Insights, Ideas, Results
Making an impact on the World Wide Web can be daunting for small businesses. The initial instinct is often to appeal to the largest audience possible online. However, when your brick and mortar business is located in a provincial town, small businesses can benefit better from local SEO than an all-encompassing search strategy. Optimising local search listings can help small businesses increase their online presence with limited budget.
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Most companies now use at least some level of social media to promote their business. Assuming your company uses this method of promotion, it is important to ensure that your online message is professional and consistent.
Large companies create detailed social media policies to make clear to staff exactly how their businesses can and should contribute to these online platforms. This ensures that the company creates the correct impression across all of their online presence – from blog posts to Twitter “tweets.”
Given the high visibility and spontaneous nature of social media, it is fair to say that creating a social media policy is equally important for a smaller business, to ensure that costly mistakes are not made when interacting with customers online.
Growing sales is the ultimate sign that your small business is on the right track. The day your sales become stagnant, or even worse, start declining it’s time to start getting worried. If you don’t pay attention to declining sales and start taking actions to reverse them you may reach the point of no return and hurt your business permanently.
The problem is it is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what mistakes you are making that contribute to declining sales because many times you don’t even realize you are making them. The mistakes could be happening in anywhere within your business functions – customer service, products, marketing, and competition. Many of these mistakes are strategic in nature, which means that you do not directly see them in everyday transactions, but their impact can be very large. This is what understanding reversing sales decline very puzzling.
To add to confusion, there is a considerable lag between the time you make those mistakes and when their impact shows up in the form of declining sales. That is why it is paramount to be aware of these mistakes and ensure you are taking corrective measures before it is too late. Here are 5 common sales mistakes I have noticed small business owners make frequently.
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As we herald into 2013 I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the stories we produced in 2012 and the response we received from the readers. Here are the top 10 articles, in no particular order that got the most attention, discussion, controversy and response.
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Some restaurants are still unsure as to whether or not they want to claim their business on Yelp, the popular review site. They don’t feel like they need to pay attention to the review site while others don’t see the benefit that a review site can bring to their establishment, but a Yelp business listing can bring many advantages to your company, including the following.
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Many small business owners think of social media as panacea for all marketing and sales ills. They believe, often wrongly, that by jumping on the bandwagon of social media they will be able to improve their sales by 25% overnight. They are fooled by misconceptions promoted by the so called social media experts. I regularly get 4-5 emails every week from these experts offering me to help promote my blog and land it on the first page of Google Search for a charge!
While there is truth to the fact that every small business needs to have Internet and social media marketing strategy you have to first understand what it can and cannot do for your business and set the right expectations before jumping in. We do believe that there are selected social media tools that small businesses must use. It’s how you use it that really makes a difference. That is why I talked about social media best practices for small business owners in earlier post. In this post let’s turn the table and discuss the traps you need to watch out for when using social media for marketing purpose.
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Sponsored Post (Brought to you by RevLocal)
Here is a quick question for you. Let’s say you are looking for a restaurant to go out for evening dinner with your friends or family. Where would you turn to find out? In the old days your answer would have been Yellow Pages (remember those thick books you used to keep?). Not anymore. These days more and more people are turning to web sites such as Google Places and Bing Local to uncover local businesses. These Online business listings, along with review sites such as Yelp, are becoming the new “Yellow Pages” of the Internet age.
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What good is the marketer if he cannot help you sell the “Brooklyn Bridge” that you (supposedly) own? After all, the job of the marketer is to help business owners sell their products no matter how bad the product may be! But before the marketer can sell that “Brooklyn Bridge” he needs to sell himself to you, the business owners, and convince you that he is the right person for the job. And therein lies the potential issues with hiring marketers.
The marketers will do anything to get your business, even if it means stretching the truth – commonly known as lying. There are many marketers who promise the moon to business owners and make them spend money on the programs that don’t produce any results. I have always maintained that business owners first need to focus on business fundamentals before spending money on marketing. My 5 fundamental rules of marketing highlight these points. I also showed why business owners should not waste their money by making common marketing mistakes Here I will show 5 promises (lies) marketers make that you, as a business owner, need to be wary of.
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For small business owners dealing with social media is equivalent to a relationship with a spouse or girlfriend. You cannot live without it nor can you (sometimes) live with it! Just like the other relationship, you still have to deal with the situation, whether you like it or not. Even if you do not want actively use social media for business marketing, you have to stay engaged to make sure your business image is not being tarnished, which can hurt your business.
You can overcome your social media fears with the 3-step approach we described earlier. We also showed best practices you can use to get the most out of social media. In this post we will show how you can deal with negative comments customers may post about your business on social media.
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For many small business owners getting on the bandwagon of social media is a novel and scary experience. They recognize that they cannot avoid it because that’s where their current and potential customers are. But at the same time they are scared due to lack of knowledge and experience. We showed 3-step approach to overcome social media fears in the earlier post. In this post we will show how you can get the most out of social media by following the best practices.
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