How Social Media Can Help Your Business

Over the past few years, social media has become increasingly important. Businesses all over the world have been discovering the ways it can contribute to success and growth of their companies. And while traditional marketing can get expensive, social media marketing is pretty low-cost and gives you a direct line to current and prospective customers. Here are five ways your company can benefit from social media.

(Curated from Tech.Co)

Social media allows you to increase your brand awareness and leverage real-time engagement with prospects or potential customers.

“When
 a client has a question or issue, they can voice it on social media, and you can respond and solve it in a timely manner. As a small business marketer, identify the social networks where your customers spend time as soon as possible and actively engage with them.”

Create community value within your industry by identifying keywords, hashtags, and customer interests. Then start offering
 valuable insight to the niche communities in your targeted social platforms. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have very active communities.

“In a short period of time, your authority in that community will increase gradually and you will be seen as an expert in your
 niche. Once you have earned trust and goodwill, you can start referencing product or services that will solve their problems. This can work
 wonders if implemented with the right planning.”

Content marketing is an important tool that can also drive results for your marketing strategy. Creating useful and relevant content and distributing it across targeted social media platforms can attract people in your industry, improving brand awareness and user engagement.

“First, understand your sales funnel (the process you want your customers to experience as they go from prospect to lead to the client to repeat customer) and then create targeted content for your audience that addresses their needs at each step of your funnel. This can be a very useful technique if you follow a well-planned content strategy.”

Using social media is a great way to build relationships with influencers in your industry, who often have a strong following. If influencers get the word out about your business, then you are likely to gain attention from their followers.

“You can build relationships with influencers on Twitter by commenting
 and re-tweeting their content, share their blog posts on social media, make useful comments on their blog, etc. You can also invite influencers to sample your products and services for free
 and request a review or quick feedback (i.e. a testimonial) and then share it in your marketing and press efforts.”

If you have a small marketing budget, then social media paid promotion is a great option. Many times, paid social media campaigns can yield better results than other types of traditional media. Almost all established social media networks offer paid promotion for businesses and brands.

“Facebook advertising offers a highly targeted paid promotion opportunity that has the potential to increase leads. You can reach people who are more likely
 to engage with you and your content.”

Do you have any other social media tips for business owners? Let us know!

How to Market Your Startup on a Budget

One of the biggest challenges that many startups face is effectively competing with the massive marketing budgets of major brands that often spend millions of dollars on advertising per week. Thanks to the internet, however, marketing has gotten much easier and cheaper. Here are three low-cost marketing techniques for your startup:

(Curated from Tech.Co)

Begin by incorporating blogging into your marketing strategy. Statistics show that businesses that blog generate 67 percent more leads than businesses that do not.

“A notable case study on the effectiveness of blogging for startups is the popular social sharing app, Buffer: with a combination of blogging and guest blogging, without advertising, Buffer gained its first 100,000 users within 9 months. Buffer has millions of users now, and it easily generates millions of dollars in annual revenue. All this is thanks to a foundation built on a smart blogging and marketing strategy.”

Involve influencers in your startup to bring in both quality traffic and conversions for your startup. Because influencers have built up their reputation and following over the years, their recommendation will generate a lot of high quality, highly engaged users.

“Having industry celebrities, thought leaders and popular blogs and publications endorse your startup can go a long way in getting the attention you deserve without spending a pretty penny.”

Startups can benefit greatly from implementing a smart email marketing strategy. Get the right leads by using funnels and segmentation to guide prospects towards the right product or service that your startup has to offer them.

“In a recent study that analyzed over 500 million shopping experiences, Monetate came to the shocking realization that email marketing beats search and social media combined when it comes to conversion. It isn’t surprising then, that most startups and publications report email as their top source of traffic and leads.”

In today's competitive business economy, marketing your startup is undoubtedly difficult, but with these three low-cost marketing techniques, you can make sure your business gets a fighting chance at success. What other low-cost marketing techniques do you have for startup companies?

How To Boost Old Business Relationships

Networking and building relationships with partners and other businesses is an essential part of success. But things happen and you may find that you’ve fallen out of touch or lost a valued partner over some miscommunication in the past. What can you do to win back those organizations you’ve accidentally alienated? Here are some tips on rejuvenating old business relationships to help you:

(Curated from Pittsburgh Business Times)

Start by demonstrating how you’ve grown as a company and how they will benefit from re-establishing the partnership.

“To rejuvenate a relationship that will come back and stay back, think about how you can make the re-connection beneficial for them. This can be a new product that meets their needs better than what you had before. It could be a change in personnel on your side if there was a problem with one of your staff. Be creative and find ways the other party will benefit by investing the TIME to rekindle a dormant or lethargic relationship. The advantage of “new” can bring a fresh dynamic to rekindle great opportunities.”

Recognize that they’ve grown as well and don’t resort to helping them the same way you did in the past. You’ll have to learn about the new them just as they will learn about the new you.

“Don’t assume that everything is as it once was. Business and life probably have changed for both of you. Do an assessment of where they are now. Explore new opportunities to help them. Be open to new possibilities that didn’t exist before.”

Do your research and find a problem they have that you can solve better than anyone else. They’ll appreciate that you put the time into learning about them and trying to help them.

“Find ways to give them value like never before. Solve problems they have and create new opportunities for them to grow their top and/or bottom lines. See yourself as a partner to help them and you’ll have a much greater chance to rejuvenate relationships.”

Go beyond offering them the same benefits they received before when you were partners. Give them new reasons to rejuvenate the relationship.

“Create compelling new reasons that the rejuvenation will benefit them. You want to have more than a “let’s just get back together” focus. It will be entered with new enthusiasm (important) if there is a bonafide reason like a new product, a new idea to benefit them or something that profoundly helps them.”

Now good luck rejuvenating your old business relationships and remember to maintain it this time!

Image by thetaxhaven

How To Take Advantage of Local SEO

When 50% of Google users actually go to the store in the same that they searched for it, it’s time for your startup to take advantage of local search engine optimization (SEO). Here are some tips to help you get started:

(Curate from Tech.Co)

Even if you have an exclusively online business, you can take advantage of the local market. All you have to do is provide Google with the right information about your business and you can start targeting a local audience online.

“You need a physical presence in order to do this. That’s why you must provide some sort of address and phone number. It doesn’t matter if you don’t serve customers in-person: This is the minimum required to appear on Google’s radar.”

Start taking advantage of local directories online and make sure your business’s information is up-to-date.

“Directories were previously thought of as a relic of old SEO. But they’re making a comeback in local form. Make sure that your business is in as many local online directories as possible. Unlike how they used to work, you can’t pay a guy to upload your website to 50 of them.”

You can drive more local traffic to your website by incorporating locally-targeted keywords into your content and digital ads.

“Your keywords should have a local flavor. For local keywords, you should concentrate on placing both your niche and your locality into the same string. If you are targeting with hyperlocal SEO you may even include the neighborhood or the street. Try to make them fit in as naturally as possible.”

Startups in particular can benefit from using local SEO because everyone loves to help a local, up-and-coming business.

“Make no mistake, local SEO is important for absolutely everyone. But it’s even more important for startups because they are starting from nothing. You have no presence online and you can’t leverage previous reputation. Typically, startups have little money to begin an SEO campaign. Optimizing for local SEO is annoyingly time-consuming and tedious, but it’s free. As a startup, you have lots of time and not a lot of money. Use the resource you have a ton of to your advantage.”

Why Press Releases Aren't Enough for Your Startup

While sending out a press release can help spread the word about your business, press releases are impersonal. They’re focused on delivering facts and information, not personality. Instead of focusing all of your energy on writing press releases, writing quality blogs that reflect the voice and tone of your business will send your audience a better message about you.

(Curated from Tech.Co)

Most startups are tweeting and posting into the void, which is an effective marketing strategy. But you can make your business stand out by getting personal with blogs. Writing quality content your audience will be interested in will help you build a reputation as a thought-leader.

“Blogging is more intimate and personal. Getting a reader away from the barrage of tweets and rolling tide of their Facebook feed is best. Startups can use blogs to explain their story and create a connection. When the traffic comes to your site, for the love of all startup culture, be honest and authentic.”

Unlike Twitter, you can use your blog to tell your whole story. You don’t have a 140 character limit so you can get into the fascinating details. Telling your story and building your image through a blog will help your audience feel closer to you.

“People want an honest and authentic story, and press releases just don’t create that. Startups rely on their social media interns and PR companies to create the coveted organic reach by stuffing links into everything. Smart people know you’re desperate and ignore everything you say.”

You can also use your blog to generate engagement and have real conversations with your audience. You can also see which content your audience responds to more to help hone your marketing strategy and your product.

“Press releases come across as monolithic and boring. Oscar Wilde said if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. This means using your blog to understand your audience and empathize with them. Shared humor creates empathy and understanding. Humor also alleviates stress and boosts morale. Startups must hold true to their core values and mission while not creating an insular tribe of “Us vs. Them.”

What other tips do you have for startup companies launching their own blogs?

How Your Business Can Learn from Beyonce's Lemonade

No matter who you are, whether you founded a startup, own an established small business, or work for a large corporation, you can learn something from Beyonce and her most recent album, Lemonade. Here are a few lemons you can use to get started:

(Curated from Fast Company)

1. Find what makes you stand-out from your competition or something that can put you ahead. Beyonce uses innovative videos to go along with her music and she’s way ahead of the game, which gives her an impressive edge.

“Beyoncé has long experimented with ways to amplify video’s impact. With her second solo effort, 2006’s B’Day, she released an alternate "visual album" version that included a separate video for each track—something she would repeat with her self-titled 2013 album. In hindsight, it’s clear that Beyoncé was testing video’s potential, getting comfortable with the format in a post-MTV digital world as a way to expand her artistic vision and marketing muscle. Her 2008 song "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," with its Bob Fosse–inspired black-and-white video, is among the earliest—and biggest—examples of music-video-as-Internet meme, transforming the song from a hit into a phenomenon.”

2. Once you control your brand and your story, you can establish a reputation of reliability and creativity with your audience. Beyonce is in control of her narrative even when a video of her sister Solange attacking her husband Jay Z in an elevator reached the public. She used that video to create Lemonade.

“Most successful brands deal with public blowback at some point. Recently, Chipotle has been scrambling to overcome fallout from a series of food-poisoning incidents, while Facebook is battling the perception that its news-feed system privileges liberal content over conservative posts. There are lots of ways to deal with these kinds of PR debacles, of course—crisis management is an entire public-relations subindustry. But Beyoncé’s response to the elevator video has been a fascinating experiment in PR disaster–as-opportunity narrative redefinition—a transformation of lemons into Lemonade.”

3. Learn to take risks carefully. Because she is an investor in Tidal, Beyonce could have forced all of her fans to subscribe in order to see her new album, which would have alienated many. Instead she used an extremely delicate strategy to encourage her fans to subscribe to Tidal while also giving them as many opportunities as possible to see Lemonade without the subscription.

“When disruption hits, some businesses cling to the old, hoping to ride things out. Others race to the new without fully comprehending the implications. Beyoncé straddles both approaches.”

4. Last, Beyonce excels at being unpredictable. That you will be impressed is the only thing you can be sure of when it comes to Queen Bey.

“Throughout the business world, marketers are looking at Lemonade’s success and wondering how to concoct something similarly effective and iconic. "We’re asking ourselves, ‘So what’s our Lemonade?’ " says Airbnb’s Mildenhall. "Because we don’t ever want to become predictable. Every time we engage with our consumers, our target audience, our community, we want to surprise them, to inspire them, to delight them. And we want to do it in a way that then drives a disproportionate share of popular conversation."

How do you turn lemons into lemonade at your business?

Image by Arnie Papp

3 Management Skills You Can Learn from Movies

When it comes to running your own startup company, you have to be able to manage others effectively. It’s difficult to be an effective manager without letting your employees take advantage of you or dislike you. Here are some management lessons you can learn from the movies:

(Curated from Entrepreneur Magazine)

1. Film: 9 to 5

While this iconic film mostly focuses on sexism in the workplace, it also teaches managers not to take credit for the work of others. When you encourage your workers to share their ideas and give them the credit they deserve, you’ll earn their respect and improve productivity.

“Dabney Coleman's Franklin Hart Jr. truly checks all the boxes as far as terrible bosses go. Not only does he bully and harass his female employees like newbie Judy (Jane Fonda) and long suffering secretary Doralee (Dolly Parton), but he lies and pretends that great ideas from veteran office manager Violet (Lily Tomlin) are his own, and passes her over for a promotion to hand it to a male colleague.”

2. Film: The Devil Wears Prada

What can you possibly learn from the dragon boss played by Meryl Streep in this film? While she is intimidating and often harsh, she is still a good teacher. You don’t have to insult your workers to help them learn as she does in the film, but take their mistakes (and yours) and turn them into lessons.

“A good manager takes mistakes and if she can, turns them into learning opportunities for everyone to do better in the future.”

3. Film: Working Girl

In this classic film, new managers can learn how to foster a culture of sharing and collaboration at work. Instead of stealing ideas and doing everything you can to get ahead, you should share ideas and work as a team to accomplish your goals and achieve more as a group than you could ever do alone.

“An effective manager understands he or she needs to be collaborative and that valuable ideas can come from everywhere. And yes, Tess did assume her boss’s identity to get ahead -- but come on, those are minor details.”

What advice do you have for new managers?