Tag Archives: small business advice

Small Business Marketing Tools to Boost your Likeability

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People buy from people they like, so remember to congratulate yourself once you’ve made the sale! You connected with the customer and appealed to them on the emotional level at which people ultimately decide to buy. You now need to make this transactional customer who’s made one purchase a lifetime customer. Using small business marketing tools that boost your likeability can help with that. In this webinar you’ll learn about:

  1. The Value of a Customer
  2. Likeability as one of the 3 Tenets of a Sale
  3. How Brand affects Likeability
  4. Marketing Tools that Boost Likeability

The Value of a Customer

Getting existing customers to spend more money on your products is less expensive than spending money on the marketing and onboarding required to continually bring on new customers. You’ll also generate more revenue over a customer’s lifetime. Build personal relationships with your customers, increasing your likeability, and revenue from a given customer will increase as:

  1. Average size and frequency of a sale increases
  2. Purchases become more routine
  3. You become the business that the customer always shops with
  4. The customer not only does business exclusively with you, but refers you to other people.

The sales cycle for a referral is much shorter than for a customer you bring in fresh off the street!

Likeability as One of the 3 Tenets of a Sale

Need a reminder about the 3 Tenets of a Sale? Here they are:

  1. People Must Know You (Visibility)
  2. People Must Trust You (Credibility)
  3. People Must Like You (Likeability)

We are (obviously) examining Likeability’s role in the 3 Tenets of Sale today, and how boosting it through small business marketing and building personal relationships wih customers increases your sales. We’ve examined previously how boosting credibility boosts your sales and also how boosting visibility boosts your sales, so be sure to check out those webinars as well! Small business marketing works!

How Brand Affects Likeability

Your Brand Promise lets customers know who you are and what they can expect from you. Branding choices give your customers information about your business that they use to evaluate your Brand Promise, and all ties into likeability.

Consider how these aspects of your branding will be perceived by your target market:

  1. Your business’ name
  2. Your business’ voice
  3. Visuals
  4. Values
  5. Personality
  6. Characteristics that make it unique from other companies will be perceived by your target market.

Remember that in small business your personal brand as the business owner is part of the business brand. Be both authentic in both!

Small Business Marketing Tools That Boost Likeability

You can use Small Business Solver’s Marketing Solver Tool to learn about a whole bunch of marketing tools that help with the “Like You” part of the 3 Tenets of a Sale. Here are a few the webinar talks about:

  1. Volunteering –> You and/or a staff team
  2. Sponsorships –> Community events or local sports teams
  3. Rebates and Coupons —> For existing customers, not just new ones
  4. Lunch & Learns –> For potential and existing customers
  5. Online Service Tie-In –> Use an online platform to provide value to your offering (such as access to an information website or web community)
  6. Pick Up the Phone –> Call customers instead of emailing them
  7. Employees –> Stay engaged, let them express their personality
  8. Mentors —> Leverage the power of your champions!
  9. Food –> Face-to-face over food can build powerful relationships
  10. Be Helpful –> Share articles, news, events
  11. Birthday Cards –> Note customer details that are potential touchpoints in your CRM
  12. Online Portfolio –> Showcase your business and your brand promise
  13. Networking –> Really listen to peoples’ stories and offer help without expectation of return
  14. Smile! —> People can tell, even if they can’t see you.

The numbers show that you really only need one hundred loyal customers to flourish, bottom line. They will keep coming back to you, over and over. They will refer new customers to you. One hundred loyal customers changes the nature of your business.

Something to think about, right?

Was this useful? Watch our other webinars on our YouTube Channel!

Alternative Revenue Streams for Your Small Business

Established & Growing Businesses, Finance & Accounting, Strategy, , , ,

Why would you want to develop some alternative revenue streams for your small business? For lots of reasons! Diversification and customer retention, for a start – customers who have a wide range of sevices and products from which to choose are happy customers!

Alternative Revenue Streams: Things to Consider

You can’t provide everything, so choose your alterative revenue streams wisely. You need to consider:

  1. Your core competencies
  2. Adjacencies to those competencies
  3. Your existing customers
  4. New customers
  5. Standard types of alternative revenue streams

Core Competency

How to decide what your core competency is? This is your bread & butter! A core compentecy is your competitive advantage, what you are known for! You should be better at your core competency than everyone else is. It’s probably the reason why you went into business.

Logical Adjacencies

Logical adjancenies are potential alternative revenue streams that are strategically aligned to your core competency. They steer what you offer in a defined direction. Some different ways to pivot when you do adjacencies is if they are a new product or service for your existing customers or if you are doing the same product or service for a new target market. Both are a natural step in growing your alternative revenue streams strategically.

Existing Customers

Strategies to develop alternative revenue streams that focus on the existing customer include:

  1. Increasing the average sale from a customer
  2. Increasing the frequency with which customers use your business
  3. Offering something new that customers also need
  4. Developing more effective retention strategies.

Keeping a customer is worth even more (and is much less expensive) than finding a new one!

New Customers

Strategies to develop alternative revenue streams that focus on new customers include:

  1. Targeting new markets
  2. Testing new offerings

Standard Alternative Revenue Streams

Standard alternative revenue streams include:

  1. New products, services, intellectual property, programs
  2. Events
  3. Memberships
  4. Intermediaries
  5. Residual income
  6. Sharing economy
  7. Government contracts
  8. Crowdfunding

Learn More About Alternative Revenue Streams

When it comes to alternative streams, the limit is really only the resources that you have available to implement them and oversee them. The general rule is that, regardless of how many revenue streams you have, 20% of your revenue streams should be producing 80% of your income, so focus on that 20%…but make them what you want! You can do one or more of them, blend them…have fun!

Watch the video to hear more about all of this.

Was this useful? Watch more webinars on our YouTube channel!

Email Tips To Make You an Email Pro!

Marketing & Branding, Sales & Business Development, Start Ups, , ,

Take your online communcations from “average” to “awesome” with these email tips from Small Business Solver Marketing Manager Sarah Levis.

Email Tips to Take Today!

A recent article from “Forbes” indicated that a corporate employee sends and receives 105 emails a day and can spend 28% of the day dealing with email. So learn how to use how to use this tool effectively! In this webinar on email tips you’ll learn:

  1. Whether An Email is Necessary –> Is email the best way to deliver your message? The most effective way? The most appropriate way?
  2. Deciding What Kind of Email is Necessary –> What’s the purpose of your email? How can you clearly indicate that to the reader?
  3. The Importance of Tone –> Is your tone appropriate for your purpose? Are you using conventions that don’t come across well in text, like sarcasm or teasing?
  4. The Power of Good Editing –> Have you edited your writing to eliminate jargon, excessive words, and weak words and phrases?
  5. A Clear Call to Action — > Does the reader know exactly what you need them to do in response to your email?
  6. Tools of the Trade –> Have you made effective use of the tools available to you in your email client to make your email as clear and accurate as possible (Spell Check, Grammar Check, signature, pre-written text blocks)
  7. Checking Your Work –> Have you proof-read your email for errors? Has someone else looked over it for errors that you may have missed?
  8. Subjects – Did you send test emails to make sure that your subject doesn’t land your email in SPAM folders?
  9. Before You Send – Writing Your Greeting, Pause Before You CC, Know the Laws –> Is your greeting appropriate and accurate? Is everyone (and no one more) on your CC list that must be? Are you in compliance with your country’s SPAM regulations?

Links to check out to make your writing even better!

  1.  21 of the Best Email Subject Lines We’ve Ever Seen – HubSpot
  2. GDPR Compliance Information – ZDNet.com
  3. Grammarly: Free Writing Assistant
  4. How to Use Gmail (Ultimate Beginner’s Guide) – Envatotuts+ Learning Guide 
  5. How to Write Emails Like a Marketing Pro – Aytekin Tank for Medium
  6. How to Write Email with Military Precision – Kabir Seghel for the Harvard Review
  7. Outlook Help Center
  8. The Ultimate List of Email Spam Triggers – HubSpot

Follow these email tips and keep these resources handy and you’ll be writing exceptional email in no time! Oh – watch the webinar, too! If it’s useful, check out our other webinars on our YouTube channel!

Succession Planning for Small Business

Established & Growing Businesses, Finance & Accounting, Regulations & Legal, Strategy, , , ,

Succession planning is all about planning your exit strategy and maximizing the value that the small business owner receives for their effort (which often amounts to years and decades of work).

It also protects the small business owner, family, and the business from any risk.

Learn the process and your options in 20 minutes!

Contact the Expert
Mike Hook
mike@intrepidlaw.ca

SEO 2015 and Beyond

Established & Growing Businesses, Marketing & Branding, Technology & Online, , , , , , , , ,

Search Engine Optimization keeps changing! Small business owners need to keep on top of this to make sure that their small business is found online.

There are some significant changes that happened in early 2015 that you should take note of right now!

Watch this less than 20 minute video to learn everything that you need to know now.

Contact the Expert
Allan Pollett
allanp73@gmail.com
www.allanpollett.com

Business Clarity Questions for Small Business

Established & Growing Businesses, Management & Human Relations, Strategy, , , , ,

The New Year is a great time to plan to ramp up your business.

Getting ready for 2015 involves getting your business ready with a solid foundation to move forward. Your foundation is based on answering these 7 critical questions.

In 20 minutes, walk through the business clarity questions and answer them for your business. Make your 2015 more impactful!

Contact the Expert

Charles McFarland
Email: cmcfarland@focalpointcoaching.com
Website: https://www.charlesmcfarland.ca
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachingbusinessandartsleaders
Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesmcf

SBS Clarity 14 Jan 2015

Hiring for Newbies

Established & Growing Businesses, Management & Human Relations, , , , , ,

Hiring is an exciting time for small business owners. It means that you are growing. And if you keep on reaching your targets and exceeding your targets, this is a natural next step in your business.

This video will help you overcome many of the challenges and pitfalls that normally occur through the hiring process, plus it will give you some bonus tips.

Topics covered include;
– fears surrounding hiring
– the total costs of hiring
– the total costs of firing
– top mistakes to avoid
– how & where to post your job posting
– how to screen resumes and top things to look for
– importance of pre screening and how to do it
– interviews and how to identify liars
– reference checks
– why will recruits sign up and stay with an organization

Contact The Expert
Meredith Arnot
marnot@perceptiveedge.com

How To Set Up An Ecommerce Website

Established & Growing Businesses, Start Ups, Technology & Online, , , , , , , ,

If you aren’t online, then you are missing out on business.

Especially with the advances, there are some really easy ways to get started. But there are also some complexities that will creep up depending on how you are planning on setting it up.

Some things that will help you figure out what platform and set up that you need for your ecommerce site are:

1. How many products are you selling?
2. What type of products are you selling?
3. How many places are you shipping from?
4. How many places are you shipping to?
5. How many states, provinces, and countries are you shipping to?
6. How many transaction do you have?

Go through the main points of what you need to consider. See some of the options out there. And learn what to look out for.

Contact the Expert

Kagan Mustafa
kagan@smallbusinesssolver.com

Need to Know HR for Small Business

Management & Human Relations, , , ,

Hiring and managing employees and contractors as a small business owner has many unknown hazards ahead.

In 30 minutes learn about the most common HR mistakes and how to avoid them. What are the steps to take in some of these situations?

Do you know what to do when you are firing someone?
How much vacation time does someone get?
What is the difference between severance and termination pay?
When and how do you make someone an employee?
Do you know how to hire?

Meredith Arnot
meredith.arnot@assess-ability.com
www.assess-ability.com
marnot@perceptiveedge.com
www.perceptivetips.com

Want to see the presentation? Basic HR for Small Business Slides Only

CRM Tour for Small Business Owners

Established & Growing Businesses, Operations & Efficiency, , , , ,

A huge part of building your customer relationships is to not only listen, but to also remember. But remembering is nearly impossible when you think about the number of clients that you have. And even if it is easy at the beginning, if you are planning on growing it will become more difficult.

Do you remember their names?
What they bought last time?
If they like one colour or another?
The name of their dog?

It is strange how important it is to us and to others that someone remembers information about us. It makes us feel more important. And it makes use like the person who remembered!

Having a CRM or Customer Relationship Management tool will help your small business remember these details and build a stronger, lasting relationship with your clients.

Contact The Expert

The Small Business Solver Tech Team
info@smallbusinesssolver.com