Posts Tagged ‘customers’
Purveyors of conventional wisdom would have you believe that the very first thing you ought to do when setting up a new business is to create a business plan.
It doesn’t matter whether you are selling odds and ends on eBay from your living room or something larger and more complex,
Business plans are excellent and necessary. Far too few of us self-employed and freelance people use them.
They force us to spell out our objectives. We have to assign numbers to our expectations and assign a time-line to our goals. They become our roadmap and keep us on track.
But I suggest that you can’t make a business plan that is worth anything until you’ve done your homework.
And that means knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it. And determining that there is sufficient demand for your product to generate enough income to cover your costs and allow a profit.
In other words, before the business plan comes research.
If a body of knowledge already exists, it makes sense to tap into it and save you some work. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics and other such sources, for example, publish a great deal of demographic information. Some of it is very useful.
But it is also likely that as a creative sole-proprietor, meaningful statistics don’t exist about your specialty.
Many micro-businesses target a very specialized niche. And many owned by creative types exist to sell a product or service that don’t follow well-worn prototypes.
It is particularly difficult for such people to find meaningful published data.
If you fall into these categories, you’ll have to generate your own information.
Don’t limit your research to purely business data. You are building a life as well as a business.
Are the demands and conditions of your proposed business compatible with the life you want to create?
For example, illustrators often work on short deadlines – meaning that sometimes they have to work far into the night to complete a project on deadline. Plus, some clients are demanding and some do not pay on a timely basis. After all of that, can you still “love it” enough?
Or, maybe your business is such that sales fluctuate during the year. How will you make it through the lean months? Can you handle the uncertainty of a fluctuating income?
So, how do you find information?
First, if other people provide services similar to yours, talk to them. You will gain a lot of information quickly. Their answers to your questions will save you a lot of legwork and open your eyes to factors you may not have considered.
Try to talk to at least five or six people so you can get a range of viewpoints.
You can find them through trade associations, schools, word-of-mouth. If the locals are reluctant to share information – perhaps because they see you as direct competition – look for similar people in a different locale.
Second, create the information you need.
Mimic and simplify what large businesses do. Reduce their methods down to a level that is practical and affordable.
For example, perhaps you want to survey potential clients and customers to get feedback.
If you are a creating a micro-business on a shoe-string, it may not be affordable nor practical to commission a focus group. But you may be able to speak to potential targets informally or use direct mail to send a simplesurvey.
Eventually you’ll have to ‘put your toe in the water.’ Try it out in a small way – so you won’t lose much if it doesn’t work – and observe the results. Then experiment and modify as needed. Once it works to your liking you can plunge right in.
This approach, known by the technical term “trial and error,” can be applied to any facet of your business.
After all, even the largest producers test market new products before rolling them out.
Put some parameters around your efforts. Decide, in advance, how much time you want to allow and how much you want to budget.
Then test, test, test.
Use trial and error for every aspect of your business. Experiment with different ways of packaging your services, different rates and prices, different types of marketing, etc.
You’ll soon find that certain approaches work better than others. Eventually your experience and data will suggest viable strategies.
And then you’ll be ready to create your business plan.
By: George Francis, President / CEO at Alta Vista Insurance Agency
As social media platforms become vehicles for businesses to steer down the vast Internet freeway, the complexities of these once simple applications are growing. It’s no secret that what was once considered “hip” niche marketing has now evolved into a strategy that many businesses are now utilizing. Social media was previously thought of as a tool used by younger generations to interact and network on the web. Now, while remaining that, it has become an avenue for businesses to expand their brand awareness and reach new customers they may have not encountered before—not to mention it allows independent insurance agencies like ours, to be visible and active right where our consumers are.
Brand awareness ultimately is the goal companies have in mind when creating these online accounts and they do this by acquiring as many Facebook fans as possible. But how is this accomplished? How does a business go from 100 fans to 1,000? The answer is simpler than you’d think; although it takes the proper diligence and patience – you can’t expect massive social success overnight. Below we’ve broken down some social media best practices that have proved successful for our agency:
• Call to action for your current fans: The easiest and most direct way to accumulate more Facebook fans is to ask the fans you already have to spread the word among their friends telling them to “like” your business page. Your current friends can do this by using the “suggest to friends” link under your profile in the left-hand column.
• Put links on your website and blog: Make sure your website has links for your Facebook and Twitter in a prominent spot on your homepage while suggesting that they like your Facebook and follow your Twitter somewhere near the links.
• Have fun! Above all, social media should be a fun, refreshing way to interact with current clients and build relationships with prospects. Sometimes it’s good to think outside the box, such as spicing up your social efforts with things like having contests or polls on a certain day of the week. Be creative and make sure you are appealing to the public with news and information you know people will find value in. Sharing information about California business insurance may not seem all that glamorous; but with a little imagination and creativity you can find ways to make the topic exciting and appealing to your audience.
• Be consistent, relevant & valuable: Again, remember that social media success takes time, you really are aiming to build lifelong relationships with your insurance clientele, and that doesn’t come easy. It’s recommended that you post every day on your agency’s Facebook page. Try posting at least once per day, and no more that once every 3 or so hours – you don’t want to over-stimulate and cripple your Facebook Fans with meaningless content. Make sure what you are posting is relevant – does it tie into a product or service you offer? Is it beneficial to the surrounding community? Try sharing links to recent, educational blog posts you may have written or sharing information about an upcoming community event – ask yourself if what you’re posting will or can benefit your consumer in a positive way.
It’s important that you diversify your Facebook account in order to make it more appealing and add more traffic. If you fill it with only insurance related posts, you won’t get much traction. Keep the content informative, interesting, and entertaining and you’ll see your “likes” go up in no time!
Many small business owners and home based business owners put up a website describing their product or services. In addition to their ground business, this ensures they reach a greater number of consumers plus growing their brand or service. There are, however, many pitfalls and gray areas in owning a website; the legal system is only just beginning to enumerate them and prosecute offenders. It is these legalities of which the small business owner and the home based business owner must be aware in addition to some of the consequences of infringement. The cost to the business owner could be astronomical if he doesn’t take steps at the beginning to safeguard all his hard work.
First and foremost is registering the name and logo of the website. The business owner has done a lot of work designing the logo and site, writing the disclaimer, terms of use and legal statement. Creation of the site constitutes copyright, but the logo and design can be infringed upon and should be trademarked.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, has pages to help the business owner with registration. This is going to cost, but not as much as legal fees, court costs and attorney fees required to sue whomever steals the business owner’s work. It takes between nine and twelve months in addition to some $300 to complete this task, but the rights are the business owner’s thereafter.
There are an unlimited amount of domain names available. Names uncomfortably close to the business owner’s domain name can cause confusion among customers, causing the business owner to lose revenue to a look-alike or cyber-squatter. Court cases can be researched in which the judge fined the person infringing upon the site. Business owner’s should institute a search of like-sounding domain names in order to prevent such cases from happening.
Registering the business owner’s social media pages is also a big step toward remaining free of website legal trouble. This immediately sets up the business owner’s name as unique and further establishes a common law ownership of a domain name. Social media is handy for promoting the business owner’s product or service and should likewise be protected. The business owner would be well advised to hire a trademark attorney to further educate him in addition to protecting him from other pitfalls and gray areas in website ownership.
Monitoring online buzz is like reverse market research. Instead of asking people what they think in a survey or focus group, you read what they’re saying online in blogs, article comments, posts made to forums and places like Twitter and Facebook. It’s eavesdropping on public conversations.
In the old days there were clipping services. Now there are amazing tools that gather and capture the relevant information you want about your company, your brands, your competitors and even individual people. At any given moment there are millions of conversations happening online. They may be brief, but they’re happening nevertheless. Tuning in to this ongoing dialog and focusing on conversations specifically about your business or brand can offer a wealth of insight into your customers’ mindsets.
Why monitoring social media is important
1. Lead generation. More marketers are recognizing that effective lead generation isn’t about firing out the most messages. It’s about getting the right message to the right prospect at the right time, which may be after that person has already engaged in some type of social media encounter with your brand and your customers.
2. Reputation management. Keeping your finger on the pulse of what customers are saying, especially as it relates to issues, frustrations, and complaints, allows you to quickly and authentically resolve their concerns.
3. Identifying brand fans and vocal customer advocates who spread positive word-of-mouth so you can nurture these free “sales reps.”
How to monitor social media marketing
There are a number of companies that offer tools and services to make it easy to monitor what people online are saying about your brand and your competitors. Some of these tools are free, others you pay a nominal fee for. A complete list of social media monitoring tools may be found by performing a search on the keywords “social media monitoring tools.” Tweetdeck and Hubspot are two of the more popular tools available.
These social media monitoring tools are very helpful because they will save you a great deal of time and your email inbox won’t be clogged with all sorts of tweets, updates, and alerts. Instead, you’ll have a dashboard to monitor what people are saying about what matters to you most. That may be your company, your own name, your executives, your competitors, your industry or specific brand names for products or services.
Cautions about Social Media Monitoring
Social media marketing shouldn’t replace market research. Why? Because in general the people who take the time to express an opinion about a business or brand via social media are generally on one extreme or the other: they either love something enough to talk about it, or dislike it enough to complain. It’s helpful to monitor brand popularity (or lack thereof), but social media monitoring tools/services are not very helpful for understanding customer satisfaction, new product acceptance, and test marketing. They should complement, not replace more traditional market research.
Do you have your own business? Is it listed online? Say goodbye to the days of the yellow pages, online business directories are the method that most consumers and customers go to today for finding the local business that they are looking for. Whether you are looking for local automotive industries, restaurants, clothing outlet store, retail shops, grocery stores, bars, or any other type of business, internet business listings are the preferred method of the public.
One thing you might have noticed is that searching for a business online is much easier than searching for a business in the yellow pages or calling a phone directory service. The reason that this is, is because the internet is updated every day. Phone book and phone directories are only updated every few months, so if a business moves, goes out of business, or a new business opens up, the phone book directory will not be updated. Plus, you can find more than just the address of a business if you look for it online. An internet search of a business will provide the address, a phone number, a website, a physical map, links other locations, competitive businesses, and even videos.
Videos are search tools that are being used for a search engine more and more each day. YouTube.com is officially the second highest rated search engine, just under Google. With a video, your business becomes more visible on the internet, and allows customers an in-depth view of your business with a simple interactive video.
So one thing you may have noticed is that even though a business may be listed online, it might not come up in the search results on Google as the first item, or even on the first page. Just because you have a business listing online doesn’t mean that Google will automatically push it to the top of the search results.
The action of getting a website to climb the ranks of Google search results is called S.E.O., or Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization entails detailing your website and other web properties around it to ensure that Google puts it at the top of the search results listed under the keywords you anticipate that your customers will search for when they are looking for a business like yours. This entails proper meta-tagging, daily unique content, the website domain name, blogs, backlinks and other sources to give your site proper search engine optimization.
But the most import part of have your company listed on local business search is to make sales. With website or listing on the internet, your business can make sales in the store or on the web. Customers can easily find where you are located at if they want to come by your physical store, and if you sell products or services online a customer can go directly to your website and purchase your products. With an online store that is listed in a local business search, your business can sell products 24 hours a day and seven days a week. You will have a virtual storefront that never closes.