articles on [blog or website] What tech does [website] use? Show me something funny Further, GrowthBot says that it’s “learning to do more” every day, so the kinds of questions you ask should be getting broader all the time. This is the heart of real AI: it’s pool of understanding grows through interactions. GrowthBot’s other powerful feature involves website analytics. With Google Analytics installed on your website, you can have GrowthBot report back to you on statistics such as page views. You can set triggers that will prompt GrowthBot to message you via Slack. For example, if you want to know when the hottest page on your website starts to lose traffic, you can create some settings that would notify you when views of that page go down by 10 percent week-to-week. GrowthBot is quite flexible in this kind of analytical reporting. You can use percentages or absolute numbers. You can specify certain pages or your domain as a whole. If you have an AdWords campaign going on, you can...
read moreDon’t hire this person for your small business!
It should be no surprise that all kinds of recruiters are advertising their services like crazy: Hiring is a hassle. For years now, the problem of finding talented people has been one of the top two complaints from small business owners. (The other consistent complaint is tight bank credit.) However, piloting a small business to higher levels of success requires growth, and growth requires additional employees. I’ve discussed this before in the context of the Mytop Theory? theory of growing your team. Yet, with this said sometimes it’s important to recognize when the individual who seems like the best candidate may, in fact, be among the worst candidates for your opening. Let me explain. Who not to hire I’ve often talked to small business owners about their hiring experiences and there’s one horror story that I hear repeatedly: Hiring the over-qualified. Imagine this scenario: You’re advertising for a marketing person and the resume of an individual who headed up the marketing department at a much larger company appears in your in-box. “Wow! To land an experienced professional like that would be a huge coup for me,” you say to yourself. So you make this person an offer and the deal is sealed. It doesn’t take too long to discover, sadly, that this professional’s strengths are in managing a team of marketers – not actually doing the marketing tasks. In fact, professionals like these might even be a little behind the times when it comes to understanding the latest marketing tools and strategies. They’ve been out of the trenches too long. Create a team of doers When you’re hiring for your small business, you usually want a doer, not an overseer. Look for a bright individual who is a self-starter and a self-learner. This person will get the job done, grow on the job, and probably be ready for a management position when your business has grown to that point. Bringing on an over-qualified professional will probably end up with the work not getting done and it could also create some internal strife, maybe even a power struggle. (By the way, with all the different websites available today where you can recruit talent for your team, it can be confusing. In this Inc. article, John Rampton makes some interesting observations and recommendations. Check it...
read moreSteal this free promotional idea from your local theater group to boost page views
No matter how small your town is, there’s a good chance you have some local performing art groups. This could be a local theater group or a dance company, for example. If you pay attention throughout the year, you’ll notice that they all use a tried-and-true promotional strategy to sell more tickets: They often stage productions that use large numbers of local children. A nearby dance company probably stages The Nutcracker every Christmas season and that gives them the perfect opportunity to flood the stage with children. This really delivers a marketing and ticket sales boost because all the parents and a lot of the relatives and friends of these kids will attend one (or more!) of the performances. Get more website visitors If you do content marketing via a blog, you can adapt this strategy and pull in a lot more visitors to your site. Here’s what you do: When you start to do online research on a topic to write about, keep a list of related articles that you find. Narrow these down to the ones that you think are best. The idea is to recommend one or more of these articles within the body of the article you plan to write. When you have your top candidates, research the authors. You want to discover two things: The author’s email address, and The size of the author’s social media following. If the author has no presence in the social media, or it looks like you can’t get in touch with the author, you probably won’t want to reference that author’s article in the piece you are planning to write. And, you’ll probably want to give a little extra weight in your choices to authors that have a good social media following. (By the way, if you can’t find an email address, in some cases you can communicate through Twitter.) It’s possible that the author will also be the owner of the website, so you can create a free account at Ruzzit to find a good email address to use. If the author doesn’t own the website where the article appeared, you’ll need to do a little digging. There’s a good chance the author has his or her own website or an account on LinkedIn. A Google search like John Smith email may turn out to be your best bet, unless you want to use a paid service. Contact the referenced authors Once you have selected one or more articles to reference, write your article and include a positive mention and link to the article or articles that you found and publish it. After it has been published, email the authors (and maybe the website owners as well). Tell them how much you enjoyed their articles. Mention that you recommended their articles in something you just published (give them a link to your piece) and you would appreciate it if they could mention it to their social media followers. This is a painless and virtually no-cost way to get more visitors to your site. Make it part of your standard operating procedure!...
read more10 Characteristics of Leadership to Help You Grow Your Business
You’ve launched your start-up. Things are going well, and you’re building your team. Suddenly, you find yourself in the position of being the leader, the captain of the ship, and you may be wondering what it means to be a really good leader, and do you have what it takes? John Quincy Adams said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” Warren Bennis, a pioneer in the field of leadership studies, noted, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” Both of these quotes capture the essence of leadership, but they give us little direction in how to achieve it. Unfortunately, too frequently I’ve seen many businesses implode under the pressures of growth because the founder fails to develop strong leadership skills. Therefore, I’m sharing with you what I think are the key characteristics of strong leaders. Shared Vision. To be a great leader for your growing business, you need to be able to share your vision in such a way that others can see it and believe in it. It can’t about you. It needs to be about “us”. Your vision should resonate with the team your bring on-board so everyone can move together in the same direction. An inability to share your vision will stymie your growth. Confidence. Good leaders are confident about their abilities and they believe wholeheartedly in their business vision. However, they aren’t arrogant. They willingly take bold steps forward without being boisterous and over-bearing. Their confidence is projected in everything they do and is contagious. Authenticity. You can’t build a business with a competitive edge without being authentic. Half-truths, puff sales language, smoke and mirrors my work in the short-term, but will ultimately blow up in your face. Once you’ve lost the trust of your team, it will be nearly impossible to build back. Respect. Growing a business means all hands on deck at all times. A leader recognizes that no task it too small or too great for his involvement. When your team realizes you’re willing to jump in to get things done, they in turn will be ready to do whatever it takes. But if you relegate team members to grunt work while you keep your hands clean, their enthusiasm and morale is sure to wane. Empowering. A great leader gives people an opportunity to flourish. That means as the founder, you need to be able to let go to grow. Empower your people to run with their ideas. Don’t try to micro-manage or dictate how things must be done. If you feel the need to tell your employees how to get something done, you’ll miss the opportunity to harness their creativity and you’ll put a damper on morale. Give them the responsibility and the authority to help you build your shared business vision. Be a Teacher. A good leader is also a teacher. Many business owners get so busy that they fail to take the time to teach their team members how to excel in their jobs. The result is, the employee becomes frustrated and bored, and you, the founder, wind up exacerbated because you don’t have the support you need. When you make an investment in a new team member, also make the investment of time...
read moreDiscover the Yin and Yang of marketing alliances
There is strength in numbers and if you can form alliances with other businesses, you can grab some additional marketing strength. Earlier this year, I outlined a system and some tools you can use to find other businesses that are wooing the same social media audience as you’re trying to get onboard. Today, I want to suggest another very simple way to find companies that might be amenable to forming an alliance with your business. Simply put: If you’re a product supplier, contact the companies who supply related services to your customers. And if you’re a service provider, contact the companies who provide related products to your clients. Depending on how close you want to ally with others, you can do things like naming Acme Widget Cleaners as the preferred widget cleaner for your entire line of custom widgets. The flip side of this is if you’re the widget cleaner, you can recommend Smith Brand Widgets. Of course, you would want to do your research before entering into a serious endorsement agreement with another company because your reputation is at stake. If you see the possibility of creating some casual alliances with a range of companies, you could agree to share links to one another’s websites from a “Recommended Products and Services” page. For companies that do print advertising, these kinds of alliances are great. You can have advertisements designed that feature your product and their service (or vice versa, of course). This lets you cut your print advertising budget in half and gives your customers valuable information. Every television show and movie today gets companies to pay for “product placement.” In a smaller way you might be able to do something similar with products and services that are related to your core business. And if you think product placement is a waste of time, you need to hear what Lindsay Kolowich has to say on the topic in her article, “From Ray-Bans to Reese’s Pieces: 13 Unforgettable Examples of Product Placement.” For small businesses that are committed to content and social media marketing, the possibilities are almost endless. You can trade guest posts with related companies in your industry. You can refer your followers to their social media accounts and they can return the favor. You might get the biggest benefit from advertising in another company’s email newsletter. And, you might generate a few dollars of income by allowing related businesses to advertise in your newsletter. Let me close with one quick note. Although I’ve been talking about businesses that operate in related market segments, the relationship can also be geographic. As owners of local businesses, you can greatly benefit from these kinds of shared and cross-promotional marketing campaigns when you ally with your business...
read moreThis week in small business: Are you addicted to entrepreneurship?
Discover how entrepreneurship is an addiction, content marketing is more than writing, and why women-owned businesses are on the rise. – these, and more (even a movie review!), in this week’s collection of curated content. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Grant Cardone says that great entrepreneurs are addicts. See if you agree. Have you heard of the movie “Generation Startup”? Andrew Yang claims that it’s the best movie about entrepreneurship he’s ever seen. Thumbs up? I love the idea behind this article: “7 successful entrepreneurs share the advice they’d give to their 20-year-old selves.” Leadership, management, and productivity Women-owned businesses are on the rise. See how they are outpacing other groups and explore the value of being certified as women-owned. This Hiscox survey summarizes what’s top of mind for small business owners right now. Have they captured your thinking? Need some practical advice on managing your inventory? This Tim Aldred article will help. Jessica Schiele, Cohab interim executive director, believes that collaboration is central to small business success and offers some excellent, actionable advice. It’s not often you get a complete video-based course for free. SAP and I have teamed up to offer this one on how to build outrageously successful businesses from scratch. Marketing and sales The world of B2B marketing has changed and old strategies often don’t work today. Here are five hot areas to investigate if you’re in the B2B world. Is your brand creating a ruckus? Emily Culclasure makes the case for market disruption. If you still consider sales and marketing separate, you’re way behind the times and you need to check out this Ian Altman article in Forbes. Content marketing is about more than writing. It’s about creating and distributing content. Sujan Patel covers “five surprising skills” you need in a content marketer. This Salesforce blog introduces you to the company’s new “benefit calculator” and asks if Salesforce is worth it for small business. Gabrielle Pfeiffer interviews Way.com founder Binu Girija on how small businesses can attract and keep customers. Even if you think you have all your marketing bases covered, you should do a quick check against this article on seven marketing tactics you need to be using in 2016. Need to get up to speed on backlink building? Lilach Bullock delivers the essentials in this guide to link building for SEO. ...
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