This Week in Small Business: Learn from Street Vendors and Stanford Biz Brains
Marketing and sales
Strategies, fundamentals and inspiration
Ready to pick up some marketing tips from businesses far smaller than your own? Listen to what some Southeast Asian street vendors have to offer. Speaking of small, in this teeny-tiny post, Bernadette Jiwa makes the point that marketing should be invisible.
Account-based marketing – the practice of marketing to an individual or prospect as an audience of one – is gaining efficacy with the latest wave of targeted advertising.
Know the lingo: The Reality Behind 5 of Marketing’s Biggest Buzzwords.
Learn what the politicians know so well: Going negative works.
There was a lot of snow and ice this winter and that caused a lot of potholes. Here are five B2B marketing potholes you need to avoid (infographic).
Creating good vibes is a great way to do branding and marketing. Here’s an Australian company involved in the Pay it Forward Movement.
The folks at Kissmetrics have some very sound advice on how to build your email list ASAP.
Social Media/Digital
Your employees may be your best social media evangelists. Scan these case studies.
If you need Instagram marketing inspiration, here are eight accounts you should be monitoring. And for branded content inspiration, check out this “Best of April” article.
Social selling guru Tim Hughes lays out five fundamentals and compares the process to the old cold call strategy.
If you’ve heard about SEO but aren’t serious about it yet, go over these essential tools and principles.
Content
Intel’s tech culture magazine IQ gets more than 2 million readers a month. Luke Kintigh shares his insights in this interview.
Campbell Macdonald, Pathful founder and CEO, explains three ways to start measuring the ROI of your content.
Cruise through this gallery of 22 free content marketing tools and you’re sure to find a new one to add to your list.
Dollars and Marketing Sense
You can probably get 10,000 people to see the cat video you’ve posted, but does it make any difference for your bottom line? Here’s a hard look at “vanity metrics.”
Limited marketing budget? Can you pull together $100? If so, here’s a decent breakdown on how to spend it.
Even great apps fall on their face in terms of ROI. Understand the basics of marketing your app. Google has more to offer on the subject.
Leadership, management and productivity
Chances are you’ve heard of speed dating to make a personal connection. But 10 minutes with the right person can also mean new contracts for a business owner. Here’s how they did it in Buffalo.
You can’t walk away from your website, even if you did a good job with its original design. Look over these reasons you may need a redesign and see it it’s time.
While a company’s success is shaped by its practices, its longevity is determined by its values, says Robert Spector.
Things move quickly today. To say on top of new apps and social media, try taking these steps. Speaking of apps, here are 12 small business apps for the Apple watch.
A small business owner in Florida decided to raise pay across the board 35-50 percent. Smart idea or just another “Florida man” story?
Automated CRM and renewals are helping a local pest control company maintain its growth.
This Buffer compendium features advice, tools and recommended reading to help you boost your small biz productivity.
There are some things you can’t overlook in the way you run your business. Here are five that if you mess up, you’ll eventually have to pack it in.
We took time to honor all the loving, dedicated and hard-working moms over the weekend. In this piece we look at moms as perhaps our best mentors.
Government, politics and the economy
On the heels of virtually zero Q1 growth, ADP says that private employers added only 169,000 jobs in April. Also, in a Bank of America survey, only 21 percent of small business owners said they had recovered from the Great Recession. They are working long hours and forgoing pay hikes for themselves.
The Supreme Court isn’t finished with rulings on aspects of Obamacare and one report says an upcoming decision could disproportionally impact small businesses.
The Baltimore riots have taken a huge toll on small business owners. Beyond the visible damage there will be higher insurance rates and many will be forced to take on added debt to reestablish themselves.
The IRS seized nearly $110,000 from an innocent rural seller of catfish sandwiches, despite the agency’s promise to end its raids. California Rep. Janice Hahn (D) is calling for a new GAO investigation into fraud and abuses in federal small business contracting programs.
Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation
Any founder seeking early stage venture capital needs to be ready for these sneaky questions. Also, there are various crowdfunding styles and strategies. This article concentrates on reward-based crowdfunding.
Heidi Roizen was born and bred in Silicon Valley and went into startups right after finishing Stanford business school. Here are her eight entrepreneurship lessons.
For a startup to be successful, two kinds of growth are required: business and personal. Here are insights on navigating those tricky waters.
Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia prof Steve Blank explains why “Build, Measure, Learn” isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work for your startup.
When starting her restaurant business, Kim Bartmann’s main priority was creating a culture where both employees and customers were treated well. The strategy is paying off.
San Jose dropped from #1 to #18 in a yearly survey of the best cities for small businesses. The new BMOC: the Riverside-San Bernardino area. On the other hand, if y’all are looking for locations to launch your startup, you might consider Atlanta. This article says the scene is getting hot.
