The 10 Most Destructive Lies Business Owners Tell Themselves

We talk to ourselves constantly. Okay, maybe not literally, but the psychological phenomenon of self-talk is real and it can have a major bearing on your life, moods and even your professional performance. Self-talk can manifest as reactions to certain events and situations. For example, you might think “that was a dumb mistake” or “this is going to be awesome,” and these thoughts generally have an effect on how you perceive the event in question. They can also manifest as assumptions, in the short-term or long-term, about different aspects of your life and business.

There’s no question that business owners lie to themselves, often knowingly, but some lies are innocuous. Others, like these 10, are destructive and should be avoided at all costs.

Lies Business Owners Tell

My Customers are Going to Love This

This lie stems from your own personal biases. You came up with the idea for your business (or product), so, of course, you’re going to love it! That doesn’t mean everyone else in your target audience is going to, and assuming that’s the case may set you up for failure. If you don’t have any objective data backing this statement, you’re lying to yourself.

Everything Will Work Out

It won’t. Not if you allow things to continue as they are. There’s this persistent myth that businesses succeed because they had a good idea and a good system. Then they just waited for everything else to fall in place. This isn’t true. Successful businesses have to experiment, tinker, and evolve constantly. You have to put in the effort if you want to succeed.

I Can Always Change This Later

This can be true, depending on the context, but it’s not a line of thinking you want to apply to many areas of your business. Assuming you’ll be able to change something later gives you a lower threshold for quality, meaning you’ll start off with a weaker strategy. And thanks to procrastination, you’ll probably end up never changing it anyway. Start strong if you want to finish strong.

I Don’t Have to Worry About This Yet

There are many reasons for procrastination, and some of them are actually pretty good. However, when you delay a task, the indefiniteness of “I’ll worry about that later” can set you up for a perpetual cycle of delay. Instead, if you don’t have time to do something, either schedule a concrete time to do it in the future or delegate it to someone else.

I Have to Do This Myself

Entrepreneurs love to get their hands dirty, and many take it as a point of pride. You might convince yourself that you’re the only one with the skill set or experience to handle a certain task, or that if you don’t do this yourself, you’ll lose control of your business. However, it’s unlikely that these things are true. Learn to let go, and trust your teammates to help you out.

I Don’t Have Time

Entrepreneurship is demanding. It takes a heavy investment of time and effort to see any progress, so many business owners end up putting off or ignoring other aspects of their life — like family, friends and leisure time. Trust me, you need to make time for these things, or you’ll regret it later.

I Just Have to Work Harder

Working harder isn’t always the best approach, just like hitting your head against a brick wall with more force isn’t going to help you tear it down. Instead, opt for smarter, more innovative solutions to your problems. Putting in more hours with a “brute force” style will leave you burned out and frustrated.

This Could Never Work

This lie often stems from preconceived notions about different strategies. You might hear an idea for the first time and immediately write it off as impractical or useless, or you might be presented with a strategy that didn’t work out well for you in the past and assume it could never work out. It’s important to be open to new ideas, especially since many strategies can be feasible as long as you use the right approach.

All I Need Is . . . . . 

Businesses are ridiculously complicated, and even to the most seasoned, successful entrepreneurs in the world, they’re somewhat unpredictable. There are too many variables for you to definitively boil down any problem to a single factor. If you give yourself this problem-solving tunnel vision, you could wind up ignoring the factors that are actually responsible for your predicament. Know that every problem is complex, and no one fix will solve everything.

No One Understands

Entrepreneurship can be painfully lonely. Because you’re working long hours, you’re in an isolated position, and you have to put on a “brave” face for your employees and clients, you might find yourself thinking that nobody understands the stresses you’re dealing with. This weighs heavily on the mind. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re alone. Connect with other entrepreneurs and open up about your experiences.

Don’t feel ashamed if you lie to yourself. In fact, if you don’t, you’re in the minority. Some lies are important to reframe your expectations, help you think more positively and direct your line of thought to something more productive. However, don’t let yourself get caught in a trap of unproductive self-deception. Keep your thoughts and assumptions in check by remaining as objective as possible in your business.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1XY9dVM

3 ways marketers can improve customer experience

Customer experience is a hot-button topic in marketing.

As more and more marketing pros seek to add this skill to their toolkit, advice from one of the leading minds in the field, Brian Solis, can help.

I met Solis, a former public relations and digital media executive, a year ago. My blog post about our conversation, Is Customer Experience the Next Killer App? was one of the most widely shared, liked and tweeted blogs that I have ever written. Since then, marketers are chiming-in everywhere you turn about improving CX.

I was talked to Solis again while he traveled to one of his worldwide speaking engagements discussing CX, and gathered more insights. Here are three main ways that Solis says PR and marketing pros can improve customer experience:

1. Uncover points of friction.

The first step is the most difficult. It requires that you recognize that customers’ experiences could be improved and requires you (and others) to step outside of your roles and collaborate to bring about sweeping change. But, it can start with small steps.

Any employee or manager can address customer experience by looking within their domain—whether it is sales, marketing, product development or customer service.

A good place to start is uncovering points of friction. This can be done personally or with the help of other team members and customers. Look at the experience within and outside your department, paying attention to what happens before and after your department becomes part of the customer experience.

When you involve your customers and other departments, interesting developments can appear, enabling you to identify things that are broken and how to fix them.

2. Place innovation over iteration.

Changing the customer experience may not require a complete product or customer journey redesign, but every aspect can benefit from a benchmark review through the eyes of the connected customer.

To make meaningful changes, you need to look at the experience from both ends. This leads to improvements and opens the door to innovation. It’s important to find a balance between innovation and iteration. Both are required for success.

Take a note from Steve Jobs and the development of the iPhone. Jobs didn’t want designers with traditional cellphone experience on the team, because he didn’t want any previous biases. Rather than focus on what a phone was, Jobs looked at what it could be.

3. Rethink what success means to CX.

Improving the customer experience can have widespread value. It is important to determine goals and how to measure them early in the process. Goals should focus on business value as well as how they affect the customer experience.

What’s the ROI of customer happiness? You can use existing metrics, but to truly track experience, rethink what success means and develop additional metrics that ensure how the two align.

Track key performance indicators related to customer satisfaction, shared experiences, customer paths and conversions. Focus on new customer growth baselines, looking at revenues and return on revenues once changes are completed. Also look at the journey and whether or not it is efficient for customers based on intent, context, device and immediacy.

The more tangible goals that you set, easier you can measure success.

  Source : http://bit.ly/24Uyndd

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

According to Google Trends, interest in content marketing has been on the rise since January 2011.

But this should not surprise anyone. We all seem to be awash in content marketing.

What’s surprising is that many content marketers don’t have a documented strategy.

First we need to clear up a little confusion about content marketing strategy.

Content marketing strategy defined

Some people like to make a distinction between the terms content strategy and content marketing strategy. The distinction, they suggest, is best explained with a Russian doll: a smaller strategy is inside a larger one.

In this case, content marketing strategy is the smaller strategy inside the larger one,content strategy.

There is some truth to this.

Content strategy, according to Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, involves the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content, whereas content marketing strategy focuses on the narrow discipline of marketing content.

Fair enough, but I think this distinction is confusing and needless because we can also talk about content marketing strategy as the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content … and not lose any sleep.

I’d like to proceed with a clear definition of a content marketing strategy.

So, if strategy means “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result,” the specific goal or result for content marketing would be “building an audience that builds a business.”

For our purposes, then, let’s define content marketing strategy like this:

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.

Which brings us to the next important question.

Do you need a content marketing strategy?

If you are a small business with a few employees or a one-man or one-woman shop, you may be thinking that your content marketing is so simple that you don’t need a plan.

Won’t a list of things that need to happen written on the back of an envelope get the job done?

Yes, that’s one way to begin, especially if you are typically a perfectionist and just need to start your content marketing rather than waiting until you have the perfect plan.

But at some point you will need to develop a more comprehensive plan — and then document it.

• Content marketers with a documented strategy feel more confident in their work.
• Content marketing challenges don’t seem as overwhelming when you have a strategy in place.
• A documented strategy makes it easier to get buy-in from stakeholders.
• It’s easier to chart your success when you have a documented strategy.

Crafting a simple content marketing strategy

Let’s be honest: Unless you are a content marketer for a big company, you don’t need much. Just a plan to help focus your time, money, and energy.

In fact, you can document your content marketing strategy in the time it takes you to answer the following 13 questions:

1. Who are your users?
2. Who are your competitors?
3. What do you bring to the table?
4. What do you hear?
5. What content do you already have?
6. What is the purpose of your content?
7. How often should you publish content?
8. How will you distribute your content?
9. Who is in charge of your content?
10. Who will produce your content?
11. Who is going to maintain the content?
12. Who is responsible for the results?
13. What’s your destination (core strategy)?

Your content marketing strategy begins with this person

The person I’m talking about is your customer.

Your customer is the focal point of your content marketing strategy. You need a substantial, deep, and comprehensive understanding of who she is.

When you do, the strategy will write itself. You won’t have to guess or wonder. But a weak, flimsy, or flat-out wrong understanding of who your customer is will sink your strategy every time.

Check out these five resources to help you understand who your customer is:

• Research checklist: Don’t Create Your Content Strategy Until You Research These 6 Things
• Empathy map: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head
• Worldview: Tap into This Psychological Driver to Create the Ultimate Message
• Customer experience map: How to Use Customer Experience Maps to Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
• Personas: How Creating an Imaginary Friend Can Make You a Better Writer

Understanding your content

Once you thoroughly understand who your customer is, evaluate the content you already have.

This exercise will not only help you spot the gaps in your content that you need to fill, but it will also help you see that old content can become outdated and cost you top positions in search engines, cause user-experience failure, and more.

So, here are four resources to help you review your current content:

• A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content
• How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience
• How to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel that Are Costing You Money
• The Single Best Way to Create Hit Content in Record Time

Measuring your content marketing efforts (conversion)

Ultimately, it comes down to this: how do you know if your content marketing strategy is working?

You’ll know if your content marketing strategy is working if you measure it.

This is why question 13 on the content marketing strategy worksheet (What’s your core strategy?) is so important.

That core strategy should:

• Give you room to stretch, fail, get back up, and grow
• Allow you to adjust as your environment changes around you, without having to make a drastic change
• Align with your values, so you’ll be able to sustain it and endure challenges over time

But how do you measure that? If you are like me and the words “analytics” and “measuring” make you uncomfortable, check out Mike King’s article:

• A Quick-Start Guide to Measuring Your Content Marketing Efforts

That should keep you busy for a while.

In this hour-long session, our Chief Operations Officer, Tony Clark, and Chief Content Officer, Sonia Simone, talk about:

• Why content creators should have a basic understanding of web analytics
• What tools you must use (forget about the rest and focus on these)
• The essential metrics you should measure to get the best performance out of your content
• What to do with the information once you have it

Source : http://bit.ly/1KPMXvO

7 Tips to Create a Simple and Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media and marketing are two terms that are increasingly viewed as one and the same. In truth, while there is a certain segment of the user community that maintains their social media profiles purely for social reasons, an increasing majority of users also see social media as useful advertising tool. If you are in the latter category, you can use these tips to craft a simple and effective social media marketing strategy for your business. Best of all, you will pay nothing (or next to nothing) for creating a very effective advertising strategy!

Tip #1: Choose Your Social Media Platforms With Care

Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter regularly cull and deactivate accounts that have not been used within a period of time. This is done to keep their content relevant and fresh and also to keep their use statistics accurate. In the same way, you should choose which social media platforms you engage with carefully. Your business will not be helped – and may be harmed – by keeping a social media account open that you do not actually use.

If you have limited time to spend on social media, choose just one or a few platforms to engage with. Facebook and Twitter still command the largest user databases, but Instagram, Pinterest and other image-oriented platforms are rapidly gaining ground. The key is to choose the very best social media platforms for your products and services.

Tip #2: Seek to Create a Lively Online Community

Rather than viewing your followers and fans as wallets, you will have greater success in social media marketing when viewing them as your community. Interacting with them on a personal as well as professional level (where appropriate) can do more to increase brand awareness and loyalty than any number of special offers and discounts – although those are very helpful too!

Here, the more you can do to make your content humorous, memorable, relevant and timely, the more success you will have in building an online audience that sticks to you like glue. Also, do your best to promote your fans’ content as well – retweeting, re-posting, liking and connecting with them about what matters to them most.

Tip #3: Share Happy Customer Stories

You can use your social media platforms to share customer testimonials. Many customers would be just delighted to see their face and name and a short quote online! You could provide a form on your website and regular reminders over email and on your social media platforms for how to submit a testimonial that might get featured.

Tip #4: Use the Inexpensive and Effective Social Media Advertising Options

Google Adwords, Facebook ads and other inexpensive, highly targeted advertising programs are tailor-made for even those with the most limited advertising and marketing budgets. So long as you know who you are trying to reach and where they are (in terms of location as well as which social media platforms they prefer) you can use these programs to your benefit. You can target very specifically to demographics including age, gender, area of the country, interests, status and more.

Tip #5: Connect with Other Influencers on Your Chosen Social Media Platforms

If you notice that such-and-so has a huge following, this indicates a person of influence within your social media sphere. Not only can you friend or fan these folks, but you can actively seek them out and begin to build a relationship with them. One great way to bring yourself to their attention is to continually re-post or re-tweet their content.

Another great way to build a relationship is to extend an offer to cross-promote – you promote their brand to your audience and they promote your brand to their audience. You may also want to host a Google Hangout or Twitter Chat together to bring your audiences together and expand your reach jointly. The more you befriend other industry influencers the faster your own audience grows.

 

Tip #6: Steer Clear of Self-Promotion

This definitely seems counter-intuitive at first – after all, isn’t promotion the whole reason you are spending all this time on social media in the first place? Yes and no. You do want to be able to promote what you have to offer, but you want to do it in such a way that your community online doesn’t quite realize they have been promoted to until they are already purchasing what you offer.

In all of this, it is vital to understand that you are your own best representative for your brand. Social media marketing is all about relationships. It is not about products and services. People buy from people, not companies, so your community will be buying from you, not from your company or your brand. The more people get to know you and what you stand for, the more they learn about your company and what it stands for as well.

Tip #7: Position Yourself as a Reliable Source for Breaking News

Sharing current content, trending content, newsworthy content, will mark you as a vital news source as well as a place to buy products or services. This will keep your community tuned in to your social media profiles for other reasons than just because they need a product or service your company offers.

Did NASA discover another planet? Post about that! Did you just donate to help disaster relief victims? Retweet the donation link. Did your cute dog (or any cute dog) just win a noteworthy competition? For sure share that! Keep on top of the current news and events feeds and you may soon find you are being shared and re-posted and re-tweeted as well, with the effect of improving your brand awareness by default.

Conclusion

Armed with these seven simple tips, you can take your company’s social media presence from bland and boring to vibrant and engaging, increasing customer loyalty, sales and brand awareness without doing anything more than just being yourself!

Source : http://bit.ly/1SfSAEd

Small Business Power Tip

Dominate Your Niche Online Then Move to Offline

IN THE EARLY part of this decade , I managed a Restaurant that attracted foodies looking for exotic, Asian dishes.  We were generating  a decent monthly income but due to the ‘exotic’ part, foot traffic wildly fluctuated.  In any given Sunday we could have barely two tables full or a busload of tourist barging in the front door, at any given minute.  Being a ‘family business idea’, our restaurant didn’t have solid systems to handle such large influxes of people.  We hear it all the time, “you are the best exotic Asian food in the area!”Even the local foodie magazine, agreed with the chorus of what people were saying.

Two problems started to arise:  Bad financials — cost analysis was deeply flawed and I was getting bored out of my mind waiting for customers.   

I’ve never been a patient kind of guy, I guess; classified as a ‘go-getter’ I like going after opportunities rather than waiting.  I view minutes sitting down and waiting as hours misspent.  I also believe in the importance and power of focus.

I can already hear people say, “then just find something to do while waiting.”  I did.  I didn’t literally waited and stared at the ceiling.  I would go at the backroom at do inventory, call suppliers, stock supplies,etc.  The problem with that ‘set of things to do’ is it might be productive but it’s not an effective way of taking a business to a higher level.  For that, you need strategic planning, face-to-face time with interested people, building relationships with companies who might be interested in bulk orders.  You need to build a system and more importantly, the time and resources to see it through.

It’s hard to do that when you’re waiting for the next customer to barge through the door.  So I went on a different direction and started a website Reno Homes.  That was in 2007, I’m really glad I made the leap.

With the reach and limitless leverage of internet, small businesses can now dominate their niche online just as well, if not more efficiently, as in a brick and mortar store.  There has never been a better time in the history of the world! (If you think I’m exaggerating, think about this: we are the last generation to experience life on planet earth without the world wide web.)

Some facts about small businesses and online marketing:

• A large majority is unwilling to invest significant time and resource in building their online presence.  That’s why Google tried to buy an unprofitable, but local-centric business, for six billion dollars.

•  I was a small business owner three times over.  We just didn’t have time to deal with ‘internet stuff’.  The urgent bullied us to forgetting the important.

• In short, you have Google’s good graces.  Search engines, especially in the last two years, has tried to win small business owners  by giving them favor in their search results in the hopes of letting them see the benefit of search to their core business.

• It doesn’t cost a lot to build an online presence.  But it takes time, consistency and initiative.  Don’t forget the older your site is the better.

The best thing is you can do a combination of Groupon-Living Social-Whatever-New-Coupon-Company, Twitter, Facebook, SEO online marketing campaigns.  Meaning, if you try out these avenues and do a bit of testing to see where you get results, you can leverage it to shoo-in traffic to you brick and mortar business.

Now, there simple is no reason, just to wait.  I just wish I knew this back then.

Source : http://bit.ly/1OZUYtx

10 Things Every Online Business Owner Should Know For 2016

Tick… tick… tick… 2015 is winding down faster every day. Very soon, we will be welcoming 2016 and it’s now that time of the year when businesses start to revise their strategy and map out a way to conquer the New Year. 2015 was a great year for online businesses, with a total of $349.1 billion projected in total U.S. ecommerce sales (for perspective, that’s more than the entire GPD of Denmark in 2014).

If you want to succeed in online business in 2016, here are 10 factors you absolutely must take note of:

Prepare a Mobile Strategy

Mobile is quickly becoming one of the biggest forces we’ve seen since the internet, and its importance keeps growing on a daily basis. Research shows tha tmobile is expected to influence ecommerce sales to the tune of $76.79 billion in 2015, and that a quarter of all US retail sales, or a whopping $1 trillion+ in ecommerce sales, are influenced by mobile in 2015 alone.

Whether it is in form of direct sales, or the influence it has on potential customers’ research before doing business with you, mobile strategy can no longer be pushed back in 2016; it is getting to a stage where you either have a mobile strategy or see your sales slowly evaporate.

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of being mobile-optimized in 2015, Google updated it’s algorithm to start penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly;research shows that a massive 46.6% of non-mobile friendly pages were affected by the update.

Start Blogging

If you did not blog in 2015, you’re already way behind; research shows that a massive 77 percent of internet users read blogs and that small businesses that blog generate 126% more leads and have 97% more inbound links than businesses that do not blog.

It’s important to note that blogging does not just mean having a blog installed; you actually have to keep your blog updated. My next point addresses this.

Blog Frequently

Exactly how often should you blog in 2016? For a long time it’s been difficult to establish the right blogging frequency, but not anymore; the kind folks at Hubspot went ahead to survey 13,500+ of their users and came to the conclusion that more is better. Essentially, the Hubspot research established the following:

• Companies that published 16+ blog posts monthly got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 blog posts monthly.
• Companies that published 16+ blog posts monthly got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published less than 4 blog posts monthly.

It’s been established, and from a credible source, that publishing 16 or more articles monthly on your blog is the sweet spot. Now, develop a content schedule and start blogging!

Document Your Content Marketing Strategy

Everybody keeps raving about content strategy, but research shows that a good number of companies utilizing content marketing aren’t recording any gains due to their content marketing use. Does this mean that content marketing doesn’t work? No, but the answer lies in something more subtle; a documented strategy.

Research by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs found that the success of your content marketing can be determined by the type of documentation you have; the CMI and MarketingProfs study found that 60 percent of companies that document their strategy get results from content marketing, compared to a minuscule 7 percent of companies without a strategy. In other words, having no content marketing strategy increases your chances of failure by 94 percent while having a documented strategy increases your chances of success by 60 percent.

Upgrade Your Website Speed

According to Aliesha from Umbrellar, “47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds”.

Take that! A whopping 47 percentof potential customers expect your website to load within 2 seconds, and as high as 40 percent of people will reconsider doing business with you if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. While that might seem surprising, don’t be too surprised because our attention spans keep getting shorter, and recent research from Microsoft shows that our attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish.

If your website is slow in 2016, you’ll lose a lot of business. Fix things by getting a good web host; for comparison, this article on Hosting Facts reviews dozens of web hosts by their average page load time and their data can serve as a benchmark when deciding on what web host to use.

Position Your Content Front and Center

After a recent leak of their “Quality Guidelines” document (a document handed to “Quality Raters” to help Google evaluate search results, the outcome of which eventually influences Google’s algorithm changes), Google decided to publicly release the document. One of the key factors Google uses to rank content is how prominent the content is on the site that hosts the content; essentially, content that is front and center at the top of your page will get ranked more than content that is hidden behind a scroll or ads.

By positioning your content front and center, you can actually guarantee that you’ll get more results from your content marketing efforts.

Speed Will Increasingly Drive Online Sales

We’ve examined the importance of website speed earlier, but it’s important to also examine the importance of product delivery speed; research projected same-day delivery revenue to increase to more than $620 million in 2015, a 6X increase from 2014, and available data shows that this will only keep increasing.

As our attention span keeps decreasing, and new technology keeps serving our short attention spans, we expect to get things faster; if possible, we want it “now and here”. Some of the biggest ecommerce giants, like Amazon, are cashing in on this by emphasizing same-day and faster delivery.

Focus on delivering your customer’s orders faster and you’ll be able to capture a lot more sales.

Indentify and Capitalize on Big Shopping Days

Black Friday, Super Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc, are big days that can result in a huge revenue boost from businesses that learn to capitalize on them. Data from Adobe’s Digital Index reveals that total online sales from Cyber Monday in 2015 rose to $3.07 billion, a 16 percent increase from the previous year; this beat expert forecast of a 12 percent increase in sales. This was dwarfed by a similar event in China, known as “Single’s Day”, in which a single company, Alibaba, generated a massive $14.3 billion in a single day in 2015.

Whether it is in China or in the U.S., available data points to the fact that big sales day are big sales day, and are often major revenue drivers for some of the world’s biggest companies. Grow your business by identifying these big sales days, preparing for and capitalizing on them.

The Customer is the King

With the advent of the internet, it is becoming increasingly clear that the customer owns the real power. Research shows that 78 percent of consumers have bailed on a transaction due to poor customer support, and that a typical business will only hear from 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers. In other words, if you suck at customer support it’ll cost you a lot of sales in 2016, and a very insignificant portion of your customers will reach out to complain.

Invest more resources and time into customer support and reap the rewards.

Embrace Personalized Marketing

Long done are the days when companies get away with being out of touch with the realities of their customers; whether it is with your email or marketing strategy, you can get more bangs for your bucks by developing a personalized marketing plan. Research shows that you can get up to a 208 percent increase in conversion rate from your emails by sending targeted emails over batch-and-blast emails. The same goes for every area of your marketing.

Focus on delivering a personalized experience for your users and watch your sales go through the roof.

Conclusion

How prepared are you for 2015? What strategies do you have for increasing your online sales? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source : http://bit.ly/1Y1ncOZ