Archive for the ‘Starting Your Business’ Category

Many small business owners find planning their marketing activities a daunting task often creating a feeling of being overwhelmed. There are so many things to consider and so many options to choose from, how will you know what decisions to make? Marketing is an overreaching term used in business everyday to describe a variety of different things, actions and materials that a company uses to attract new customers. It could mean the type of materials you use – logos, business cards, letterhead, brochures, websites etc… or can be interchangeable with the sales team’s activities – tradeshows, networking, conferences, events & cold calling or perhaps it could mean your interaction with your customers – customer services, counter service, distribution service, call center activity etc…

Marketing is about all of those things. It is about the science of making an emotional connection with your customer. One that is strong enough to compel them to take action to purchase your product or service and to develop an ongoing relationship with them so they continue to come back again and again. It is a complex process that once mastered, yields significant results.

A marketing plan is the tool to those results. It helps the business owner build the roadmap to success and with the right approach, winning attitude, and these 9 tips, you will have a winning formula to a successful marketing plan.

1. Understand Your Buyer
Analyze your market and really understand what your audience wants and needs. The foundation for all marketing is being able to connect on an emotional level with your buyers so take the time to understand and predict what your ideal clients are looking for.

2. Make an Emotional Connection
Emotionally engage your audience and keep them coming back for more. People connect and build relationships on emotional connections. Figure out how to create an emotional connection in every component of your marketing. People like to do business with people. Make your marketing interactive and allow customers to get to know you on a personal level. Write about yourself in your newsletters, add photos and invite them into your world.

3. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Take a look at the marketing of other successful businesses and mimic it. Use the same method but change it up to fit your product and your audience. For example, Bill Glazer of GKIC uses a technique called swipe & deploy. Swipe a direct marketing piece for one industry and change it to fit yours.

4. Be Unique
Really dig deep to determine how you are different. The simplest of differences can mean big profits. Finding your uniqueness and creating messages to demonstrate those differences will help you attract more customers to your business.

5. Stop Selling and Start Story Telling
Weave a story in to your marketing messages. One that is compelling and that your customers can relate with. People tend to connect with people they feel they have something in common with. Remember your reasons for getting into business and use that in your marketing to attract new customers.

6. Plan Your Tactics Strategically
Marketing is about being visible and getting your message and your brand into the marketplace. Remember people are busy so make sure you thinking strategically about when and how you are engaging your audience with your material. Your objective is to make an emotional connection and compel your prospect to take action so take the time to plan our your strategy, your delivery and your materials.

I am a big believer in education and investing in myself to learn new things so I can better improve my life, my business and my relationships. Over the years I have become quite fond of many books and this list of books are ones that I believe every business owners must read.

1. Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

This book introduces you to the 15 laws of success and a must read for anybody looking to achieve success.

Hill also develops 13 principles in the form of a philosophy on personal achievement and provides stories to make his point.

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2. E-Myth Revisited : Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber “Work on your business, not in it” is one of the valuable lessons taught in this masterpiece. Gerber encourages owners to develop systems that allow their companies to operate even without them and to focus your time and energy working on your business rather than becoming a slave to it.

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3. Who Moved My Cheese by Spenser Johnson Using a wonderful story about mice, Johnson describes change in one’s life and work and four typical reactions to change during their hung for cheese.

This is a great way to educate yourself about change

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4. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success One Relationship at A Time by Keith Ferrazzi

The ultimate book on networking in my opinion. Ferrazzi discovered early in life, that all successful people master the art of relationships. He lays out specific steps and a mindset required for connecting with thousands of people to support your success. Business is not about being behind your computer, it is about connecting with people and developing relationships that propel your business.

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5. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins This book talks about finding what you are good at and creating a culture of discipline. It discusses multiple level of strategy and introduces you to 5 different leadership types and their approaches.

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6. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie Of course, your salespeople and managers should read this self-improvement classic. But Friends is also about leadership. “There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything,” writes Carnegie, “and that is by making the other person want to do it.”

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7. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t by Chip and Dan Heath The Heath brothers identify qualities of memorable and effective ideas wherever they occur, in one of the most useful and entertaining marketing books to come along in years

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8. The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, by Jack Stack The term open-book management didn’t exist when Stack, CEO of Springfield Re-manufacturing, started giving employees the education and the data to track their companies — and their own — performance. Stack is equally instructive and open in chronicling the experience.

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9. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton The authors help you identify your talents and build them into strengths so you can improve your performance every time. The program introduces you to 34 dominant themes and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career goals using their Internet Based Strengths Finder Profile.

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10. Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things Done, By Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan This book focuses on results and getting the job done no matter if you are running a company or a manager on the job. It is about setting your mind and delivering the results every time you set out to accomplish a task.

The word “integrity” is the most overused and misunderstood word in business. Many claim to have the upmost highest level of integrity when it comes to serving their customers, respecting their service partners and treatment of their employees but very few really know what the word means. By definition, integrity means “a steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code” so the question that comes to mind is whose moral or ethical code? Yours? Your parents? Society? Your religion? Your friends? The list could go on and on.

Having integrity is doing what you believe to be true and moral based upon the ethical code you have chosen to adopt in your life. All of the experiences you have had and all of the influences you have met, how you were raised and the religion you follow are all part of the composition of your ethical code. Integrity is the developed by making the right choices that support your ethical code consistently and without waiver. Integrity is something you have even when others are not looking.

Many successful people are successful because they have integrity. It is through integrity that you develop trusting relationships. And it is because of trusting relationships that good business is formed. Integrity is one of the easiest qualities to detect, or to detect the lack of in people you meet. Once you become familiar with a person’s actions and the choices they make, you will begin to anticipate their integrity level. When you act with integrity on a consistent basis, your actions become more predictable and your behaviors can be anticipated by others.

Integrity is one of the most sought after qualities by customers, business partners and employers so what can you do to ensure your actions are communicating a high level of integrity?

1.   Know Your Beliefs
Understand what makes you tick. What beliefs do you hold as true and as right? Before you can act with integrity, you must first understand your limits and your beliefs and the actions that you would take when those beliefs are challenged.

2.  Be Consistent to Your Beliefs
Integrity is about consistency and holding true to you not matter what the risk. It is about creating predictable behavior that not only you but others will begin to rely upon and depend. Don’t waiver in your actions and hold true to your beliefs each and every time.

3.  Don’t Lie or Exaggerate
Integrity is about creating trust and lying is always associated with lack of integrity, even if you feel the lie is justified. When you are honest and true, your integrity will shine and draw others to you.

4.  Stay True to Your Values
Sometimes we are easily influenced by others and our beliefs are challenged. We often find ourselves on the edge with a choice to go right or go left. To have integrity means to stay true to your values and your beliefs.

In order to succeed, you must not only have drive and ambition, but you must also act with integrity at all times. In the words of President Eisenhower “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army on in an office”.

Every business owner, even the really successful ones have been guilty of making mistakes in their business. The difference between the truly successful ones and those that aren’t are that they learn from their mistakes and are not afraid to take the risks to deploy strategies to take their business to the next level. Here are nine strategies for you to start using in your business today.

1. Don’t Work Without A Plan
You wouldn’t take a vacation without planning your days, activities and your budgets so why would you run your business without a plan. A solid marketing plan is the foundation to every successful business and if you want to achieve greatness, you must be thinking about how you are going to accomplish this each and every day.

2. Stay True to Your Mission and Be The Leader
Every business has a brand identity. A reason they went into business and an impression that they want to leave with their customers. Do not sway from your mission. To be the leader in your market, you must be the first to try new things. Do not do what your competition is doing by mimicking their marketing and advertising. Stand apart from the masses and be unique.

3. Consistency is the Key
Once you have a powerful message, shout it from the rooftops and shout it out often. Your message has to be repeated over and over again and in every communication the business sends out into the marketplace both internal and external – Your marketing material, your website, your employees and every client touch point should be screaming the same message every time.

4. Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up
To really accelerate your business, you must build a business based upon referrals. To obtain referrals you must master the art of the follow up. You business will grow from your existing client base either engaging additional services or referring you to others. Keep in touch with them often.

5. Don’t Be A Super Hero
Do not try to go at it alone. You are not a superhero and will eventually burn out quickly. Surround yourself with talented people and lead them to victory. You focus on what you do best and outsource other tasks to topic experts who can help advance your business.

6. Wow ‘Em
The best activity you can focus on is to wow your customers. Create an experience that they will remember. The best customer experience is generated by the details. Those little things that make all the difference in the world and usually doesn’t cost the business owner much to do.

7. Leverage Your Systems
From this point forward, you should be thinking about how you can leverage your business. Everything that you do should be able to support multiple efforts and activities. For example, if you are marketing, how can you use that same marketing in other venues. If you write an article, can you turn that content into other pieces like an ebook, a blog post or a white paper that you can give to your customers.

8. Network Every Day
Business is built by the people you meet. Make a goal for yourself to network each and every day. A good system is to commit to reaching out to five new people a day to introduce yourself and to see how you can assist them with no expectation of a returned favor.

9. Build Alliances with Influencers
Chances are there are other businesses that complement your offering. Align yourself with those other business owners and collaborate on how you can help each other’s business. This will give you an opportunity to reach a new market, offer new products and build your network within your industry.

In today’s economy, many businesses are struggling to keep their heads above water. They find themselves under a lot of stress and looking for ways to recession-proof their businesses. I love Michael Gerber’s book E-Myth because it teaches entrepreneurs how to systematize their business so it runs smoothly and as expected. In times like these, business owners often find themselves wondering what they could do to protect them for the future. Here are 5 tips that you can use right now:

1. Perform a Financial Makeover – Now is the time to be financial focused and trim the fat! As business owners, we sometimes have a tendency to set and forget, but in a recession, it is critical to focus on every element of the business’s finances. Look at what is essential to you business and identify wasteful spending. How can you save? What can you leverage? Renegotiate all contracts (even if the contract isn’t up yet). Bottom line – eliminate expenses that are not essential to your business.

2. Automate, Outsource and Redistribute – Now is the time to be working on your business, not in it. It is so easy to fall into the trap of doing everything yourself – don’t do it. Look for solutions that add value, make sense and can be leveraged. Your time should be focused on building your business and developing strategies to grow your business. Bottom line- automate, outsource, and redistribute the tasks that take you away from growing your business.

3. Create More Value For Your Customer – Now is the time to tell your customers you love them! Show them why they should continue to do business with you and a simple way is to create more value for the same price. Take a look at what little bit extra you could throw into the pot. A free service? A free widget? An extended contract at current prices? Whatever works for your business. Bottom line – Do everything you can to keep your clients and attract more.

4. Network Like a Maniac - Now is the time to reach deep into your network and make connections. Building up social capital is one of the best marketing strategies a business owner could use to build their business. To be an effective networker, you need to be genuine and not be looking for something in return. Offer your gift of knowledge, compassion and connections to help out others. The ROI on that action will pay off for years to come. Bottom line -Friends give friends work.

5. Stay Focused on The Future - Now is the time to position yourself for the future and in order to do that, you must remain focused. Although these are tumultuous times, begin smart and strategic will bring you out ahead of your competition. You should always be thinking about what action you can take that will move your business forward. Bottom line – never lose sight of the prize.