Employee Motivation

Every successful company owns a part of its success to the employee engagement and motivation. Motivators are the biggest factors in making employees willing to work with passion and true belief in your company. As an owner, executive or management personal it is your job to keep your employees focused and willing to input their knowledge and skill to achieve higher results.  Motivation is a key factor when it comes to engaging your workforce. It is well known that people are willing to work for you if you can offer a great work atmosphere. In addition, employees are willing to give up a certain amount of wage to have a good, friendly environment at work as found in “Understanding Employee Motivation” research.

What you need to do to motivate?

First of all, you have to trust your employees. The work atmosphere has to be easy going but with everybody knowing what they have to do. Your leadership has to be always visible and proven to the employees so that they understand that you are a success. There are many different motivation theories with strategies, techniques and tips. However, there are basic things that every employee needs in order to be motivated to work for you:

·         Good work environment
·         Ability to communicate with management
·         Ability to generate and provide ideas
·         Freedom of choice
·         Ability to participate in company’s decision
·         Wage

 These are the most common things that employees look at when they looking for a firm to work for.

It is well known fact that engaged employees willing to produce more for the company then it actually cost to employ them. Motivation is the key for success of the company as people work in teams for the same goals and willing to achieve higher results. We can compare families with work teams. As in family we have different hierarchies and goals and can see one family unite working together to achieve that goal, workforce is the same thing if compiled properly into a team and given a task. Employees should know their clearly defined roles and must have a belief that in the case they are stacked on something there will be help from their peers and management.

Trust is one of the biggest sources to engage the team and individual employee to the process of attaining the needed goals. Motivation is the best source of energy to fuel employees’ belief that they are being noticed and that they work for the best result in the best company with the best team. It is management’s task to portray and truly hold the respect and will to show employees that they are valuable not only to the company but also as a personal friendship.

Brand Building - Building more than just a brand

Brand is a very important aspect of your daily business life. Brand defines everything you want your business to be. Brand can be associated with the feel and vision customers get after being in contact with your company. You can make it almost anything you want. For example, think about Disney! What is the first thing that comes to your mind? Most likely it is fun, childhood, toys, ice cream and great time! Then think about Nike, it is sport, action, move, running and anything related to sport activities. Your brand has to have the same kind of message. Although your brand is not as known as those mentioned above, when you’ll be getting more customers and referrals you’ll notice that people do differentiate you by your brands, mission statement and vision.

Building brand is one of the most important marketing strategies. Many successful brands are successful because customers can differentiate them by just looking at the logo or colors. In order to make your brand stand out you have to create a unique logo and brand yourself with something memorable and easily recognizable. Usually a good graphic designer will be able to create a unique logo for you. Use catchy colors for the website and brochure design. Make them all look in the loop and close to each other, so that is makes sense for the customer who saw your flyer, brochure or business card and your website to recognize you as the same brand. Small tip: don’t go on too many colors, the more colors you include on the print material the more it’ll cost you to print. Usually anywhere from 2 to 3 is the most optimal color range. However, don’t be afraid to use little bit more colors on your website. For example, you can have a header in blue, menu bar in light blue, main body in white and footer in blue or something that would resonate with the color range.

Successful branding has to be spread across all marketing channels going from the most cost effective and reliable to the next affordable level. One thing to keep in mind is you have to experiment with your marketing push across all different marketing channel platforms. In sometime you’ll find out that some work better than others and others bring more profit. It is always a trial and fail with some marketing strategies. You have to do regular things that bring the constant steady results while experimenting with new techniques and strategies.

As mentioned previously marketing push has to be done through the means of different marketing strategies, here are several examples: internet marketing, press release, news and other types of press marketing, advertising, lead generation and peer groups, etc.

One of the most cost effective and result driven marketing strategies is the internet marketing. With its ability to be spread out in a short amount of time to a large amount of users, it brings a good return on investment while being relatively at the low cost if compared with traditional forms of marketing.  Google and Bing both offer a PPC (pay-per-click) advertising that can be placed in search. In addition, search engine optimization is a good source of defining a landscape for your website in a competitive web space.

Brand building is one of the most challenging and most rewarding marketing practice’s, it offers many benefits to those who are willing to invest time and resources into it.

Customer Service and Customer Support

We’ve decided to spend some time going over the importance of a good customer service. Many businesses succeed because they have a good customer support and many businesses fail without a proper attention to the customer after the product was sold. Customer support is a critical must have department that every organization must have at the highest level. It is well known that products or services fail once in a while and the first thing every customer will do is they will try contacting your customer service desk. In many situations even though the product has failed, they will be satisfied with a pleasant experience from a well-trained and professional customer service representative. In addition, you’ll be saving a customer for your future interactions.

Invest into customer service training

As a business owner or manager it is your responsibility to make sure that your customer service department is well trained and knowledgeable on how to solve different cases and on how to work with different customers and their character. A well trained customer service should be able to handle multiple customer tempers in order to resolve the situation or customer’s disappointment. A timely solved case can save you lots of time and resources, as you’ll be spending less time on communication, it will drastically decrease the amount of time that needs to be spent on the case which will decrease an overall cost. Also, there are hidden benefits of resolving customer’s case quicker, for example: the faster you’ll resolve it, the lesser customer has to worry and the happier he/she will be when receiving the product.

It is know that bad customer service results in customer cancelling contract, less freewill to upgrade to new products and more bad word-of-mouth. Not being able to solve customer’s case is a very bad sign for the overall company. There is always a percentage of malfunctioning in products, some of them just don’t work and fail to do what’s needed, however a good customer service can resolve all problems by:

·         Talking and listening to the customer
·         Identifying the problem
·         Proposing one or several solutions
·         Taking action
·         Following up with the client

 Most of the time when the customer is happy you won’t be hearing from him/her; it is a small percentage of customers that willing to provide their feedback themselves and to spend their time to your benefit. However, if the product or service is not acting to its need, you’ll be definitely getting multiple calls with unsatisfied customers. Your main goal is to lower the amount of calls and to increase the quality of service performed by the customer support representatives.

Invest in your customer support and customer service to achieve highest customer satisfaction!

All you need to know about Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing

Let’s begin by saying that those two are not the same; while Internet Marketing is a wide practice and is under the umbrella of the marketing itself, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just a tool that is being used as a form of marketing implementation. Internet growth gives many options for any size of business that wishes to grow. Anyone selling or delivering its services online can take a great advantage over the internet marketing offerings. Many online marketing agencies offer great services as SEO, PPC, online PR, networking, web development and many others. With all those services offered you don’t have to worry about being visible to your customers.

You have several options with the Internet Marketing, you can do all by yourself, which will require you to learn the practice or you can hire someone to do it for you. In my practice most of the time people don’t like to do it by themselves as it requires them to invest a reasonable amount of time and sometimes money or they simply don’t have the time as they run their daily business operation.

Search Engine Optimization – is a way which can help you make your website visible to many customers by refining the website layout, making it more useful, adding helpful information for the user, and not engaging into any spam activities! SEO is a great way to show your customers your products and services, or simply deliver the important information. Please keep in mind that SEO is not only made for your current customers to help them find you, it is meant for all audience who is interested in the topic of your discussion. You can use search engine optimization to demonstrate your work or share the information with the world. Search Engine Optimization found their ways back in 1995 when the first major search engines were born. Now internet marketing is a big part of any marketing strategy, it offers lower costs, higher customer reachability, faster way of delivery and several other important aspects of the marketing.

In order to successfully use internet marketing one must understand that it is not a onetime practice; it has to be done over and over with new and different strategies to be used.  There are tons of different ideas and strategies that one can apply to be successful with the online campaigns. Every campaign is going to be different and full of exciting discoveries. For example, you can set a goal of attaining hundred visitors for the first hour of you campaign in addition to 20% conversion, therefore you’ll have a goal of 100 people visiting your page with 20 of them buying, signing up or doing other activity that they are required to do. Conversion doesn’t only mean that the customer has to buy, conversion means that the customer has to perform a task that you need him to do. There are several ways to reach your goals: 1. You have to spread your content though social networks, such as facebook, twitter, stumbleupon (I personally find it to be the most of use). 2. You have to have many friends and like in order to spread the content fast and to have an ability to ask to spread your content. 3. Make friends with websites in the industry, you can ask them to advertise your post or event.

As said there are tons of ways to implement internet marketing, it all depends on what you need and the amount of time you can allocate towards it. If you have any questions please contact us.

Creating Business Development Strategy (Part 2)

Please read Creating Business Development Strategy (Part 1)

Up-Sale or transform old customers to New Opportunities:

The cost of finding a new customer is always higher than the cost of transitioning individual to the returning customer or retaining the customer. It cost several times more to target, develop a message and communicate that message to the potential target. Therefore, after developing a onetime relationship with the customer it is critical to continue your communique and to retain the customer for the future business. You have to grow your funnel by continuously growing the number of prospects and the number of existing customers. If the customer bought your major product you can up sale anything that will logically suite customer’s needs. For example you’ve sold a phone system to a customer you can also sell peripherals because they suite the purpose of communication.

Uncovering and Creating New Opportunities:

There are numerous ways to target and create a potential interest from the customer to you; you can use marketing to target your audience. Here are several marketing methods that can be implied to find new prospects:

·         Internet Marketing
·         Email Marketing
·         Direct Mailing
·         Telemarketing
·         Lead Purchase
·         Researching existing Tier 2 and Tier 3 customers for potential conversion
·         Exhibitions, seminars, user groups
·         Referrals
·         Other forms of marketing

Be cautious as not all of the above might suite you or might be effective for your industry, but they will lead you into the ideas of how you can attract and what methods to use when trying to find new prospects. It is recommended to have marketing campaigns at least once in 3 month. Marketing should be a reoccurring and constant practice that you should be using for your business to grow. You have to experiment with various strategies and techniques to find the best marketing bundle that will work best for you. It is important to mention that there is no ultimate one practice that will be brining you all the opportunities but at least several different practices that should make you successful.

Business Development Plan Example and Ideas:

It is your best bet to develop a Business Development Plan and review it every 2-3 month to identify what stage you are at and to see what needs to be changed in order for you to succeed more and what is successful right now.

You need a copy of all existing accounts to go over and to sort out what is logical to target. If you are just starting out, you might as well use all leads that you have or you’ll need to find all the leads to target.

Target all possible sources: business directories, online directories, websites, verticals, etc. At the development and growth stage you must be adding a certain percentage of leads rapidly. Every week you must increase your funnel and work on the current leads. Growing you funnel doesn’t mean anything until you close the deal. Therefore, develop skills for closing deals.

After developing a certain amount of leads you must develop marketing strategy and message. Contact your prospects through the means of marketing.

You should be getting opinions of others, ask people who might know of what you are doing and know business side.

You can use a “SMARTER” mnemonic to set objectives and measure you success or failure (read more at Wikipedia):

·         S.pecific
·         M.easurable
·         A.chievable
·         R.elevant
·         T.imed
·         E.xciting
·         R.ecorded

Successful Business Development Strategy comes from developing your thoughts and constantly looking and measuring the results. It is critical to work hard on all the errors and things that don’t bring any positive feedback. Your strategy has to be supported with your action, which is the only way to track your results.

Summary:

It is important to set goals and to follow the plan; no goal means - no target to reach. You have to have a specific target to make sure you are where you want to be.

Creating Business Development Strategy (Part 1)

Please read Creating Business Development Strategy (Part 2)

The Business Development Strategy is used to develop and stream in the right direction your overall business idea and is meant to support your initial Business Plan. In addition, business development strategy is essential in setting up an approach for developing new opportunities and creating new leads, either from existing accounts or by targeting new potential accounts and prospects, in order to close them.

The post is aimed to set the layout and to touch up on the main key points in creating a successful business development strategy which can be used as a support for your Business Plan.

Let’s start by saying that the main object is ‘Strategy’, therefore you will be developing a practical and attainable set of objectives in order to surpass your targets.

Identifying main strategy points:

There are several main key questions that you need to answer in order to establish the layout of the strategy and give yourself a good start. The key questions are: Who? What? Where? When? Which? Why? How?

The following is the explanation for the questions above:

Who – identify your potential target audience?

What – identify the best possible product or service (what to offer)?

Where – identify the operation location?

When – is the best time to approach the customer?

Which – workforce personal to use?

Why – would they be interested in buying from you?

How - will you retain them as a returning customer?

In order to answer all those questions effectively you have to dig in to your current records and do data analysis. If you have records for the past twelve month and you have conducted regular account reviews every decade you won’t have any problem and will be fast on your track, however what if you didn’t conduct reviews or don’t have any records as you’ve just starting out?

If you’ve just started out your business or planning to start in the near future, you have a good opportunity to engage yourself into a market research practice which will help you in identifying the market and its potential. Market research and market analysis is a very important step as it’ll show you whether or not you should enter the market and will help you identify the potential of your market.

Outlining Customer Profiling:

A successful business development demands a solid customer profiling in order to select the best possible target to reach. Here are several important factors to work with:

- Business Sectors

- Demographics

- Size of organisations

- Financial Situation

- Psychographics

Identifying those sections will help you to analyze and create strategies for your successful business plan.

End of Part 1: Creating Business Development Strategy – tune in for more in our next post!

Business Travel Tips

This week Business Blog decided to take a roundup on Business Travel. Many business owners and business people in general take business trips once in a while, some take many and some take several per year or even life career. It all depends on type of business, individual’s position and other aspects of whether his/her job requires the person to take business trips. Time to time business trips can be a lot of fun and very interesting and there are times where they aren’t. However what is important is the comfort of the accommodations that the person stays in. After long meetings and work day you always want to come back to a good hotel, have a good food and relax. Having a good comfortable trip is an overall experience that can define your mood for the whole trip; therefore we want to expand on several points that can help you schedule and plan a good trip. Here we go!

Tips:

How to select the best possible airline, hotel and car rental for you trip?

Airline: The best thing to do is to book the spot as yearly as you can do. Several benefits:  the price of the ticket is cheaper, you are guaranteed on time and hustle free flight, and you can also register online for sitting and luggage drop off. Luggage drop off offers you a great chance to save tons of time standing in line and waiting to register and leave your bags. In addition, is it very nice to choose nonstop flight or also called direct flights where airplane only has one stop at the final destination.

Hotel: hotel industry has created a lodging type for almost any budget or personal need. You can select the most suiting suite based on your preferences of the room. The price will vary depending on your needs.

Car: car rental can be somewhat hustling, therefore rent in advance and search for deals. You can find good deals on many car rental services, in addition you can talk down the agent to give you a good price therefore don’t book online but call and persuade that you’ll be booking early in advance.

Should you be using a travel agent?

There are two sides of these questions. First you have to determine what you need the travel agent for and then you have to define what the price differences are when buying from agent or purchasing yourself if there is any. What I usually do is the next:

First, I think if I’ve ever been in that same city or location, if I was there then there is no problem and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to figure out things. But if it is a new location to me, then I’m calling several agents to see what each of them has to say, how they service me and what information the give me. I choose the best pick based on all those qualities and if I see there isn’t a big price difference between buying myself and going through the agent, I order from the agent.

Should you buy travel insurance when going on a business trip?

I usually don’t buy the travel insurance. Here are the reasons why: first of all, most of the travel insurances don’t cancel your fair for the same reasons as your business trip might be cancelled. They usually cancel only if one is ill. Second, if it is a long planned trip then there is a high chance I’ll be still going. Third, if it is a quick one-two day trip usually I don’t have anything booked such as hotel or car. Therefore, before buying travel insurance check what is offered and go with what make sense to you.

That’s pretty much it. I hope we’ve covered most important topics, if you have questions please comment or send a direct message through the contact us section.

Marketing for Business Owners

Why bother marketing?

Let’s start by defining what the marketing means: marketing – is a tool of targeted approach to attract prospects for future conversion into a customer. Although, many people think that advertising, direct mail, email marketing, newsletters, billboards are all called marketing they are somewhat wrong. The reason for that is because marketing is an umbrella that has those tools under it. Marketing is very broad and employs many different approaches, strategies and techniques to make sure that the right customer is approached at the most appropriate time and with the most appropriate message to solve his needs. As mentioned above marketing is very broad. Old traditional methods of TV and radio commercials still persist but are more limited to the companies with bigger marketing budgets. It is very debatable as to how effective they are at our century of multimedia channels for delivering the message; although it is more about showing the prestige of your brand and its ability to showcase the power of the budget. Many large brands employ traditional methods of marketing to convert prospects or existing customers into an online activity and to sign them up with the online communities, forums, fan pages and etc.

Online Marketing

Online marketing for small business brings great results. Online marketing costs are much lower than paying for a TV or radio spot. Physically online is very price effective as you have to pay only to the people who manage the online portfolio, in comparison with producing just one 30 seconds TV commercial which can range from $300,000 to $700,000 on an average without the actual price paid to the channel for the regular or prime time. Where online marketer’s yearly wage can be just a quarter of the price of producing a TV ad. Online marketing is a very cost effective and wide spread approach customers, because when the online message gets on the internet there is no way to limit it in its ability. People share information and you have no idea how fast the message can be spread without any cost to you.

Online marketing tools:

There are several major online marketing tools, they are: social media which includes Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Stumble Upon and many other social networks which are totally free for you to spread your messages or you can use their advertising services. Google Business Solutions: Adwords which are also known as PPC (pay-per-click), Adsence (Google’s network), Google Places (put your name on the Google’s map) and many other. Online marketing agencies can also provide you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and other services.

For the best fit you can consult with us if you require any need or you can also go direct to the local agency and have a discussion with them on what can be offered to increase the visibility of your business.

From Business Idea to Business Success

Business is always full of rewards that come with the risks. All those days that you work hard to establish your business and create it from your business idea will eventually pay off, however sometimes they can be very daunting and challenging. It is common misconception that to have a successful business you have to have a large amount of capital, large workforce, and many connections and it is true to some extent however everybody started from somewhere.

Economic climate is always a challenge, you can predict it for a while but in a long term you have no idea what the economy is going to look like tomorrow. Tougher economy makes it harder to start and to establish your practice; however there is a benefit to it as well. Bad economic situations make businesses smarter as they have to figure out how to survive. It is not to say that those that don’t survive are not smart! There are industries that are dying themselves just because of what they do, for example traveling industry is slowing down dramatically in the crisis as people tend to spend less on leisure, the same goes with the entertainment. In this post we’d like to give you several tips on increasing a chance of survival and a chance to convert your idea to the actual business.

1. Business Idea

Your idea is the main source of fuel for your company. Idea and your will to accomplish your goals drive you to success. You have to create a solid view of what you want to do. It doesn’t have to be something totally new, although it is more beneficial. What you have to be sure of is you have to have a market for your idea. You have to ensure that your business will be successful by checking if someone needs what you want to offer.

 2. Business Plan

Business plan is critical and is a must to do task. If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail! You have to develop a solid, concise and very well thought trough business plan. It has to include several sections, going from mains idea, executive summary, financial needs, marketing strategy, workforce and many other sections.  The easiest way to do it is to create a check list and name all the necessary sections. You can search a sample of a business plan in Google, Bing or Yahoo searches, there are plenty of them and they are offered for free. Also, you can look at the government resources for business; they always have many sources available for business individuals.  

3. Cash Flow

You have to stay on top off your record. Many businesses fail because they fail to collect payments or check customer's credit if the transaction seems suspicious, they are sloppy with invoices, and they are not paying attention to how much they can spend and save to invest. A good accountant is a must! But if you don’t have a good accountant, then be one until you’ll find the right individual. It is critical to save and invest more into the business at its growing stage. Business needs cash and you have to be on top of what is being spent. If your creditors or customers don’t pay, it is your responsibility to get the money out of them. Start by talking and if it doesn’t lead anywhere cut off the service and move on to the collection agencies.

4. Marketing

Marketing is a must for any business! If you don’t market yourself no one will know you. You have to spend on marketing and advertising. People come to those they see messages from, think about yourself you only know about many products or services because the provider has marketed and advertised it to target the audience which also means they've done market research. You can use many different techniques, from traditional direct mailing, posters, banners, newspaper ads, to online marketing and  advertising, SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click), to blogging to social marketing on Twitter, Facebook and other social websites. Marketing is never enough therefore the more you do it the more potential customers might see you.

You have to sit down and rationalize all your marketing ideas, cut out everything you don’t like. Check your marketing efforts every week to set up a base for you activities.  See what’s working and what’s not to eliminate unnecessary spending.

And remember your marketing strategy will be a guide for you to establish yourself on the market as well as it will help you to understand who your target market is.

Love the Photography Art

Photography is a great way to express yourself; that is why many people choose to use photography as a way to express themselves. Traditionally, photography used to be just black and white. However, these days you have so many different option for photography; you have many types of photo cameras from high to low end, from amateur to pro to master photographers. Different major camera brands such as Canon, Nikon, Sony and others offers unique features in their products.

Suiting the skill

You can now buy camera to suite your exact skill level. You don’t have to be a pro to use cameras. You can buy an entry level amateur DSLR camera that would have main features for your future transition to the mastery.  There are several modes which are critical for your learning.

Modes:

• Aperture mode
• Shutter Mode
• Manual Mode

All those modes are critical in learning the way a DSLR camera works. Don’t worry if you won’t get the result right away that is totally normal. Many professional photographers had no results at their beginning as well. The only difference is that some of them where artists by nature. The artist skill is definitely an asset! It can help you to demonstrate your abilities. Being an artist means that you have a specific way of looking at things. Usually as an artist you see things differently from the way that other people perceive the world.

Photography Styles

Photography has many different styles; you can shoot weeding, documentary, black and white, landscape, portraits, animals, creative and many other styles. One good example for the photography is one Toronto Photographer who does lots of wedding photography to help people remember their precious life moments.

Photography is unique and creative therefore go out and do some shooting!