Debra Murphy
All small businesses will benefit from having a simple marketing plan that maps out your overall strategy to reach your ideal client and win new customers. Unfortunately many don’t take the time to create this important guide to keep your business on track and prevent you from wasting time and money with minimal results.
The success of most businesses is dependent on the effectiveness of their marketing. Getting consistent results from your marketing requires that you regularly evaluate how well your programs are doing driving inbound leads and ultimately sales. If your results aren’t what you expect, or a particular marketing activity isn’t performing as expected, a marketing audit will help you identify where the problems lie.
Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting value-based content to attract your target audience, position you as a trusted expert and advisor in your industry, help build your online brand presence and drive more traffic to your site.
Patience and consistency – virtues in many aspects of your life. These same qualities are important for marketing your business, and even more critical for your inbound marketing efforts. Putting an inbound marketing plan in motion that attracts your ideal client is something that requires stamina and determination.
Many small businesses feel that having a strong brand identity is not necessary. Some think it is something only large companies need. And although some might invest in a logo, they miss the fact that a brand identity is so much more than just the visual impression of your business.
Web presence optimization extends search engine optimization to all of your web properties to create better visibility, awareness, and recognition for your brand. By optimizing content across your entire web presence, including your website and social media profiles, you present a more unified, consistent image for your brand no matter where someone finds your business online.
Cyber security has become a critical part of the modern business environment and is a common discussion topic in planning meetings and boardrooms throughout the globe. As cyber security threats evolve, businesses must also adapt their defenses to protect against these threats.Understanding what kind of threats are out there and how they can affect your business is the first step to effective prevention. Here is a list of the top 5 cyber security threats facing small businesses.
An outside advisory board provides a range of services from acting as a sounding board or a second set of eyes, to providing expertise, guidance and insight to the business owner. This is the first in a multi-part series that looks at real issues facing business owners and how they are addressed with the help of an outside advisory board. We will look at instances where an advisory board worked in concert with a business owner to provide different perspectives on issues and help develop and execute long range strategies and plans using short range goals and projects.
Small businesses regularly face many challenges. As the business owner, you are tasked with hiring the right people, increasing sales, making payroll, filing taxes and providing quality customer service. You know you need to market your business to become or remain visible to your target audience. But like most small businesses, there are more pressing priorities of operating a business that demand your attention.
If done properly, a business assessment provides the business owner with significant value and benefit because it helps him/her to focus on what is important. Here is a real life example of how an objective look at the strategy and operations of a business helped distill, focus and change a company’s actions that resulted in increasing revenues and growth.