Is Your Business Card Bringing You Business?

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Typically, many hours are spent deciding on the logo, layout, and tagline to include on a company’s business cards. But not much time goes into thinking about strategies to make those business cards actually work to bring in customers. That is a mistake.

Business cards are like mini ambassadors for your business. They represent you, your company, and your brand. Business cards often provide the first impression a recipient will have of you and your company. They shouldn’t be just an afterthought in your marketing collateral mix.

To effectively market and advertise your business, whether through business cards, social media, or a website, the first step is to create awareness. Awareness is generated through uniqueness. The colors, stock, font, graphics, and unusual finishing touches like rounded corners or foil stamping and special die cutting can all add up to create a business card that stands out in a crowd.

Simple elegance and a clean, uncluttered layout work best. Sometimes more is learned about a business by the professional look and design of its business card than by almost any other marketing collateral. Prospects may forget about and toss out many other collateral pieces, but they usually keep an interesting business card.

Visually standing out is the first step to make a business card work to bring you business. The second involves the recipient and answering a simple five-word question…

What’s In It For Me?

The text on your business card must quickly and clearly explain the benefits of working with you. You can’t fit an entire brochure on the small area a business card provides (although some people try!). Most companies will list the services they provide. That is fine to do on the back of a business card.

On the front, however, where everyone looks first, you need to state clearly what results your products and services deliver. What is the primary benefit of working with your company? Make it short and sweet. Don’t hide it. Proudly display it on the front of the card.

The quality of the stock used, the font and layout, the finishing touches, and the copy used all work hand in hand to create a powerful, client-getting business card.

But those beautiful cards won’t do much good if they aren’t getting deployed. Take business cards everywhere you go. Put a stack in your car, in your wallet, and in your purse or briefcase. If you find the right target audience, hand them not one but several cards and ask them to pass the extras along to colleagues or friends who might be able to use your services.

Strategically thinking about the design, production, and copy on your business cards has the effect of creating a viral campaign for your business. Unlike the online variety, this is a viral campaign that can actually bring you real results and not just buzz in the marketplace.

How Not to Feel Like a Fish Out of Water at Your Next Networking Event

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Networking events such as Business After Hours and organizations like BNI and Meetup.com provide great opportunities to meet and mingle with other, like-minded businesspeople outside their place of business in a more relaxed and non-threatening environment.

Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs do not get the most of this great opportunity because they feel awkward or simply don’t know what to say or do. Instead of getting excited to start building relationships, they end up heading for a quick exit, the buffet line, the bar, or the restroom. If this describes you, there is a better way.

To make this type of networking event feel comfortable and more enjoyable, you need to have a plan. When you’re prepared, you’ll feel more in control. Being in control can help relieve the anxiety of being in a new setting and situation.

Your plan should include making new friends, building relationships, giving before asking, and looking for opportunities to grow your business. It’s important to attend business networking events. They have a social aspect but are primarily created as places to develop mutually beneficial business relationships.

4 Simple but Powerful Questions to Ask of Every New Contact

  1. “What do you do?”
  2. “How long have you been doing that?”
  3. “What do you like best about what you do?”
  4. “How would I know if someone in my circle of contacts would be a good referral for you?”

The first three questions provide an opportunity for the other person to talk about themselves, which everyone likes doing. They also allow you to start building a bond and relationship by getting to know about the other person and their interests.

The last question is the key. It will make you stand out and also serve notice to the other person that you want to help them grow their business. (Remember: you give before you get.) At the same time, it plants a seed in their mind that this in turn is also what you are there to do.

You now have a simple but very effective network marketing plan.

At your next networking event, remember to ask these four simple questions. Doing so will give you the confidence to feel like you’re where you want to be and know exactly what you’re doing there.

It’s the difference between feeling like a fish out of water and being a fisherman at the best fishing hole in town.

Beating Email Overwhelm

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Most business owners have a love/hate relationship with their email. Mostly hate. But like it or not, business owners and executives often “live” in their email inbox, so it makes sense to learn to control the beast before it controls us.

The first step in getting past email overwhelm is to clearly define who the boss is in this relationship: you or your email. That might sound like a silly question, but ask yourself if:

  • Your email client is set to automatically check for new messages every few minutes.
  • You read your email on multiple devices — computer, smartphone, iPad, etc.
  • You feel a compulsive need to see who is sending you email as soon as you hear the sound that indicates a new message has arrived.

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are not in control of your email. It is in control of you, and you need to fix that.

Begin by setting a schedule for checking and responding to your email. That might mean 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at noon, and 30 minutes at the end of the work day. Choosing specific times to check your email isn’t as important as making an effort to not allow email to remain the time thief it currently is. You set the schedule. That’s the first and most important step.

When you begin to follow this schedule consistently, you train customers and friends who have come to expect an immediate response to realize that even though you don’t respond instantly anymore, you will respond… but on your schedule.

The urgent messages will still find you. You can let your important clients know about your schedule and that they can still call you if there’s something that truly can’t wait. Also consider setting up folders and rules. Use your email client to automatically sort your email into folders based on the subject or sender, then when it’s time to check your mail, you will easily be able to find the most important messages first.

Getting past email overwhelm isn’t hard, but it does require conscious decisions and actions on your part. The first step is to simply decide to take control over your inbox.

The next step is to create a system to control the incoming daily emails. Make four folders and label them “to read,” “to do,” “to answer,” and “maybe.” File your emails accordingly. Your goal is to leave your inbox with zero messages by the end of each day. Now, during your allotted email time, you can first respond to any new and urgent emails and then file the rest. In the time you have left, you can begin working your way through the folders.

When it comes to taming the email inbox, there are three points to keep in mind:

  1. Be the boss — don’t let email have control over your life.
  2. Use email the way it was intended — and use other tools to handle the jobs email isn’t very good at.
  3. Keep your inbox clean — as with your office desk, clutter accumulates, so do your best to keep up with it.

Start mastering these simple concepts, and you’ll be well on your way to getting rid of email overwhelm for good.

Are You Doing Too Much?

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Once a business is established, it’s common practice to add products and services in the name of diversification and the desire for more profits. It’s a wise business move to choose products and services that will appeal to customers you’re already doing business with.

But what’s the point of diminishing returns? When does adding more products become less profitable or even start losing you money?

Lego is known for its beloved interlocking toy bricks. The company has been around since 1949. You and your children have probably built many fun projects using their colorful, iconic blocks.

As with many other successful brands, Lego decided to diversify. The Denmark-based company added games, movies, clothing lines, and six themed amusement parks (Legoland). Lego added many new colors to the primary colored bricks originally available. Costs were added at a much higher rate than new profits to pay for all this diversification.

The once very profitable company began bleeding red ink. A new CEO (Jorgen Vig Knudstrorp) was brought in to fix the problem. One of the first questions he asked was this: “What do we need to stop doing?”

Beginning in 2005, Lego sold the theme parks and whittled down half of the brick colors. They became more efficient and creative at doing what they were good at by concentrating on less rather than more. By the end of the same year, Lego was profitable again.

Sometimes the answer to doing more is to actually do less. Doing less frees up time and resources to concentrate on the key products and customers that bring you the bulk of your profits. If you have too many services or products, start considering what things you should stop doing, so you can focus instead on what really matters.

About Your About Us Page

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One of the primary reasons a prospect comes to a website is to learn more about a business. The prospect wants to learn not only what you do and how you do it but — more importantly — why you do it. There are many competing businesses in your industry and community. Statistics have shown that one of the most visited pages on any company website is the About Us page.

Why is that? Whether you are a B2B or a B2C company, your prospects are people first. So it’s natural for them to want to know more about the people behind the company they’re considering working with. Prospects hire the people in the business, not just a faceless company.

Unfortunate Reality

The sad truth is that most company About Us pages are filled with industry jargon. Or they’re carbon copies of all the other websites in their space. This makes them boring to read and easy to bypass quickly.

Clues

You know you’ve landed on one of these About Us pages when the page is filled with boastful claim after boastful claim. You see words like “industry leading,” “unique solutions,” “award winning,” and “innovative brand.” With eyes glazed over, most visitors can’t exit these pages fast enough.

People want to learn about people. They already know about what you do from the other pages on your website. The About Us page should focus instead on why you do what you do.

How to Fix It

If your About Us page has these issues, the good news is it’s not difficult to fix. You need to get a pen and pad of paper. As you sit to think about re-writing the page, don’t be afraid to let some personality shine through.

Your About Us page is a selling tool. To sell more of what you do, you have to get the visitor to establish a bond with your company and trust you. To establish this bond, you must let the visitor know the people behind the company. A big part of your brand is your company culture. Your About Us page is an opportunity to tell visitors your story and what your culture is about.

Here are eight ideas to think about as you create the content for your About Us page. Weave them into your brand story.

  1. How did the company start?
  2. Why are you in this business?
  3. Avoid all hype and jargon.
  4. Say what you want to say in as few words as possible.
  5. Include a few testimonials from happy clients. It won’t seem boastful if others do the advocating on your behalf.
  6. Make it personable and interesting. Don’t be afraid to show the human and vulnerable side of your company. Your visitors aren’t perfect people either. So showing this side of your business allows your brand to connect and build a bond.
  7. Invite visitors to connect with you in other online places where you’re active (LinkedIn, Facebook, blog).
  8. Tell them where to go and what to do next. This is the “call to action” part of the page.

Tell them not just what you do and how you do it. Instead, tell the visitor why you do what you do. Your About Us page is the perfect place to share that message with the world.

Increase Your Facebook Following

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Even though Facebook has more than one billion active monthly users, many businesses still aren’t using it to its full potential. Here are a few easy ways to use Facebook to increase exposure, communicate with customers, and grow your business:

  • Offer Facebook fan-only specials that are promoted to fans who currently “like” your page. Encourage them to stay tuned for future deals as well.
  • Use Facebook as a quick way to spread the word on exciting flash sales that have short time windows to act.
  • Run contests via your Facebook page. Remember to read Facebook’s contest rules first, though, so you don’t violate any inadvertently.
  • Ask thought-provoking questions, create quizzes, and post survey links to encourage fan participation.
  • Add a Facebook social media widget that enables users to like your page without having to search for you on Facebook.
  • Include a Facebook link in your email signature, on your website, and on printed pieces such as business cards, receipts, statement stuffers, table tents, and newsletters.
  • Share exciting news about your company by posting updates on your Facebook page.
  • Don’t forget that Facebook is a social website. Use it as a way to communicate with your audience, rather than simply to promote your brand. Post interesting content you think will be relevant to your audience, and encourage people to share your posts and to comment on them.
  • Post photos from company gatherings, including grand openings, customer appreciation events, staff outings, and other celebrations. Encourage fans to tag themselves in the photos. This will allow their friends to see the photos and increase your exposure.
  • Request input and involve your fans in product decisions, such as new product launches, celebratory events, and preferred customer rewards. Share responses on your wall, and thank fans for their contributions.
  • Schedule posts in advance to be published at a later time to ensure your messages are delivered at the optimal time to reach your audience. Check out this Facebook help center post for step-by-step instructions on scheduling a post.

Like most types of marketing, Facebook requires dedication. While immediate results are unlikely, a well-nurtured Facebook account can help many organizations strengthen relationships and grow their business.