Posts Tagged ‘market’
I was having this conversation with a business coach colleague yesterday. She deals with a lot of business owners, especially those starting out and those experiencing rapid growth. She’d been doing some research and one article she read suggested that a major reason that businesses fail is because of a lack of capital. This got me thinking about how people fund their ventures and whether they need a lot of capital to start their own business.
To be honest this really depends. If you are a product based business obviously you will need capital to invest in product but, if you were to start a service based business, you can often times get your business started with little or no investment plus time. You will need some capital though and there are some options available to you:
Friends and Family- Many people look to family and friends to fund their business ventures, especially if the funding required is small. Family and friends will generally offer you generous repayment terms on your business loan but make sure everything is done professionally. You don’t want to ruin relationships with friends and family for the sake of a few dollars. Also, if you get money from family and friends, make sure you allow them to share in your business successes.
Business Credit Cards- Business credit cards are another popular option that people look at when they aim to grow their business. Business credit cards can help with cash flow and, if you pick the right card, you can sign up to a rewards program and get points that can be redeemed for flights, accommodation or a variety of other rewards that may be useful to you. These rewards can be a pleasant little bonus for all of your hard work.
Investors- If your business idea is groundbreaking, or if your business plan is solid, you may be able to pitch to investors and get some investment in your company. If you expect rapid growth or you have a ground breaking product, then this may be the option for you. The problem with investors is that you may lose some of your decision making power as you give away part of your business to an investor.
At the end of the day, the most important factors for business success are clearly defined goals, the dedication to achieve them and then a marketing plan that will get your business in front of people. If you do need business finance there are options available to you. I have outlined three of these above.
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.
A wise man once said “Marketing = Education”. What he meant by that is that you need to use you marketing to educate your prospects. But what do you need to educate your prospects on? You need to educate your prospects on the solution your services provide, your expertise and the value of your services.
Although you can educate your audience through teleseminars, article marketing or your blog, my personal favorite is workshops and seminars. You can invite your prospects to an inexpensive 1 hour or ½ day workshop and teach them about your area of expertise. This does several things:
– It establishes your credibility, because when you are in front of the room, you are instantly perceived to be the undisputed expert. Whether you think you are or not, you are the expert in the eyes of your audience.
– It educates your audience on the solution that your product or services provide. Remember, you never sell just a service, you sell a solution to the problem your audience has. Focus on the problem and educate your audience on how your services provide the solution.
– Clients buy from people they know, like and trust. When you are up on stage, your audience obviously knows you. When you tell your story and share some vulnerability, people will like you. Since you demonstrate your expertise by teaching your audience, you are getting your audience to trust you. So having a workshop is the ideal vehicle to get people to buy from you.
– If people have objections to buying from you, that generally means that they do not have all the information yet. Your workshop should be able to give them all the information they need to make a decision one way or another. Not everyone is a good fit for you, but they will know after your workshop.
– Your workshop establishes the value of your services. Through your success stories and your content, you can show the value of what you do. You can demonstrate through examples the money clients made or saved my using your services. That is a powerful tool and cannot be underestimated.
So take the plunge and start teaching. You will not only educate your audience, you will also market yourself and your services. You will be surprised at the new clients you will attract and better yet, the increase in your bottom line.
The problem with free advertisements along with other free online marketing and advertising channels is that they might give the unsuitable impact to your company. Several free ads come off as inexpensive and second-rate, phrases you actually wouldn’t like to link to your company. It’s nice to save cash with guerrilla marketing techniques, however, you shouldn’t sacrifice the image and credibility of your business along the way. Good guerrilla marketing such as a rewards-based customer referral program helps improve your business organically and project a professional image.
Instead, below are a few popular web marketing strategies, which you could use instead. Link exchanges could be terrific, particularly when your advertising budget is restricted or nonexistent. Find merchants that sell supplementary items, and offer to trade text links or ads with them. In case you are just starting out and your site doesn’t get much traffic, you may not get a one-to-one trade; be prepared to make concessions, at least until you have a track record and traffic to indicate. Having said that, most companies is not going to ignore the opportunity for more exposure, so you will likely find a few happy to exchange links on you.
Newsletter advertising is a great way to reach select groups of consumers. For instance, when you sell health products, you may advertise in a newsletter that gives health tips and advice. Because newsletter advertising is specific, it is usually really expensive. If your budget is tight, you can start your own newsletter campaign. Budgeted advertising, like Google AdWords, allows you to get a set of keywords, set a limit on how much you would like to spend, and have your ad display until the limit is attained. It is a specifically useful way to track your campaign success, and has been a boon to small businesses proprietors.
When you have graduated from these techniques, or if your budget allows it, try approaching popular news services, Web-based email providers, and other sites that reach a big segment of the population. While this can prove extremely expensive, in return, you have the potential of reaching countless new clients. No matter what method you may take, provide serious thought to your “creative” the actual ad itself. Be it just a text link, or whether it’s an extensive banner-ad campaign, the creative can make or break your advertising effort. Try several versions, track them, and see, those that perform best.
Local Business Advertising is effective however, you need to be wary of sites offering to provide a free link in the interest of increasing your search engine rank. Search engines caught on to these so-called link farms a long time ago and a link there is more likely to hurt your ranking than improve it. In fact, it could even get you banned from search engines altogether (something called ‘being in the sandbox’). There’s nothing ever really free. Whatever looks free eventually ends up costing you in the long run.
Looking for bankruptcy? Don’t go for it! Instead, keep bankruptcy as your last option and try out the other options which are available in the market. There are a few debt relief options to consider. The best 3 are mentioned below with brief explanations for each one of them.
Do it yourself – debt management:
This method involves arrangement of the credit cards or other personal unsecured loans in an order. The order will be a descending one with loans having high interest rates getting top priority and then followed by the ones with lower interest rates. In this method, you will have to create a new budget in which, you will have to eliminate some of the unnecessary expenses and then save some extra money. Pool this money with the amount out of your paycheck that you keep aside for loan repayment and start repayments with the one, which has the highest interest rates. This helps in containing the debt due to faster accrual of interests.
Professional or self arbitration – debt settlement:
In the method of settlement, you will have to negotiate with the creditor on your own or you will need to use professional help for doing the same. In either case, the process converges to push the creditor to eliminate the debt by a certain percentage. The amount not forgiven is to be paid in lump sum to the creditor. To force the creditor to eliminate at least 50% of the dues, the use of the bankruptcy threat is essential. Once the remainder is paid, the consumer will get a clean cheat and the debt will be considered as paid in full.
Reducing monthly installments – debt consolidation:
In this method, negotiation with the creditor is carried out by a professional negotiator who negotiates for the reduction in the interest rates and elimination of associated costs like insurance charges, over limit fees, late fees and other. The threat of bankruptcy is used to force the creditors to agree to the above conditions. When the creditors agree, they re-amortize the loans and then the monthly installment burden for the consumer is reduced significantly.
The above mentioned three methods ensure that the credit score of the consumers remain unharmed and that the consumers get back their financial stability and get out of their debts asap. This is not possible in case of bankruptcy filing because, once the consumers go for bankruptcy, the FICO score will be lost completely. This brings in more financial troubles for the consumers. Hence, personal bankruptcy should be avoided.