5 Ways to Make Your Digital Marketing More Mobile-Friendly Posted on February 19, 2018September 2, 2022 by Allie Wolff At last count, some 77 percent of Americans own smartphones, and 51 percent own a tablet computer. To say that mobile technology has taken over our lives is an understatement. In fact, 60 percent of today’s online searches are now conducted exclusively using mobile devices. If your business hasn’t yet adapted to our increasingly mobile world, you are undoubtedly missing out on revenue as a result. The good news is, it’s never too late to start. Here are a few tips for whipping your digital marketing strategies into mobile-friendly shape. Keep it short and sweet. By nature, people who are using their mobile devices are on the go, which means they don’t have the time or patience to scroll through pages of text. Additionally, the smaller screen sizes of handheld devices don’t allow for too much verbiage. The most effective way to deliver a marketing message to a mobile audience is through short, straightforward text elements and compelling imagery. Make an impact quickly. We live in an increasingly fast-paced world where things are moving and changing at a rapid pace. People using their mobile devices are looking for quick snippets of information, which means you only have a few precious seconds to get their attention and deliver your message. Craft your marketing materials with this in mind, focusing on the initial impact as the most important element. Leverage video to your advantage. More than half of all video content produced today is consumed on mobile devices. Furthermore, an incredible 92 percent of mobile video viewers will share that content with others. Finally, shoppers who view a video first are 174 percent more likely to make a purchase. This makes video one of the most powerful means of marketing to mobile users. If you want to increase your engagement and conversions, video ads are the way to go. Get social. Roughly one in five minutes of all digital media time is spent on social networks. What’s more, 80 percent of all social media activities are now performed using mobile devices. In other words, when your audience unlocks their phones, one of the first places they’re going to go is to their social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. If you want to reach them, you need to make sure your ads are there as well. Keep things relevant. Regardless of whether your ads are traditional or optimized for mobile, they should always be relevant to your audience. If they aren’t, they’ll just be annoying which will paint your brand in a negative light and have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. The goal of your mobile marketing should primarily be to bring value to the lives of your target audience through things like education, engagement and entertainment. Whether you own a small, fledgling business or a growing organization, mobile should be a central component of your overall marketing strategy. As you begin to adopt the above tactics, remember to utilize the analytics that are available to you so you can continue to hone and improve your strategy to achieve optimal results. Do so and you will be well on your way to reaching, engaging and turning those targeted mobile prospects into loyal, paying customers.
How to Minimize the Cost of Customer Acquisition Posted on February 16, 2018June 13, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Everyone knows you’ve got to spend money to make money, and acquiring customers for your business is no exception. The problem is, if your expenses outweigh your revenue, you’ll be chasing growth forever. In order to accelerate growth, you need to hit that gold balance of keeping expenses low while increasing revenue. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can impact expenses by cutting your customer acquisition costs (CAC). Encourage repeat business. Not only do satisfied customers return again and again, but they’re also more likely to share their positive experiences with others, which equates to valuable word-of-mouth marketing. To increase your odds of repeat business, invest time and effort into the following: Product-customer fit. Build products and services your customer base will be sure to rave about. Automation: The more you can streamline your workflow, the more efficiently you can serve your customers and provide a human touch in the areas that matter most. Incentives: Motivate your customers to come back to your business and send referrals your way. Service: Create memorable and meaningful experiences before and after the sale to stay forever imprinted on your customers hearts and minds. Keeping your current customers happy makes acquiring new customers and winning repeat business much easier. Offer incentives Offering incentives not only motivates your current customers, but can also influence new customers to do business with you. For instance, starting a loyalty points program or offering a discount in return for a long-term commitment are both very powerful motivators to generate sales without a significant monetary investment on your part. Furthermore, you can also use incentives in exchange for user-generated content. Participants share their personal experiences with your brand on their social networks for a discount, upgrade or free product. As a result, your brand enjoys a huge boost in exposure without having to pay for advertising. Leverage marketing automation Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. (Adobe CMO) Marketing automation is an intelligent, cost-effective way to grow your database and turn cold contacts into new customers for your business. With the power of marketing automation, you can capture new contacts from your website, nurture them with automated emails (personalized to their preferences, of course) and keep tabs on your hottest prospects. Instead of sending the same, bulk newsletter to everyone in your database once a month, marketing automation picks up on your contact’s preferences and level of interest so you can send emails tailored to each person’s unique needs. Then, when a hot prospect expresses interest, you can automatically notify your sales team. It’s a seamless way to keep your sales team in meaningful conversations with your most important prospects. You never miss an opportunity – and avoid wasting time on prospects who will never be a good fit for your business. Use retargeting. Lastly, you can improve the chances of a prospect converting to a paying customer by keeping your brand top-of-mind. The fact is most people who come across your products or services will not be ready to buy right away. By using retargeted ads, you’ll keep your brand positioned in front of them and create additional touch-points so that when the time comes and they’re ready to make a purchase, they’ll naturally want to come back to you to close the deal. Retargeting can generate better ROI than regular advertising because you’ll be targeting people you know are already interested in what you have to offer. There’s no way to avoid spending money on the growth of your business, but by taking the right approach and implementing smart strategies, such as the ones listed above, you can keep those costs as low as possible. This will allow you to generate more revenue and achieve continued growth over time.
Integration Spotlight: Hatchbuck + Unbounce Posted on February 15, 2018February 15, 2018 by Jessica Lunk By now we’ve likely hammered home the value of email marketing, marketing automation and CRM. But without inbound leads to use these tactics on, you’ll be wasting your time and worse, your business won’t have the ability to grow. A business website should be at the heart of your marketing strategy. Without it, your business has no digital presence and no way to capture leads. If a full-blown website isn’t in the cards for you due to budget, ability or other mitigating factors, a landing page will more than suffice. Creating a page that’s worth its weight is a different story though. There are several factors that go into building a landing page that converts – content, a lead capture form, visual aesthetics – and the idea of creating a landing page that works may seem daunting. Lucky for us all, there are plenty of tools out there to take the pressure off and to easily create beautiful, effective landing pages that will capture the traffic you’re driving. One of our favorites is Unbounce. Unbounce is an easy-to-use landing page builder and conversion tool that integrates easily with other tools (like Hatchbuck) through Zapier. Through Zapier, you can easily capture leads from your Unbounce landing pages and push them into your Hatchbuck database for nurturing. Similar to our drag & drop email builder, Unbounce requires absolutely zero design or coding experience. They’ve got a pre-designed template library chock full of professional-looking landing pages and popups that are sure to help you capture more inbound leads. The ability to create a branded, mobile-responsive landing page is an absolute must for businesses large and small. With some many beautifully designed websites and talented web designers out there, it’s easy to feel like a small fish in a big pond. But tools like Unbounce, it’s easier than ever to compete no matter your size or budget. Zap Recipe You can easily grab this zap, here: Here’s a walk-through of how setting up this zap works: Once you’re logged into your Zapier account, choose “Make a Zap!” to get started. Select Unbounce as your “Trigger App” in Zapier. Select “Form Submission” as the trigger for your Zap. This means that the zap will fire every time someone submits a form on your Unbounce landing page. Select your Unbounce account. (If you’ve never connected to Unbounce in Zapier before, you will need to connect your account, so have your Unbounce username and password ready.) Choose the Unbounce client and Unbounce landing page you want to connect to. Test your Unbounce connection. Success! Now, choose your action app. This is where you’ll choose Hatchbuck! You can choose to “Add a Tag” or “Create/Update Existing Contact in Hatchbuck.” For this example, let’s choose, “Add a Tag.” Choose your Hatchbuck account. You can test to make sure your connection is working properly. Choose the tag you’d like to add to leads that fill out your Unbounce form. Choose the email address field you’d like to import. This is the Unbounce field that collects the email address. It may show an email address from the test data pulled from your Unbounce test. This is just to make it easy to see what data your fields will be pulling in. In this example, we can see that our test pulled “donald.duck@unbounce.com” from the “Form Data Email” field. That looks right! We’ll choose the “Form Data Email” field to populate our contact record in Hatchbuck. Select the contact status you want to give new leads who come from your Unbounce landing page to your Hatchbuck account. In this example, we chose “Lead.” Add the first name and last name fields from Unbounce. Helpful hint: Back in Unbounce, make sure you’re asking for separate First Name and Last Name fields, rather than just one “Name” fields. This will keep your data nice and clean as it comes into Hatchbuck. Send a test tag to Hatchbuck using your test Unbounce data. Success! You’re ready to name your zap and turn it on! Now, Zapier will add any new leads from your Unbounce landing page form to Hatchbuck and add the tag you selected to them. This is super awesome, because you can use tag rules to do even more when that lead gets to Hatchbuck, like: Start a campaign Send an autoresponder Notify a sales rep Create a follow-up task Create a deal Back in Hatchbuck, go to your Tools > Rules. Create a new rule. Select Tag Rule. Give your Tag Rule a name, and find the Tag that you’re adding to your Unbounce leads from Zapier. You’ll also provide a “Score.” This will increase or decrease your lead’s contact score every time they fill out your Unbounce form. You can learn more about lead scoring with Hatchbuck, here: https://hatchbuck.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000578604-how-contact-scoring-works Now add your automations. The sky’s the limit, but in this example, we’ll just add a task for a sales rep to follow up with the new lead. There you have it — you’re all set up! See other Hatchbuck integrations in our full Zapbook. Happy Zapping!
How Solo Entrepreneurs Are Using Their CRM To Break $1 Million in Revenue Posted on February 14, 2018June 13, 2018 by Guest Author A guest post by Elaine Pofeldt, author of The Million-Dollar One-Person Business. When writing my book The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, I noticed that there a number of common threads among people who broke $1 million in revenue in a one-person business or partnership. Making smart use of an email list or customer relationship management software (CRM) was one of them. In today’s digital world, it’s very possible for a one-person business to reach a global audience. Taking the time to build an email list to keep in touch with followers can make that job easier. Instead of always having to rely on pay per click or other types of advertising, you can reach out directly to your followers through an email list or CRM. “If people are willing to give you their email addresses, which they treasure, they are willing to listen to your message,” as Sol Orwell, founder of Examine.com, a Toronto-based website that generates seven-figure revenue per year selling reports on nutrition supplements, told me. So how can you make the most of your email list? Here are some strategies deployed by the high-revenue entrepreneurs in the book and others I’ve interviewed since its publication. Build your list before you need it. It’s hard to build a high-quality email list overnight. The earlier you start building your list, the better. Orwell, for instance, spent years building his. So how do you build it? If you run a brick-and-mortar business, ask customers and prospects who come into your store or buy a product if they would like to join your list. If you offer the option to email them a receipt, give them a chance to opt into your email list, too. In an online business, consider running a promotion where you give new visitors to your site an incentive to join your list. Keep it tidy. Abby Walker is a Denver-based entrepreneur who brings in $3 million in annual revenue at Vivian Lou, a one-woman company that sells inserts to make high-heels comfortable. She licenses her product from the manufacturer, Insolia. Early in that licensing arrangement, Insolia passed along a list of 18,000 names that had many outdated email addresses. By spending the time to update and resuscitate it, Walker gave herself a jump start in attracting customers to the website for Vivian Lou. Plan before you send. When it comes to email marketing, sending more and more messages doesn’t always pay off. An email list will work best for you if you send out messages to your subscribers only when you have something valuable to share. That may be when you are offering a special discount or when you have information to share that will truly benefit or entertain them. I’m a subscriber to Orwell’s list, which I consider a good example of how to use an email list successfully. Orwell sends out mailings infrequently and typically months apart, but when he does, he focuses heavily on making his missives fun to read and valuable, instead of trying to sell something. When we rang in the New Year, for instance, subscribers received a newsletter from Orwell with the subject line: “News to Share 2018 – Lessons from 2017, $40k+ raised for charity, and more.” The newsletter included links to a year-end/summary, lessons-learned post he wrote, his annual letters for 2016 and 2017, a charity cookie bakeoff event he ran that raised $40,000 in Canadian dollars for a nonprofit that educates girls, and a practical and entertaining article he wrote about reputation management for business owners. I found myself clicking on every link—and enjoying what I read there. And he keeps himself honest by inviting readers to disengage if they’re not finding the newsletter valuable. Here’s how he puts it: What’s this email? I hate how we just ‘connect’ but never engage, and this is my attempt at changing that paradigm. If you don’t want any more of these, just hit reply and let me know. Keep it real. I’ve enjoyed meeting Orwell in person, and one reason his email newsletter is so appealing is his messages are written in his natural voice, not marketing-speak. The more authentically you express your own voice in your e-mail marketing, the more you’ll be able to connect with readers, too. As business broker David Fairley told me in reporting The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, the key to success in ecommerce is “building a reputation as a curator of a certain type of highly specialized product and creating a community of aficionados with a unique consciousness.” Sharing your unique voice gives customers a powerful reason to buy from you, not the corporate commodifiers of the world. That may seem like a lot of work, but if you send out your newsletter selectively when you really have something to say, it doesn’t have to take much time. One hour a month of well-focused effort can go a really long way when it comes to making the most of your CRM. Author Bio Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in small business, entrepreneurship and careers. Her work has appeared in FORTUNE, Money, CNBC, Inc., Forbes, Crain’s New York Business and many other business publications and she is a contributor to the Economist Intelligence Unit. She is the author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, a look at how entrepreneurs are hitting seven-figure revenue in businesses where they are the only employees, tapping automation and other technology to scale their efforts (Random House, 2018). As a senior editor at FORTUNE Small Business, where she worked for eight years, Elaine was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her features and ran the magazine’s annual business plan completion. During her time at FSB, she ran the magazine’s website, fsb.com, for four years, building its traffic from two to five million page views a month.
Become a Better Leader in Four Simple Steps Posted on February 13, 2018February 13, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick The day you expand your business from an army of one to a team can be a peak experience as an entrepreneur. Expanding your business is a fantastic opportunity to sharpen your leadership skills. The more you can keep improving at motivating and inspiring others to do their best work, the more of an edge you’ll have in today’s business environment. Only 30% of U.S. workers are fully engaged at work, according to Gallup—and that’s often because of how they’re being led, the polling organization has found. Fortunately, there are many interesting ways to strengthen your leadership skills. Try these approaches. Take a personality test. Understanding your unique personal style can help you make the most of your innate talents as a leader and improve in areas where you’re not as confident. Taking the free DiSC personality test can give you interesting insight. This behavioral assessment evaluates test takers based on the qualities of dominance, influence, compliance and steadiness. As you’ll find if you take the test, scoring high in each trait comes with negatives and positives. For instance, someone who scores high on dominance is motivated by winning, competition and success—good qualities to have when you’re building a business—but may show a lack of concern for others, impatience or open skepticism. While no test is perfect, the insights you get will help you self-assess and focus on the areas where you have the most room for growth. Shed command-and-control thinking. By thinking of yourself as a high-performance coach you’ll have an edge in today’s workplace, advised Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, in a recent blog. That’s especially true if you employ younger workers who aren’t accustomed to the hierarchical style of leadership that many companies embraced in the pre-digital era. As Clifton points out, younger workers are eager to develop their talents and have ongoing conversations that help them get better, rather than the traditional performance reviews previous generations have come to expect. Millennial workers also like their bosses to play to their strengths, not continually try to help them shore up perceived weaknesses. And they don’t like formalities. “Most millennials are coming to work with great enthusiasm, but the old management practices — forms, gaps and annual reviews — grinds the life out of them,” Clifton wrote. Avoid wearing your team down and you’ll find yourself far ahead of competitors who are stuck in the past. If you’re looking for a book to help you adopt a more collaborative leadership style, check out retired General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams. He shows how he moved from the traditional command-and-control approach to a leadership style where decentralized teams had decision-making authority as his Army troops fought Al-Qaeda in Iraq. If a leader like General McChrystal can break free from the command-and-control model, anyone can. Go back to school—on your own terms. As the workplace becomes more digital, management practices are evolving, too. Many entrepreneurs wish they could go back to school, but that’s hard to afford when you’re also investing in building a business. Instead of giving up on taking management classes, check out edX, a nonprofit site that free courses from top universities that you can take online. Among the options: MITx’s “Becoming an Entrepreneur,” University of Queensland’s “Becoming an Effective Leader” and BUx’s “Digital Leadership.” Many of the classes are self-paced, making them ideal for busy entrepreneurs. Find a support network. Sometimes, the best way to grow as a leader is to learn from other entrepreneurs. Fortunately, there are thousands of Meetups taking place around the world for people interested in leadership and entrepreneurship. Check out the Meetup website to see which ones are taking place in your area. If your business is generating six-figure revenue, consider applying for a group such as Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Accelerator. It is designed to help business owners with $250,000 to $1 million in revenue grow past $1 million in revenue. EO provides a curriculum focused on how to address key decisions that all leaders face, regarding people, strategy, execution and cash. Participants are also connected with small “accountability groups” of peers to help them stay on track with their goals. EO is one of many groups for entrepreneurs that can be a great source of support, so check out the options in your area to find one that’s a good fit. Being a great leader doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. Fellow entrepreneurs can be amazing guides.
5 Marketing Tasks You Should Absolutely Be Automating Posted on February 12, 2018June 13, 2018 by Allie Wolff Automation is a gift to marketers. It allows us to set and forget those pesky manual tasks (like sending out 5,000 emails) and focus more on the fun stuff like messaging, brand voice, blog writing, and video production. Of course, if you don’t know much about marketing automation, figuring out where to start can feel overwhelming. So here are a few marketing tasks you should be automating, but maybe aren’t. And if you aren’t, that’s okay. Better late than never. Email Since we’ve already mentioned emails, we might as well start with email automation. Instead of manually sending out emails to your customers, you can set up email blasts to go out at designated times. Additionally, you can set up conditional emails that are sent when visitors or leads do something specific like download an ebook or sign up for your email list. Once you’ve written the text for these emails, your email automation tool substitutes the customer’s name in and handles the rest. Social Media If you write a fantastic blog post, it won’t be worth a thing if no one ever sees it. In order to catch the attention of online readers, a blog post has to be shared multiple times. While that may feel like a lot from your end, it’s probably barely enough to register on the screens of individuals who are scrolling past numerous posts a day. Even once you’ve come to terms with the fact that you have to promote your material this often, it’s hard to remember, especially with the many other things you need to do to run your business. Instead, you can pre-write tweets and Facebook posts, for example, and plug them into your automation software so that your material is pumped out throughout the week. Marketing Funnel Excellent. That e-book you published or webinar you produced was a massive success, and you’ve collected a lot of emails. But now you have to spend time organizing that information for future follow-up. Did you know you could simply automate this process? Instead of spending hours manually formatting a spreadsheet and organizing names, phone numbers, and emails, you can have that information automatically pulled into your CRM or your email marketing tools. This way, following up on leads and closing deals is significantly quicker. Analytics Analytics are an inevitable part of working in marketing. In order to justify your expenses, you need to see that you’re achieving some return on investment on your efforts. Instead of spending time tracking campaigns manually in spreadsheets and figuring out how to represent that data, sophisticated marketing analytics tools can track your campaigns, record revenue, and generate powerful reports that give you a 360-degree understanding of how much money each dollar spent on marketing generates. A/B Testing A green button may work better than a red button. One blog title may draw more readers than another. This is a test that you can run automatically and simultaneously for a variety of features like call-to-action buttons, images, videos, and more. Little tweaks can lead to big results, and A/B testing can help you determine where to make those adjustments. Marketing automation can save you an enormous amount of time, especially if you’re a small business owner who needs to put as many things on autopilot as possible. With these marketing elements managed, you can focus on the more enjoyable parts of marketing your business such as meeting with potential customers, talking about your product, and sharing your vision for your company.
The Most Important PPC Trends to Be Aware of in 2018 Posted on February 9, 2018June 13, 2018 by Jessica Lunk The pay-per-click industry saw lots of serious changes in 2017, and experts are forecasting more in 2018. What areas should you keep aware of? The verdicts are in, here’s what you need to know: Get used to machine learning Google dove big into machine learning with their PPC networks in 2017. Their “smart bidding” system, meant to optimize conversions using machine learning, was just one of several major developments: smart display campaigns and new ad rotations also showcased the influence of artificial intelligence in the PPC sphere. Understanding how machine learning and artificial intelligence affect PPC will be important to digital marketers in 2018, since the industry is likely going to be leaning more and more on that tech. It wouldn’t surprise us if, within five years, manually altering PPC bids becomes a thing of the past. Get used to the new Google AdWords interface Most marketers cried out in unified hatred at the new AdWords interface. For folks who spent most hours each day adjusting bids and keywords as quickly and efficiently as possible, this redesign came as a kick to the stomach. But when you think about it, the old design—we’ll just say it, it was plain and clunkier—was introduced in 2009. That’s close to a decade ago. And if you spend even just an afternoon reacquainting yourself with the system, and accept that this is the new normal, you will probably get over your hatred and learn to love the new layout. As well as being noticeably faster, the new layout is frankly easier for newbies getting into the game. Remember, folks: it’s not just about what you’re used to. It’s about adjusting for the future. Focus on audience search While Facebook has long reigned over the detailed audience search, offering PPC marketers remarkably specific targeted audience groups, Google has begun to wade deeper into this field. The search engine giant has long hesitated to give away too much of its users information, citing privacy concerns (which is fair—they have a tremendous amount of personal data on, well, basically everyone), but if they don’t want to lose more market share to Facebook, they’ll have to be competitive. In 2018 and beyond, expect to see less emphasis on keywords and more consideration of targeted audiences. That will likely make the difference in digital marketers’ success. Emphasis on social media Given how Facebook saw a 40-percent ad revenue growth in 2017, and looking at its dominance in the realms of audience targeting and video marketing, social media is going to be a major focus for PPC marketers in 2018. Even LinkedIn is likely to gain traction as marketers realize what works and what doesn’t on one of the Internet’s most niche social networks. Social media is particularly great for tracking users (like with Facebook Pixel), and for remarketing to increase your conversion rate. And speaking of audiences above, the ability to create lookalike audiences based on past success is something the social giants have been honing for a long time and is going to continue being a primary focus for marketers in 2018. Get ready for voice search As more searches are performed quickly on mobile devices, and AI assistants take over our search consoles, predicting voice-controlled search will be a quickly emerging PPC trend. Searches are going to become even longer-trail, as people tend to search for sentences rather than easily typable phrases: not “indoor plant brown help,” but instead “how to stop an indoor plant from turning brown,” since the latter is what you might actually say aloud. It’s likely that voice search will prompt PPC marketers to create a new build. While the results may not be noticeable in 2018, it’s probably that the year will mark the beginning of a new trend and a lessening of typed-in classic search terms.
5 Productivity Hacks To Help You Actually Finish Your To-Do List Posted on February 8, 2018June 13, 2018 by Erin Posey The clock is ticking, and you are eyeing your incomplete to-do list wondering how you are going to get out of the office by 5:00. While to-do lists are a great way to organize yourself in the workplace (and even in your personal life), unless you have some set of ground rules at the start, they can quickly get out of control. If your to-do list appears never-ending, you’ll have no chance of getting on top of your workload or leaving work on time. These five productivity tips will help your confidence grow and actually enable you to finish all the items on your to-do list without undue stress or anxiety. Be Prepared There is a good reason that these two words make up the Boy Scout and Girl Scout mottos – because they make life so much easier. By sitting down at the end of each day and planning your to-do list, you know exactly what you’re going to do the next day. You can start work while your mind is fresh and don’t have to waste precious time trying to work out where to begin. For many people, the morning is when they’re most productive. It pays to get the majority of the challenging work out of the way before the mid-afternoon slump hits. If you schedule the last 30 minutes of each day to recap what you’ve done and to go through tomorrow’s workload, you’ll be mentally prepared for whatever comes your way. Writing an actionable to-do list each day will then become part and parcel of your habits. You’ll have enough time to weigh things up carefully and decide what should and should not be on the list. Keep it short The only chance you have of getting through your to-do list is to keep it at a reasonable length. Any additions will need to be qualified the day before. Consider whether it’s important and if it has to be completed that day. Having a long list that you never seem to get through just defeats the purpose of writing one in the first place. You are being busy for busy’s sake. If you do find you manage to complete your urgent tasks with time to spare, then you can move on to tomorrow’s to-do list. You are in control of your day and responsible for scheduling what needs to be done. Just remember, never to confuse quantity with quality. You may even consider adopting the 1-3-5 rule. This gives you room for nine tasks to be allocated each day. One significant task, three medium tasks and five smaller tasks – pretty self-explanatory and very easy to remember, even on your busiest days. Prioritize the list Prioritizing the items on your list ensures that the urgent and time-sensitive tasks get completed before their deadline. It can be helpful to start with the most difficult thing first, even before you’ve checked your email and phone messages. Making your most essential tasks a regular priority will actively improve the way you do business. The reality is that once the day progresses, unless you’ve worked out your priorities and completed them early, there is less chance that they will get done at all. Give Your Tasks Realistic Time Estimates Unless you estimate how much time each task will take, you won’t know if your list will practically fit in the course of one business day, allowing for breaks and natural distractions. If you have five things on your list and each item will take two hours, it’s not going to work out well for you. This is where the 1-3-5 rule may be particularly useful. Base your to-do list on sensible choices that won’t hinder your productivity and ruin your day. Minimize Distractions Having a workable list will make your day run more smoothly. Grab your coffee, close your office door (if you have one) and get started. Keep your phone, email and social media turned off during your “work” period, if possible, so you can accomplish your tasks without interruption. Having to work with constant distractions will hamper how much you achieve in the span of one day. Multi-tasking may be a necessary workplace skill, but the reality is it is not conducive to quality work. Maintain your focus on one task and check your emails and messages in between items. You may find yourself having to say ‘no’ more regularly or even making yourself unavailable for non-essential meetings. It’s not necessarily a bad thing and means you’re one step closer to finishing your work by the end of the day and starting with a clean slate the next day.
5 Small Business Goals to Make 2018 More Profitable Posted on February 7, 2018February 7, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Setting goals is one of the most important activities for a business owner. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business, where you’re located or what you sell, goals help you remain focused and keep your business moving forward. Although goal-setting is something that can and should be done year-round, the start of a new year is an especially good time to begin planning for what you’d like to accomplish in the weeks, months and years to come. Here are a few small business goals to get you started. Become More Productive Your productivity level has a direct impact on your company’s bottom line. Aiming to ramp up productivity is always a wise business goal because it will set the stage for better performance, increased growth and higher profits. You can accomplish this goal a number of ways, such as eliminating workplace distractions, optimizing business practices and utilizing better technology. Lower Expenses This goal is important for companies of all sizes, but particularly small businesses. Obviously, the less money you have going out of your business, the more quickly your profit margin will rise. Lowering business expenses can be accomplished a variety of different ways, like reducing your debt, renegotiating contracts and adopting a leaner business approach. The key here is to be specific on not just the what, but also the how. Improve Customer Service You may already have a great process in place to keep your customers happy, but there’s always room for improvement in that area. Set a goal for transforming your customer service process from good to great, or great to exceptional. Make a pledge to handle customer complaints in a more efficient and effective way. Or, consider adopting a CRM solution to help streamline your processes. If you’re not sure which direction to go, try asking your customers for feedback to learn how your business could be doing better. Boost Marketing Just because what you’ve been doing all along may still be working doesn’t mean there aren’t better, more effective or more efficient ways. This is particularly the case with marketing. You could easily be wasting your precious marketing budget on activities that aren’t netting you the results other methods might be capable of. Start the year right by conducting a marketing audit, and then commit to making changes wherever possible. Investing in marketing automation may also help make your goals more attainable. Increase Your Market Share Tapping into a larger portion of your chosen market is a great goal to have for the coming year because it will help you become more profitable. There are many different ways you can increase your market share, whether it’s launching a new product, expanding your service offering or opening an additional location. Figure out which strategy makes the most sense for your business and then get it on the calendar as one of your goals. Last, but certainly not least, as you’re defining and documenting your goals for the New Year, it’s helpful to follow the acronym ‘SMART,’ which stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-Based For instance, instead of just listing “increase sales” as your goal, make it SMART by saying you want to increase sales by 3% each quarter. This will ensure that you are able to track your progress and make any necessary tweaks along the way, which will improve your odds of accomplishing what you set out to do in 2018 and beyond.