Posts Tagged ‘photo credit’

photo credit: Damian Morys Fotos

If you think of your business as a car, you probably want it to be something like a Lamborghini. These are beautiful, high performance machines that attract a lot of attention. What you see on the outside is a thing of beauty.

With business, the outside is the intersection between customers and the business. For the most part, its the only thing customers ever see. This includes sales, customer service, marketing, and of course the product or service.

Its important to have a good face for customers to see and interact with. However, if all you ever focus on in your business is this interaction, you will be neglecting some very important elements.

For all the beauty of a Lamborghini, what makes it truly special is not on the outside. Design elements are easy. What is important is what is on the inside.

photo credit: telephoto46

The engine of the Lamborghini makes it pretty special. Imagine a Lamborghini with a lawnmower engine. It just wouldn’t be the same.

However, many small business owners try to run an outstanding organization on a rickety, slapped together engine. You make customers your number one priority and make promises to them and yourself to be the best. But if you always focus on being the best at the intersection of customer and business, you will never be able to be your actual best. In order to do that, you have to commit to building systems on which your business can run smoothly and achieve the results that you desire.

Don’t try to run a Lamborghini business on a lawnmower engine. Focus a good portion of your time on the insides of your business. This means building systems for everything.

As you built your business up, you probably went about this backward. You made promises to customers, then figured out how to make them happen. You may still do it. If you ever have problem maintaining a new change to your business, it is because you haven’t built the platform for it first. By throwing one new thing on top of another over the years, you have created a junkyard engine that is giving you just barely enough juice to stay in business.

If you want success, real and measurable results, you need to swap out the slapped together systems of your business for a new, powerful, success engine.

Here are some things effected by the engine inside your business.

• Efficiency
• Profitability
• Employee Satisfaction
• Time Management
• Product/Service Development and Implementation

This list could go on. The fact is, good systems have a positive impact on every part of your business. So, instead of trying to put more shine on your business, why not add some muscle under the hood?

Building systems takes time and hard work. You need to look at every single part of your business. My wife’s uncle has a business restoring old Ford Mustangs. When he rebuilds a car, he takes it all apart. Down to every last screw. As he does, he catalogs the process and identifies the purpose of each part.

If you do this with your business, you will be able to identify parts that are defective, other parts that aren’t performing like they are supposed to, and probably more than a handful of parts that you don’t even need. Go over everything carefully. Fix and improve each aspect of your business. Build simple systems for every job, every interaction, and for every piece of paperwork.

As you do this, always keep the customer in mind. You are fine tuning, or rather overhauling, so you can have an engine with which to really serve them better. Future promises should come from what you know you can accomplish. Future goals should be reached for not with hope, but with knowledge. You need to know your business intimately and be able to quickly identify any parts that aren’t working properly. In the end, you are a highly specialized mechanic, able to fix just one car, your business. Get good at it. Build and then maintain a real engine for success within your business.

Want to know more? Have specific questions? Ask below in the comments section.

Here is one simple gesture you can do to show your customers that you are grateful. Send them a thank you card.

Any time anyone gives you money for your product or service, you should be thankful. In the early days of your business, you probably experienced euphoria. Unfortunately, as you grow successful, receiving money can become old hat. It becomes an impersonal transaction for you, even though each and every payment helps you pay the bills and stay in business.

Recalibrate your mind to thankfulness by committing to send a thank you card out to every single customer. Yes, each and every one. I don’t care if you have 10, 100, or 1000 customers. Showing thanks is good for business and good for you.

The best path to take is to hand write each thank you note. At the very least you can sign them before they go out.Reconnect with the emotion of gratitude.

When a customer receives a personal thank you note from you, she feels important and appreciated. Its one more step along the path to loyalty for her.

When you send a thank you note, you are calibrating your mind to always think of the customer first. A simple thing like this can pull you out of the details for a few moments and help you put some focus on what is important, how your business relates to your customers.

So go pick up some cards and start being thankful again. Here are some thank you cards on Amazon. Or go to you nearest drug store. Leave the cards out in plain sight on your desk and write some every day.

photo credit: Iain Farrell

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Ultimately, you want to build conversations around your own site and your own brand. You want the long comment streams to be on your blog, the vibrant communities happening around your personality. But if you try to create that from scratch, you will probably spend a lot of time talking to yourself.

When you are getting started, you need to hitch your wagon to other people’s horses. In other words, join the conversations that are already happening, even if they are happening in orbit around a competitor.

Where to Join

Conversations are happening everywhere. Pick a few places you are comfortable with and then join. You will be most effective if you can find conversations that take place within your industry. I highly suggest finding an active forum to be a part of. Forums have plenty of conversations going on, and will also provide you with lots of links out to blogs and such to explore.

Blogs are another great place for conversation. Find the top blogs in your industry and start commenting on them regularly. Always stay on topic and add something to the conversation. In fact, that is a rule across the board when joining ongoing conversations.

Social networks are powerful conversation tools. On Facebook, you can try to connect with friends of friends, and then join streams that are talking about things within your industry. On LinkedIn, get active by posting answers to people’s questions. Twitter may be the mother load for conversations. It is easy to find people with an interest in your topic through Twitter search and tools such as Twellow. Also, you can find Twitter chats on all sorts of subjects. These are great conversations to join to hone your art and network with more people.

How to Act

There is one rule to keep in mind when joining ongoing conversations. Be a contributor, not a publicity hound. Yes, your ultimate goal is to build your own brand. Keep in mind that there are many steps to the process of building your own community though, and creating trust in existing communities is a big one.

So when you join conversations, make sure you are adding value. Be a good listener and talk when you have something worth saying. Do not blast your marketing message all over the place when it is not asked for. Give good, solid, advice and you won’t have to.

What to Do Next

The end goal is to grow your own brand and bring in more sales. To that end, you are going to want to build relationships from the communities you join and eventually invite people into your own sphere. If you ultimately want conversations to happen around your brand, you need to create hubs for this to happen. One big one would be a blog.

You need to have some place to send people who are interested in learning more about you and your business. A static business web site isn’t going to cut it. We are living in a world of engagement, so make it easy for people to engage with you.

Once you have some influence, start hosting your own conversations. Here’s one option. Host a webinar on a topic that you know something about. Invite the people you meet through ongoing conversations, and ask them to invite their friends as well. Of course, keep in mind the rule of giving and provide excellent content in your webinar. This is not a traditional sales pitch, but rather a way to educate prospects and show them why they need your business.

There are all kinds of ways you can start to build your own engagement portals. Take it one thing at a time and don’t overdo it. Always keep relationship and trust in the forefront of your mind. If you do a good job of engaging with people in ongoing conversations, chances are good that many of them will be happy to join your new conversations that revolve around your business.

All of this leads to sales. While it may seem indirect, you will actually be building a foundation from which to attract more sales then you could ever go out and get. Building your influence today will pay off in business tomorrow.

photo credit: stevendamron

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

photo credit: titlap

If you want to give your next post card mailing a little more pop and add conversions, consider setting up a landing page to work in conjunction with it.

A landing page is just a web page where you send prospects. You could use any existing page on your web site, and if you have one that converts like crazy, then use it. But you can also create a new page that is uniquely tied to your direct mailer. For instance, I recently created a postcard that highlighted the fact that a company was local. I created a landing page that talked more about that, and included the address for that page right on the postcard.

Why?

You should create a landing page when you want to highlight a specific piece of information or put up a special offer. Alternatively, you might hire a copy writer to craft a great web sales letter that works well to convert visitors to customers.

Conversion is the key to a good landing page. You should have a goal in mind when you send out a direct mail piece. In that piece, you need a very clear call to action. If you are a sending a postcard, you do not have a lot of room to expound on your offer. That is where the landing page comes in. Add just enough incentive to get people to visit the page, and hook them there.

What?

You could include anything on your landing page. The best bet, however, is to keep it simple and to focus on your conversion goal. A successful conversion is when a visitor takes a next step. Depending on what you are offering, you may go right for the sale, or you may want to get visitors on to your email list or set up a meeting with them.

You want to interact in some way with your landing page visitors. The ultimate interaction is to get the visitor to sign up for a newsletter, fill out a form, or purchase your product. To get them to that point, interact through your web page copy and consider recording a video specifically for the page. Also, make it easy for visitors to contact you by providing a contact form.

Where?

The best place to put your landing page is right on your main web site. This way, you can have an address that looks like this: www.yourwebsite.com/landingpage or even landingpage.yourwebsite.com. If you use the same look as the rest of the site, you will make it easier for visitors to look around and learn more. However, you may want to have a page where the only link out is to purchase your product or sign up for whatever you want your visitor to sign up for. You also may want the page to match the look of your mailer.

If you have a situation where you need to put your landing page somewhere other than on your main website, or if the web address is just too long to include nicely on a postcard, you can use a web address shortener. Tinyurl.com allows you to shorten long web addresses and even customize the shortened address. So, you could change your long web address for your landing page to tinyurl.com/yourpage.

With a well crafted landing page, you can make your direct mail have more impact. Give visitors something to do and a clear path to get there. Also, be sure to customize the landing page and the direct mailer so they work together in content and look.