Is a Promising Future Hidden Inside a Small Biz Confidence Survey’s Disheartenting Results?
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. One survey result is a data point. When you get a few consecutive survey results that are all pointed in the same direction it’s a trend – and unfortunately that’s what’s revealed in the results of Capital One’s latest Spark Business Barometer. The survey, which has been giving a Small Business Confidence Score since at least 2009, showed a nine-point drop in the percentage of business owners who say conditions are either “good” or “excellent” compared to the same time last year. Further, the survey has shown an uninterrupted decline since the first quarter of 2014. You can probably chalk up most of the uneasiness to factors such as the seemingly tenuous economic conditions, the unsettled political situation, and the heightened regulatory environment. But if you have a little history in small business, you know that most owners tend to be optimists and even in challenging economic conditions many forge ahead and do quite well. We see these underlying truths in the Capital One survey results as well: 41 percent of small business owners say conditions are excellent or good, and 26 percent say they plan to hire within the next six months, and of those, about half say they will be hiring full-time employees. But there are a couple of statistics buried in the survey results that I think are even more promising for U.S. small business and our overall economic health in the coming years: Younger small business owners and women have an extremely positive attitude about the futures of their businesses and seem to be doing some promising planning for the future. Let’s first take a look at two telling examples: hiring plans and retirement planning. Younger groups of respondents reported more plans to hire in the next six months. Younger respondents also said they offered retirement plans at rates higher than older groups. This is fascinating because it says that younger small business owners are planning to provide better for the American workforce both today – through increased hiring – and tomorrow, by providing retirement options for their employees! Further, as women look to the near future, they have a more optimistic outlook than men: While only 36 percent of male business owners think their financial standing will be better in six months, 44 percent of women owners are looking forward to better finances. Millennials have gotten a bad rap in the media of late. You may remember reading news stories over the last few years that Millennials weren’t buying things like previous generations? It was said that instead of buying cars, they were punching up Uber rides on their smart phones. Instead of buying houses they were living in their parents’ basements. It turns out that those observations are not quite so true…at least any more. For example, the National Association of Realtors just published a report on generational trends for home buyers and sellers. It turns out that the largest generational group of buyers (at 35 percent) are 35 years old and younger, with a median age of 30 years old. This is great news for our economy because there are 75.4 million Americans between the age of 18 and 34, compared to only 74.9...
read moreFive Secrets of Employee Retention: How small businesses can ensure they keep their best and brightest
Great employees are the lifeblood of any small business. However, as the job market accelerates, even happy workers may be tempted to explore whether the grass is greener at another company. Losing employees is a concern for most small businesses, not least because of the cost: a study from the Center for American Progress estimated that replacing an employee costs, on average, 20 percent of the employee’s annual salary. So if a worker making $50,000 a year quits, you’ll pay roughly $10,000 to cover the lost productivity costs and then recruit and train someone new. “At a small business, everyone is that much more important; you’re a bigger piece of the pie,” says Dawn Fay, New York-based district president for staffing firm Robert Half. “There’s the cost of losing someone, but you also run the risk of losing other employees or burning people out as they carry a larger workload, which can affect your client service and product and ultimately impact your revenue.” For small companies, keeping the right people in the right seats is paramount. Here are five ways to improve your employee retention and ensure your best and brightest stick around. 1. Hire well Small business owners often have little background in staffing an operation, then one day they find themselves overwhelmed with work. They feel as if they are on a sinking ship and they’re ready to grab for any flotation device thrown their way. Why not hire smart instead of fast? Start thinking early about writing job descriptions for your first hires. What kind of people would you be looking for? What would they do? Armed with that information, you’ll be able to make smart decisions and avoid costly and painful hiring mistakes. Maintain that same approach as you continue to add people to your team. 2. Stay competitive and get creative Small business owners can’t toss money at candidates like a Google or Apple, however they can offer other incentives. By virtue of your smaller size you can be more flexible. You can adjust hours and allow for telecommuting to fit your employees’ lifestyle and family requirements. Leveraging non-medical benefits such as dental, vision and life insurance can also make you an employer known for your ability to retain top talent. This kind of reputation, by the way, is extremely valuable when you need to recruit for key positions. Word will get around in your industry and community that you’re a great small business to work for. 3. Acknowledge achievements Let’s be honest with each other, many of us aren’t the best at expressing our gratitude or acknowledging the contributions our employees make, and a once-a-year employee recognition dinner doesn’t cut it. If you need to put “express gratitude” on your daily “to-do” list – do it! It will make a big difference in your team. You can turn good employees into brand evangelists. And here’s a little secret: you’ll feel better about yourself as well. Studies show that having a thankful attitude is one of the biggest contributors to a sense of well being. 4. Create connections The days of faceless employees toiling on an unrelenting assembly line are gone in our society. Today, most businesses – big and small – are service providers. This means that employees need to work together in...
read more7 Tips for Creating the Best ‘About Us’ Content
Entrepreneurs who are successful at fundraising understand one overarching principle: Investors put their money in people, not in business plans. At the end of the day, the top venture capitalists invest in the people they believe in. Folks with fantastic ideas and business plans can walk through the door, but if the investors don’t believe in the individuals behind those plans, they don’t invest. This same general principle carries over into virtually every aspect of business: We do business with people, not with companies. Let me offer some hard evidence to back this up: About Us pages are, on average, the second most-visited web pages on a website. And sadly, About Us content is often little more than an afterthought when most small businesses design, write and launch their websites. I challenge you to take a quick tour of some small business About Us website pages and rate them. As you do this, I believe you’ll develop a sensitive scanner that will be able to quickly spot the best About Us pages and find the faults of the ones that don’t measure up. But let me give you a jumpstart and briefly outline seven attributes that work together to form the foundation of fantastic About Us content. Engaging. The first thing you always need to do is grab visitors’ attention. Pull them into your world. Something like, “Tom Smith and Mary Jones formed Miller Pest Control in 2007…” doesn’t cut it. If you’re going to write about yourself, make it concise and interesting. Further, the best About Us pages are also well designed. I don’t know how many I’ve seen that are two bland columns or a staid checkerboard of head shots. Give your About Us page more thought than that. Personality. By now you should be convinced that your company culture is extremely important. The personality, or “look and feel” of your company is part of that culture and this should be reflected in your small business About Us page. A small business that rents inflatable jump houses for private parties wouldn’t want to express the same kind of personality as a locally owned funeral parlor on its About Us page. But if the jump house business owner doesn’t’ put effort into creating his About Us page, that’s just how it could end up sounding. Distinctive. What makes your small business different? The central reason you decided you could be a success in your small business is probably the same reason people should decide to choose you over your competitors. Robert Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” What makes your road less traveled by? If you can communicate that to your prospects, it will make all the difference! Pictures. Excellent visuals can help give you the best About Us page in your business sector. They need to be appropriate and in harmony with the rest of the page and your website. If you believe that photos of your key team members will serve you best, get great photos taken; don’t settle for a mish-mash of photos people volunteer. Photos of your facilities and employees being productive are also great. Be creative, but also be sensitive to the nature of...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Untapped content marketing resources, Apple’s 22-year-old whiz kid, and more
Leadership, management and productivity UPS is getting behind Small Business Week and sponsoring a contest that will give winners $5,000 to invest in their businesses. Tired of dealing with your customers who are always asking for a “special deal”? Try these tactics. Hiring? Check out these four things you need to do before posting a job. Marketing and sales Rebekah Radice links to seven excellent tools that will help you create stunning graphics for your social media marketing materials. If you couldn’t attend Social Media Marketing World 2016, you can get the flavor of the event with these 24 quotes. James Cotton gives us a map (and dictionary) to help us escape the digital marketing maze in this Guardian article. Have you checked out Stashes.io? This “stash” of profit hacks is a good place so start. Employees who aren’t directly on your marketing team can be an untapped source for content. Bad online marketing carries a high social cost, according to this Harvard Business Review article. Have you heard how Google is experimenting with “Google Posts”? It might change the whole search engine results page world. Sticky is terrible on a greasy spoon lunch counter, but it is great in your social media content. Check out these tips for creating sticky content. The guys at Newsmax Finance think that the Warriors’ record-setting season offers lessons that extend beyond the basketball court. Apple finally got into social media. Here are tips from the 22-year-old whiz kid who’s doing Apple’s Tweets. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Need a loan? These tips should be helpful. This article lists the best cities for young (and young at heart?) entrepreneurs. Along those same lines, here are America’s top 30 boom towns. In startups, which come first, money or marketing? These social media marketing tips designed specifically for startups, could help get the money rolling in. Politics, government and the economy Congressmen from both parties got together to introduce a bill that would make the federal government come up with a cybersecurity plan that could be used to help small businesses. Gene Marks suggests that you just have to “do the math” to figure out why small business owners aren’t feeling so sunny right...
read more12 experienced bloggers: How to crowdsource a killer article for your blog
I need to start this out with a little confession: I’m not going to feature the tips from 12 experienced bloggers here. I used that headline because that’s the kind of headline you’ll be able to write when you follow up on the tips I’m about to share with you. A curated collection of advice from experts is one of the most popular categories of blog, or content marketing material that you can feature on your small business website. I know how difficult it is to pump out a steady stream of blogs, so how to come up with great blog ideas is always among the fears that keep us from developing blogs as well as we should develop them. So what I want to give you today are a few ways you can have other people write a blog for you. All you’ll have to do is do a little copying, pasting, editing and adding a couple of paragraphs as introductory and concluding comments. Select your topic This process starts by selecting your blog topic. You want it to be something that is far reaching. You want to address a problem or issue that everyone in your audience deals with and then express this problem in the form of a question. For example, today I’m writing about how to get articles for your blog, or what to do when you run out of blog topics. So my question might be something like: How do you get ideas for your blog? What are some of the best ideas for blog articles? What blog articles are the most popular on your website? With a good question in hand, the next step – and really the heart of this crowdsourcing strategy – is to pose that question at various places around the Internet. Quora Quora is all about crowdsourcing answers to specific questions. It is one of the perennial favorite sites for bloggers in search of article ideas. When you start using the site and visit to pose your question, you might find that the question has already been asked. All you’ll have to do is scoop up the best answers. One good thing about Quora is that users often do a good job identifying themselves, unlike some sites where people will give themselves user names like Unicorn546. You’ll even find that users will tell you what company they work for and more about their professional background. This makes them ideal for using in an article of curated content from experts. By the way, when you look at a specific question on Quora, you get a sidebar that offers links to “related questions.” Don’t forget to explore those: They can be a gold mine for coming up with other article ideas. Forums There are all kinds of forums on virtually every area of interest. These can be excellent places to pose your question. Sometimes users are a little less open about their true identity in these places, so you might mention that you’re pulling together an article and would like to credit the folks who offer great answers. I think you’ll also discover, as with Quora, that forums can generally be good places to uncover creative ideas for blogs. HARO Help A Reporter Out has been around for many years. Reporters ask...
read moreIs Your Internet Marketing Systematic or Eco-systematic?
By Brad Shorr The worst way to approach Internet marketing is also the most popular: haphazardly. Companies all too often dabble in this or that, social media one month and email marketing the next, until they have squandered their budgets with very little to show for it. Other small businesses – ones far more successful in generating sales leads – take a systematic approach, executing well thought out and sustainable campaigns for SEO, PPC, email, social media or display advertising. Over time, these campaigns bear fruit, creating a lead pipeline providing plenty of fuel for growth. There is a step beyond systematic Internet marketing, however, and that is eco-systematic marketing. The shortcoming of many well-structured campaigns is gaps. In other words, something is missing, something invisibly causing the campaign to under-produce or outright fail. This is why we at Straight North, an SEO Chicago company created the Lead Generation Ecosystem infographic. It helps people visualize all of the components of a complete Internet marketing lead generation campaign, from lead sources to analytics to handoff to sales. If something is missing (a reporting system and lead validation are two common ones), this infographic will enable you to spot it. • • • Brad Shorr has over 25 years of marketing experience. He is Director of Content Strategy for Straight North, a B2B Internet marketing agency. Brad’s articles have appeared on leading online publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur and...
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