Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
How-To Guides

How to Keep Your Small Business in Business

All new businesses have to start somewhere – even the mega retail giant Amazon – and today, that somewhere is the internet. But it’s hard work, and you have to make many crucial decisions early on if you want to stay competitive. When you are going up against Amazon, Walmart, and other online powerhouses, you have to fight for your share of the market and continue fighting to stay in the spotlight. Here are a few tips for small business owners trying to do just that.

Prioritize the health of your online presence.

Your website is the first glimpse of your business many potential new customers will get. You cannot afford for your clients to be underwhelmed. Your website should be attractive, easy to use, and, perhaps most importantly, reliable. It doesn’t matter how great your design is; if your hosting service can’t keep up with the amount of traffic you generate, your customers won’t stick around. Take some time to compare hosting services, and don’t necessarily go with the cheapest. As Digital.com notes, InMotion is one reliable option and offers things like around-the-clock customer support, secure hosting solutions, dependable uptime, and a 90-day money back guarantee.

Say hello to SEO.

Search engine optimization remains crucial to the visibility of any website. But, as Search Engine Journal explains, SEO in 2019 means more than simply posting a few blog posts each month. If you want your website to remain a top search result, you have to start by providing your audience with content they want and can use. This might mean videos, infographics, or interactive tools. The user experience of your website matters, too. Page speed, for example, is also a factor in how Google, and ostensibly other search engines, prioritize page rank and assign page authority.

Don’t sacrifice quality for price.

Amazon and other sites will almost certainly enjoy volume discounts, which means they can sell for less. However, don’t let a lower-priced tag discourage you from offering similar products on your own site. Studies indicate that consumers prioritize quality over lower prices in many cases. While your products or services should not be overpriced, how you interact with your customers and how you stand behind them after the purchase are valuable. 

Narrow your focus.

If you haven’t yet, spend some time looking at your inventory. Chances are, there are products that simply haven’t sold, while there are products that have. This is a good place to start and can help you narrow down your focus so that you can make the most of your customers’ online experience. Catering to a niche market allows you to provide the best products – the ones your customers want. In other words, don’t try to sell everything; stick with things you know. By doing so, you have a better chance of capturing your target audience and providing content and service that far exceed what any general retailer could offer.

Stick with steady growth.

Every company wants to grow, but the growing pains you will experience can stall your company’s progress. If you want to be truly competitive, you have to be consistent by offering your customers the same – or a better – experience each time they buy something from you. Make sure that your management model is scalable, that you have a quality control system in place, and, most importantly, avoid the temptation to offer more than you can deliver.

You’ll probably never be a $100 billion company, and that’s okay. Most people don’t need billions of dollars to support their family, even one with an extravagant lifestyle. What you do need, however, is a sustainable business that does not get eclipsed by those that already hold the market. With a little planning, including narrowing your focus and paying attention to your website, you can hold your own and watch your business grow.

Categories
Business Trends

20 Examples of Consumer Behavior

I’ve always been curious about why people do the things they do. So I did some research into consumer behavior.

  1. Marketing Campaigns

Advertisement plays a crucial part in persuading the purchasing decisions made by consumers. They are even known to bring about a great shift in market shares of competitive industries. Regular campaigns can influence the consumer purchasing decision to the point that they may opt for one company or brand over another. Or even indulge in petty shopping. Marketing campaigns help remind consumers to shop for less flashy products such as, say, insurance.

  1. Price 

            The price you set for a product has a significant effect on how a consumer behaves. A high price will often send your consumer heading for the lower priced alternative. Alternatively, consumers equate high prices with superior quality products. The best advice would be to research the cost set by competitors. What is best for your brand? Are you looking to sell below or above market price? Take this into careful consideration.

  1. Product

Consumers generally buy to meet a need, not the product. It’s really surprising why people really buy things. Sometimes they buy for personal growth and sometimes the buy for power and influence. Ultimately, people want to be popular and to be liked by other people. One of the most shared articles last year was shoppers are buying clothes just for instagram. This shows the great lengths people will go to be adored.  

  1. Self Concept and Lifestyle 

Products are expected to have a personality driven by physical appearance, packaging, and price.  The consuming behavior of an individual will be directed to enhancing self-concept through consumption of goods and symbols. Consumers can be defined in terms of the products they purchase or use. Or in terms of what those products mean for them according to M. Joseph Sirgiy.

  1. The Cost of Zero

In the book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely suggests that most transactions have an upside and a downside. But a free offer gives us a feeling that something is more valuable than it truly is.

“There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a free item. “ – Dan Ariely

  1. Seeking something new 

            Consumers are no longer loyal to brands like they used to be. There is something called Brand Fatigue. People are so overwhelmed and easily distracted. What that means, for example, is instead of sticking with Starbucks someone may opt for the neighborhood coffee shop. Loyalty is short lived nowadays.           

Consumers try to seek new brands not because these brands are any “better” but rather they want a “change.” They now become loyal to the engagement and experience that a particular brand offers.

 “The consumer has changed dramatically. There’s a shift in consumer behavior and brands need to adjust accordingly.” – brand marketing firm las vegas”

  1. Attitudes and beliefs 

Consumers form a certain attitude towards a product. They’ll have a certain feeling and belief towards an object. For example, we’ve formed a belief toward Apple products. They are sleek, fluid, easy-to-use, user-friendly, and smart. This forms a customer to brand relationship.

A consumer will also hold both positive and negative beliefs. “Apple is a great company but ever since iPhone ___ nothing much has changed.”

“You have to start with the customer experience and work your way back to technology” – Steve Jobs

  1. Word of Mouth             

Information is passed from individual to individual about products. Word of mouth is extremely powerful. Your brand and reputation are on the line and online through what other people say. Many frustrated customers take to Twitter to display their frustration with a service or product. Flight delays can be frustrating. Jet Blue ensures customer loyalty by responding to frustrated customers.

  1. Technology Adoption

Marc Andreessen, the American Entrepreneur, is quoted as saying “technology is eating the world.” From smartphones to social networking apps. Technology has changed the way we interact with our world.

  1. Personal Preference

Consumer behavior influences various shades of likes, dislikes, morals and values on a personal level. In certain industries like fashion and personal care, the consumer’s personal view and opinion can become the influencing factor. Nevertheless, advertisement can help in influencing these factors to a point, ultimately the likes and dislikes have more influence on the purchasing decisions.

Summary 

As societies, culture, and technology continue to advance, we’ll begin to see slight changes in consumer behavior.

Categories
Legal

The Importance of Small Business Succession Planning

Introduction

Small business succession planning answers an important question many business owners either ignore or are altogether unaware that they even need to answer, which is: “what is your exit strategy?” In the United states, small and medium-sized businesses account for the majority of businesses in existence, but many or most of these businesses hardly ever live beyond their owners or founders.

This poses the question, why is so much time, money and effort put into growing a business and ensuring that it is successful, with little to no thought given to the survival of the business beyond its owner, which in itself, can be a step towards ensuring its success or longevity.

This article will discuss the concept of small business succession planning and its overall importance in the life and/or success of a business.

Business succession planning is the concept of planning, identifying, developing, and deciding on a new business owner and/or manager that is to replace the previous owner after he or she retires, resigns, dies, or is otherwise incapable of continuing to run the business. It is a fact of life that human beings are mortal and will cease to exist after spending a certain amount of time on earth. Or that they may become incapacitated by an illness or an accident of some sort. There is however no specific law that says that businesses have to be mortal, and in that sense, a business can in theory live ‘forever,’ or at least for a significantly longer period of time that its owner can. This can however only happen if a proper succession plan is put in place.

Types of Small Business Succession Planning

There are several types of small business succession planning. It may however be ideal to consult with a business attorney to advise what type may be best suited for your particular business and the environment which it operates in.

Having said that, some of the most common types of small succession planning include:

Inheritance

Small businesses can be passed on to the heir or heirs of the owner or founder via inheritance. In this instance, the heir may inherit the business if it is stipulated in the will of the owner, or where the person dies intestate, the business may automatically pass on to this heir according to the intestacy laws of the particular state where the business is located.

This may be the easiest type of succession planning but it can often be detrimental to the business if the heir has no clue or idea on how to run or manage the business. In this instance, the business can potentially run into trouble which may eventually lead to its liquidation or winding up.

BuyOut

A business can outrightly be sold to persons or companies outside the organization, as a way for the owner to exit the business while ensuring its continued existence. In this scenario, the owner will likely have conducted a proper evaluation of the business to determine its worth, while also conducting some due diligence on the potential buyer to ensure that they have the capability and other resources to ensure the continued survival or existence of the business.

Of course there may be many other things that need to be taken into consideration regarding an outright sale of the business, and only the owner, perhaps in conjunction with other employees or stakeholders can come to the determination of whether this is the best succession option.

This buyout arrangement can usually happen with a business partner, employees of the business, the general public or even a competitor.

Sale of Ownership Interest

In situations where the business is registered as a corporation, the owner may decide to sell some or all of their stake in the business to one or more stakeholders. This is yet another way in which the owner can divest themself from the business, in the hopes that the new stakeholders will do everything in their power to ensure that they see a return on their investment by keeping the business alive, even after the original owner has completely exited, or reduced their shareholding.

Transfer of Management

The management of a business can be transferred to key and trusted employees as a way to maintain continuity after the owner(s) exit. For this transfer to be effective and successful, the owner will likely have spent some time deciding on exactly which employee(s) to transfer this management mantle to, training and preparing them for this eventuality, and making sure all other processes, legal and otherwise, are put in place to make this happen.

In such situations, while the ownership of the business might transfer to the heir(s) of the owner, the management thereof will transfer to existing employees, who are already knowledgeable in the running of the business, thereby increasing the chances of the business’ survival after the owner has left it.

The Importance of Succession Planning

Without a succession plan, there will often be a lot of uncertainty that surrounds a business in the event of its owners’ exit, moreso if that exit is sudden and unplanned. This is particularly true of single-owner businesses. Multi-owner businesses, on the other hand can sometimes be shielded from this uncertainty, as the other owners will often carry on running the business if one owner exits.

For a single owner business, the chances of the business’ death is very high when there is no succession plan, and various statistics offered up by different research papers seem to suggest that the high death rate of small businesses, is in part attributable to an absence of an exit plan by the business owner.

Given the importance of a succession plan for the survival of a business, it can often be a good idea to include necessary or select family or relatives in the process, while of course seeking experienced legal advice where appropriate or needed. Even if these family members might not inherit the business after your demise or incapacitation, it is still a good idea to keep them informed, if only so that they can ensure that your wishes are properly carried out after you are gone.

Below are a few specific benefits of small business succession planning worth mentioning.

First, a succession plan can often ensure that a specific program is put in place for the proper training and development of the human capital that may potentially take over running of the business in future. This professional development can take one or more of several forms, including; job shadowing, mentoring, coaching or a gradual increment in management responsibilities, either of which will go a long way in preparing the individual(s) for the role when it comes, and ensuring a smooth transition.

Similar to, and continuing from the previous point, a succession plan helps a business (owner) actively take note of, and be aware of employees who exhibit traits of being capable of taking over management and/or leadership of the business in the future. Without the existence of such a succession plan, the business owner would perhaps be more likely to simply see such person or people as being good or hard working employees. An active succession plan can, on the other hand, rather make the owner see the employee in terms of; “I think she/he might be the best person to take over from me,” therefore allowing ample time for corporate knowledge transfer.

A third benefit to be had from a good succession plan revolves around tax benefits that can accrue either to the business itself, or to the heir(s) of the owner who inherit the business. Many states in the U.S. have their individual inheritance tax laws, including the federal government. A good inheritance plan which has factored in this tax burden, can sometimes, with the help of a qualified accountant or tax attorney, find creative ways to minimize the payable tax on the inherited business, which can sometimes prevent the business and/or new owners from getting into financial difficulty, which may consequently affect the business’ survivability.

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of them all, is that the business can continue to live on. This is obviously the main reason and intention behind the plan, and more often than not, depending on the quality of the plan, the objective is often realized. This can then allow the business owner to have less worries about what will happen to the business for which he or she has worked so hard on, after he or she or she is gone.

In Conclusion

There are more instances where the importance and benefits of a small business succession plan can be highlighted, but suffice to say that the few mentioned above should hopefully be enough to encourage and convince any small business owner that it really is in their best interest to not delay in working towards drawing up this plan.

Bio

Kanayo Okwuraiwe is a startup founder, an incurable entrepreneur, a digital marketing professional, a chess lover, a brother, a son, a friend and more. His latest project has seen him create a digital marketing agency called Telligent Marketing that provides law firm SEO services to help lawyers grow their law practices.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Why is it important for your business to indulge in mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing is an innovative strategy of digital marketing, which will help you to reach target audiences through smartphones and tablets through email, social media, and also SMS. Mobile phones are used more commonly than desktops by consumers to do their searches. Thus, business owners need to focus on mobile technology and incorporate it into their marketing efforts. In this article, you will learn about how you can apply mobile-based technology in your marketing efforts to improve your business.

What do the statistics reveal?

  • Mobiles are now accounting for almost 70% of the total digital media times.
  • Almost over 60% of the total searches are coming from mobile devices.
  • Consumers spend around 87 hours every month on their smartphones.
  • Majority of the American consumers are using their smartphones for accessing search engines at least about once a day.
  • Statistics also reveal that about 61% of the users would be unlikely to return to a specific mobile site in which they had some trouble in accessing, and only about 40% would visit the competitor’s website instead.
  • 57% of all consumers say they will not be recommending businesses with a poorly designed mobile site.

Here are some of the things you should look into when you try to optimize your mobile website:

Your official business website will have to be responsive. You need to ensure that your templates and themes which you put on your website are responsive to the screen size of different devices like laptops, tablets, and mobiles. Although responsive websites are in use for some time now but still, a lot of business brands fail to incorporate them. As a result of this, they end up losing customers and revenues. You need to ensure that this does not happen. You should build your website for mobile phones also, follow these rules to help you in this aspect:

Do not use Flash and Java because a lot of devices do not support these technologies and will not do so in the future either so you should avoid them altogether as it can result in you losing customers.

The website must follow the following rules: –

  1. The screen sizes of phones are small, and hence you will need to write in such a way that it is easy to read.
  2. You need to use bulleted points.
  3. You should write short and punchy headlines.
  4. You must keep your paragraphs short.
  5. You should use legible text sizes.

Email marketing requirements that you should follow: –

  1. Use a short subject line on the emails you send out.
  2. Your email design’s template will need to be responsive to mobiles.
  3. Preview your subject lines before sending out the emails.

Your web pages need to be optimized for use on smartphones, or they will not get any ranks from the mobile searches. A lot of queries come from mobile devices, and hence you should consider getting your website indexed for mobile searches also.

You need to do the following tests on your mobile website: –

  1. You must test the speed of your mobile website because visitors will tend to leave if it takes a lot of time to load.
  2. You will need to analyze the performance of your website also and find insights for helping you to identify the methods that can make your website faster and also mobile friendly.
  3. You will need to check if your business website is mobile friendly and test how visitors are able to use your web pages from their mobile devices.

Mobile marketing by using SMS

SMS services are, no doubt a good strategy for business owners who want to connect with their customers. In order to boost your sales and improve your communication with your customers, you do not need hefty budget spending and plenty of time but focus more on SMS marketing, which is powerful as a tool also. More than 90% of the SMS messages get opened within the first 3 minutes while it takes more than an hour for a recipient to read an email. The rate of opening for SMS is more than 90 percent while it is about 20 percent with emails. Thus, text messages are more effective to engage consumers. And a lot of people make direct purchases when they receive a branded SMS.

You must always remember that

Directly marketing through mobile devices will be more personal a method to target audiences.

When you try to reach people through mobile devices, then you are reaching out to them on a more personal level. You will need to be respectful and clear in your approach. You should keep your text within 160 characters. Do not use any abbreviations and slangs. Offer the consumer something good. You should also be clear in who you are sending your message out to. You need to create a clear and precise call to action option.

If it seems too difficult for you to adopt mobile technology in your business because of financial constraints, then you can always opt for taking a business loan to cover the investment expenditures.

In the event that you should need debt management services to help you repay for the business loans that you had taken then you can consider to visit Nationaldebtreliefprograms.com where all your queries will be answered by the most experienced and leading professionals in the industry.

Wrapping things up

For every business owner, it is important to embrace the use of new technologies as they appear first. This will help them to stay ahead of their competition in the world of digital and internet marketing. Mobile phones are an essential part of our daily lives these days and have taken over the world of digital and business marketing as well. By sending text message updates, you will be able to have more consumers hooked onto your business. Hopefully, the information shared in this article will have helped you.

Categories
Human Resource

Empowering Employees to Make Good Decisions

Quality decisions improve organizational health, full stop. Decisions have the power to make or break a business’s bottom line, either gradually or in one fell swoop. How your company makes decisions also affects invested employees feel in their roles, making it an important part of overall culture.

Many organizations know they’re falling short of optimizing decision-making but aren’t sure exactly how to change that. Start by giving employees everything they need—including trust and tools—to make good decisions. 

What Hinders Decision-Making at Work?

Part of empowering employees to make good decisions is removing the hurdles standing in their way. What hurdles? Well, company culture and policies may “make decision-making a multi-layer process that requires forms, documentation and numerous signatures.” This reduces the number of decisions employees are able to make and makes them cumbersome even when they do go through.

Businesses that adhere to an overly hierarchical chain of command may also find employees are hesitant to make decisions, believing them to be the jurisdiction of someone higher up. This points to an underlying culture issue—one companies must evaluate and work on if they want to change how employees approach decision-making as a practice. When employees feel micromanaged, they tend to opt out of making decisions or questioning authority, meaning companies lose vital and diverse perspective at every level. 

Connect Employees to Analytics Tools

What do good decisions look like? Well, they have positive business outcomes—like improving internal operations, reducing inefficiencies, raising revenue, delivering results for clients, etc. And to make these good decisions, employees need access to the latest information available. This is where data analytics and business intelligence tools enter the picture to connect employees with data insights they can then factor into their decisions. Next-gen analytics from ThoughtSpot, for instance, give non-technical employees access to data insights two different ways: through search- and through artificial intelligence-driven analytics.

Search-driven analytics allow employees to enter specific queries in straightforward language, like a merchandiser at a retail organization looking up sales growth by product category over the last year. This ability to ask ad hoc questions and receive answers in seconds empowers employees to make informed decisions much faster than static reports do, plus users can continue to ask questions beyond the initial query to get the full picture.

What about insights that would be helpful in decision-making that employees haven’t even had a chance to ask, though? AI-driven analytics uncovers potentially useful insights using algorithms; all employees have to do is click.

Employees can make confident, data-driven decisions when they’re empowered with the full range of information they need. This is precisely why so many enterprises are ramping up their data analytics strategy to include self-service tools; data has immense value when it finds its way into the hands of the people making decisions on a daily basis in a format they can understand.

Set Expectations, Build Trust

People feel comfortable making decisions at work only when they know they have the authority to do so. When employees feel decisions are outside their domain or “above their pay grade,” they’ll hesitate—or pass off the decision to someone else. It’s like calling the ball in volleyball: If nobody calls it and steps up to hit the ball, it’ll just fall to the floor between teammates as they stare at each other, each thinking the other person would handle it.

Creating an organizational chart is a good way to set clear expectations. One CEO recommends this strategy because it “provides an at-a-glance answer when employees are confused about whether they should make a decision or not.” Based on the decision at hand, employees can choose to handle it themselves or escalate it to a superior when needed. This helps ensure the person most qualified to make the decision actually does it, improving organizational outcomes.

Using these tactics to empower employees to make quality decisions will help your organization avoid missed opportunities for improvement.