Can You Achieve Business Success Without Relationships?
Can You Achieve Business Success Without Relationships?
Achieving a high level of business success without relationships is difficult at best and impossible for many. Read on to understand why.
People are much more likely to buy from people and businesses they know, like and trust. There are some glaring exceptions to this rule but that’s usually because of price and availability of the product or service you want or need.
I can think of 2 big box stores that people say they despise but they shop at them because the local alternatives that used to exist have vanished or they are located so far out of their way that it’s too inconvenient to patronize them.
Location
Local business owners that are not only surviving the invasion of the big box stores but are actually thriving are the ones that have decent locations, outstanding service and effective local marketing campaigns.
Most people are creatures of habit and we usually need a VERY good reason to do something outside of our normal routine.
If you take the time to think about where you live, work, shop and play; you will probably discover that everything fits within a narrow path between work and home. This corridor probably narrowed some and the frequency you travelled it were probably reduced as gas prices rose.
Service
When you buy from a big box store, you almost always need to know what you want, how to use it to get the most out of it and what others think about the product or service.
You still need to do research on what others think about a product or service when you shop a locally owned business but a smart local business owner will be happy to educate you on almost every aspect of the product or service.
Is it worth a few dollars more if the stuff you want to buy comes from a local business owner that can help you save time and grief learning how to use what you’re buying so you get the most out of your purchase?
Price
The economy is tough and budgets are stretched very tight for many people. Your local big box store might carry the lawn mowers and other products you want at a lower price than the local business but do they service it, offer advice on caring for it or carry the parts you may need?
Local business owners often ask you how and where you will be using their products. These questions help them identify your needs so they can offer the best possible advice on usage and care.
The majority of the sales associates I’ve seen at the big box stores I’ve been to in the last decade are interested in their paychecks and looking busy instead of helping customers. Their goal is usually to get thru the day doing no more than is needed to keep their supervisor off their back.
Big box stores can usually get away with indifferent to poor customer service because they have location and price on their side. To compete, local businesses must compensate by building relationships with their customers. These relationships help the customer and the business owner bond over a common interest. If cultivated properly, the relationship will keep you going back to the business owner for years and it may grow into something beyond business success for the owner and good service from a trusted vendor for you.
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You Will Be Out Of Business In 5 Years Unless You Act Now
You Will Be Out Of Business In 5 Years Unless You Act Now
Trends change and you must adapt your business or you will be out of business in a few short years. Do you know why you’ll be out of business if you fail to act?
The switch to a mobile society is well under way yet 90% of small businesses and an alarming percentage of larger businesses are not presenting mobile friendly websites to their customers.
You may doubt the importance of mobile and I can appreciate that doubt. Answer these questions for yourself.
Do you own a cellphone?
Your customers do.
Is your phone within 10 feet of you 24 hours a day?
Your customer’s is.
Do you ever visit a website using your mobile phone after seeing an ad on television, on a billboard, in print or on the radio?
Your customers do.
Have you ever used your phone to buy something online?
Your customers probably have.
Have you ever used your phone to compare prices while in the store?
Your customers have and do.
Have you ever visited a social network or review site using your phone to get information on a product or service you were thinking about buying?
This is a common practice for your customers.
Have you ever called a business or made a purchase at a local business within a day of doing a search?
Your customers regularly do this.
Have you ever done a search for local businesses from your phone using Google or Bing?
Your customers do on a regular basis.
Have you noticed those little balloon shaped icons on Google that are usually next to the name, address and phone number of a number of businesses near the top of the results for many business listings.
Your customers notice them, click them and visit the top businesses that are listed.
Those bubbles are indicators of a Google Places listing and they show up on both the desktop and mobile searches as well as in Adwords ads when the business has a Places listing.
Google made it very clear in this article that they are giving mobile friendly sites more weight in searches. The bottom of the article even has a PDF showing stats that indicate the reasoning behind the shift in their business model.
Mobile is the latest trend and you will either embrace it or be out of business because your competitors that do embrace it will get your customers.
Leave a comment below then create a support ticket at my Help Desk so we can talk about a mobile website or a Google Places listing for your business.
Your bookmarks, comments and feedback are always welcome. Disclosure of Material Connection
Are You Setting Your Small Business Up To Fail?
Are You Setting Your Small Business Up To Fail?
Setting up a small business or home based business requires the same planning for success as a large business. Are you skipping steps that are vital for business success?
Business Plan
Your business plan states your goals for the short term, mid-term and long term. As I’ve stated before, this roadmap is as vital as why you are starting your own business in the first place.
Daily Action Plan
Your daily action plan is creating a to do list every day then completing those tasks in an organized fashion to so stay on track towards each of your goals. Some tasks are easier to complete and are more enjoyable than others. Many successful business people take on the big tasks first and allocate a predefined time to the task before taking a break or switching to an easier to complete task.
By segmenting a big task, you are breaking it into bite sized pieces you can handle while still moving forward.
Business Budget
A business budget includes fixed expenses as well as miscellaneous expenses and a marketing budget. Too many small and home based businesses try taking the do-it-yourself approach to marketing instead of hiring a consultant and building marketing into a budget.
These short sighted business owners view consultants and the services they recommend as expenses instead of seeing them as the tools they are that will help you increase your business.
You may be an expert in your business but are you also an expert in marketing your business both online and offline?
Do you know that traditional advertising methods such as: Newspaper ads, Television ads, Radio ads, Magazine ads, Flyers and Direct mail pieces are less effective than they once were?
Knowing who your target market is, what they want and where they can be found has always been important to the success of any marketing campaign and the business itself and this knowledge is even more important today.
Many small business owners ignore…
Today, the majority of your customers carry cellphones, use social media on a regular basis and use the Internet to research products and services before they shop offline. These people frequently search the Internet and company websites for coupons while shopping for coupons or specials after they get recommendations from their social media friends and check out a few review sites.
You need a mobile friendly website, a presence on the popular social media sites where you actually engage your customers, a verified and optimized Google Places page and citations on many business directories.
Do you have the time and skill needed to create and present a professional presence online while running your business?
Many business owners know they don’t have the expertise they need but they try to take the least expensive road by hiring a family member, college student, friend or someone else that might know just a little bit more in one of the areas mentioned above.
The problem with this approach is there is no marketing strategy in place that lets you put all the pieces in play in a way that will be most effective for your business.
Your goal is to get the phone ringing and new customers walking in the door. You need to know how you are going to accomplish this on the marketing budget you have at your disposal and you need a way to measure the results from the strategies you’ve put into play.
Google Places, mobile versions of your website, social media and more are all important but knowing which ones will yield the highest return on investment in the shortest time frame is important to the business success you seek.
A DIY business owner, in most cases, won’t have the time or skill to effectively run their business and to develop and implement a successful marketing strategy. Do you want to risk your business by being a DIYer or do you want to call 813-618-1816 or 888-612-9122 to talk to a consultant that will be able to help you develop and implement a marketing strategy and plan so you can concentrate on running your growing business.
Your bookmarks, comments and feedback are always welcome. Disclosure of Material Connection
Are RSS Feeds, Social Buttons & Blogs Useless For Small Businesses?
Are RSS Feeds, Social Buttons & Blogs Useless For Small Businesses?
Do you believe that RSS Feeds, social buttons & blogs useless for small businesses? One marketer is teaching they are. Read below and decide for yourself.
RSS Feeds
RSS stands for really simple syndication. It isn’t understood by many and it is under-utilized by many online businesses and most offline businesses.
Most blogs and CMS’s have at least one RSS Feed built in so your visitors can receive notifications when content gets updated.
You don’t know when people subscribe or unsubscribe from your RSS Feed unless you’re using an RSS Feed management program like Feedburner.
Google thinks RSS Feeds are important enough they paid about $100 million to buy Feedburner in 2007.
This purchase gives Google the ability to more accurately see how many RSS subscribers a site has. Each RSS subscriber you have is viewed as a vote that the content of your site is good and that social proof is counted in the ranking algorithm.
Google has also made AdSense available for RSS Feeds.
Do you think Google would spend that kind of money on something that is thought of as useless?
I and other marketers submit our RSS Feeds to RSS Feed Aggregators to get targeted traffic and backlinks from these authority sites and we see that as a very useful use of RSS Feeds.
Social Buttons
Webmasters that are interested in receiving free targeted traffic from the search engines add social buttons to their websites so visitors can add a bookmark to their favorite bookmark site or social network.
If you provide quality content and ASK your visitors to share it with their friends, many will.
Every tweet, like, plus one or bookmark you get adds social proof the content is valuable to your visitors. Search engines are now paying attention to this social proof and using it in determining your placement in the search engine results.
In addition to traffic from the search engines, sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin can be great sources of targeted traffic to a shared post.
If you aren’t interested in passively attracting free targeted traffic while allowing visitors to give their vote of approval on your content, you don’t need social buttons.
Small Businesses Don’t Need Blogs
His statement was small businesses don’t need blogs because they don’t use them anyway.
I agree that most small businesses don’t need blogs. They need content management systems.
To me, a blog is Blogger or WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress installation using the script from WordPress.org is a content management system.
Many CMS’s, including WordPress, have the ability to blog built in along with many other features and flexibility.
While it’s true that many business owners won’t use the blogging functionality of their CMS on a regular basis some will.
Others will learn to create categories so they can easily place their published white papers, press releases and newsletters on their website without hiring someone to do it for them.
A WordPress powered website gives a small business owner the ability to look extremely professional without having a full time programmer, webmaster or staff unless they choose to hire someone to back up and update the script for them.
Small business owners can compete with the big boys by being smart about their website, by using social media effectively and by getting as much social proof as they can about their products and services. This means using content management systems to do most of the heavy work for you. They help simplify the tech stuff while greatly expanding the potential for the site.
WordPress started out as a blog but it has evolved into an extremely powerful CMS that powers about 17% of all websites online even though many still think of it as a blogging platform.
Some marketers may believe that RSS Feeds are useless; they may believe social buttons are irrelevant and they may believe blogs are a waste of time for small businesses but the facts as I read them tell me the exact opposite is true.
Leave your uses for RSS Feeds, social buttons and WordPress powered websites below and share this with your friends.
Your bookmarks, comments and feedback are always welcome. Disclosure of Material Connection
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Is Your Business Diversified? Why or Why Not?
Is Your Business Diversified? Why or Why Not?
If your business isn’t diversified why isn’t it? Do you believe so strongly in your business one revenue source that you’re comfortable with one offering?
Google AdSense Example
Hundreds, if not thousands, of internet marketers created full time incomes using Google AdSense as their sole source of revenue. When Google changed their algorithm and devalued the poor quality sites many of these marketers were putting up, their livelihood vanished in the blink of an eye.
Many marketers that used Google Adwords to drive traffic to CPA offers either saw their quality scores get lowered so much it was no longer a viable method of traffic generation. Some marketers even saw their accounts closed and they were banned from Google Adwords. For some, this meant the thousands of dollars a day in revenue that was being generated dropped to zero.
Amazon Kindle Example
There have been many courses sold on how to publish Kindle books. Many of these courses taught people to use public domain and private label rights products as the foundation for their books.
When Amazon customers started complaining about the poor quality of the books, many accounts were closed and the account holder was banned from an extremely lucrative business model that is still experiencing an expanding customer base.
Facebook Example
Some offline consultants have built their entire consulting business around creating custom business pages for clients. Fees ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars were charged and collected.
Facebook will be switching all business pages to a look similar to that of personal profiles on March 30, 2012. This switch includes the timeline and the new layout nullifies some of the carefully crafted looks that were created. The custom landing tab that had the like gate where a visitor had to like the page before they could see your content will be relegated to a link visitors may or may not visit.
These consultants will have to retool their business and actually TEACH their clients how to effectively engage their visitors in conversation if they wish to continue to use Facebook as their revenue generator.
There are many examples of products or services that were or are offered by brick and mortar businesses too.
The point of all these examples is a business owner MUST be diversified in the products and services they offer or they will perish when the market evolves.
Businesses must also be diversified in the marketing methods they use and they must be willing to adapt and upgrade their approach if they wish to reach their customers.
Traditional marketing methods like television ads, radio advertisements, newspaper ads and billboards are less effective than they once were and they will probably never be that effective again.
Your customers are using their smartphones, laptop computers, tablet PC’s and desktop computers to find the products and services they want or need.
If you don’t have a professional looking website, a professional looking mobile version of your website, a presence on the top social media networks where you actively engage your prospects and customers, you WILL lose business to competitors that are doing these things.
A business that has multiple revenue generators and adapts to marketing methods that places them in front of their customers on devices they use has a good chance at being successful for the long term. Business owners that aren’t diversified in their revenue generation and marketing will face extinction sooner rather than later.
Feel free to leave your comments on this topic below or open a support ticket at my Help Desk so we can explore how we can help you grow your business.
Your bookmarks, comments and feedback are always welcome. Disclosure of Material Connection
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