Mine Your Own Business

6 Tips to Build Small Business Credibility

Every small business owner knows how important it is to establish the credibility of your business, after all if people doesn't have trust in your product, customer service, and overall business performance they will go somewhere else. A recent article described how for almost 100 years the Better Business Burea (BBB) had been one of the best methods for establishing the credibilty of a small business. It then went on to reference a recent controversy on BBB's current rating system. This got me curious about the controversy so I did a Google search and found this article that gives some very interesting background if your curiosity is aroused as mine was.

Back to the article, it recommends the following six tips that any business owner can take to build business credibility:

1. Start a Blog
2. Encourage Customer Reviews
3. Post Testimonials and Endorsements
4. Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
5. Be Easy to Reach
6. Reward Referrals

Probably not all of these will work for your particular business and obviously some are better than others. The three I like the best are Encourage Customer Reviews, Post Testimonials and Endorsements, and Reward Referrals. All three of them have one thing in common, they are providing actual feed back from current customers to prospective customers. What better way to build your business credibilty?

 

 

Boost for your Small Business

It seems like those innovative people at Google are always coming up with some new tool prospective customers can use to find your business. We've posted several times on different Google tools, Google Local Tags being our most recent post. Now Google has come out with Boost which is a location based product for local businesses bullt on Google places. The ads can contain basic location information as well as information aimed at consumers such as star ratings, number of reviews received and other information.

You can read about all the details of this new product at Google Gives Local Businesses an Advertising Boost. There is even a great image of what Boost ads will look like so yu can better visualize how it would work for your business. One of the final points the article makes is that Boost is designed to compete in the future with Facenook Places. Currently Facebook Faces is not selling ads for this product, alhough some preliminary guidelines have already been released. Stay tuned to see how this all works out.

Small Business Web Tools

We recently ran across a new resource for small businesses (at least new to us) at SmallBusinessComputing. There a lots of links on the site to all sorts of valuable information for your small business. They also had an interesting article titled 3 Web Tools for Small Business Marketing that presented the following online businesses:

• E-ssistance
• TubeMogul
• PrintingForLess

The first business is sort of like an online assistant that you don't have to train, pay benefits, provide with insurance, etc. The second will distribure any video you've created for your business to YouTube, Google video and many more. The third business is a full-service printing Web site for brochures, business cards, etc. Your business may not need any of these services at this point, but it might be something to keep in mind for the future.

One final point is that PrintingForLess has a very nice testimonial page that even includes some video clips. Small businesses often don't toot their own horn enough, after all if your customers are thrilled with your company it certainly doesn't hurt to share their praise with other prospective customers. We recently had a very positive experience with some new equipment we bought and would have liked to share that on their Web site, but they didn't have a place to post anything.

 

The "So What" Test and Advertising

A few days ago we posted about a great article on getting Free Advertising in Mine Your Own Business. One of the things we discussed first was the difficulty of deciding on the most effective advertising mediums for your business. Unfortunately that is only half of the advertising dilemna for a small business owner. Let's assume you've developed the perfect advertising avenues to reach prospective customers and they actually see (or read or hear) your pitch, how do you make sure the content will be persuasive?

A recent article suggested using the "so what" test on your advertising message. It is a very short article that you can read in less than five minutes, but it promotes a very effective way to evaluate your advertising content. For each statement, the article suggests imagining your prospective customer saying "so what" to your statement. Simply make sure your message explains why that part of the message is important for the customer.

The article provides a couple of good examples, but the one I liked best was a refrigerator door with a textured finish. I had no idea before i read the article why that would be a selling point so I did a quick, impromptu survey of some of my co-workers and none of them knew either. The answer to the "so what" test is that the finish masks annoying fingerprints.

Free Advertising

All small business owners know that advertising is usually expensive. Another problem is deciding what type of advertising is the most cost effective for your particular business. Is it newspaper, radio, TV, Web....the list goes on and on and even ineffective advertising still costs you money. What if you could get free advertising? I ran across a great article from the Wall Street Journal with an idea I'd never heard or considered. Why not take advantage of advertising someone else paid for, your competitor who has gone out of business?

The article describes how signs and ads are paid for in advance for a few months or more, so when a business goes fails you can take advantage of their advertising. The article suggests you call the phone number on the competion's signs and ads. If the phone rings go on to the next ad. If you get a recorded message, call the phone company and have them redirect that number to your business line. Pretty clever, isn't it? When a prospective customer calls, just tell the the company went out of business and that you would be happy to help them.

The article continues with some ideas for other free advertising. What about using old trade-show directories, abandoned fax numbers and Web domains? There are tons of possibilities and for once you don't have to worry about what is the most effective for the cost because they are all free (or almost free).

 

 

Sales and Existing Customers

We've done postings before on how much cheaper and easier it is for small business owners to increase sales through existing customers as opposed to searching for new customers. In fact we did a a posting a little over a year ago (my how time flies) comparing your existing customers to oranges or baskets of oranges. In that posting they had a list of ways to increase your sales from your current customers. Now comes an article that provides five different ways in the the article Five Ways to Increase Sales From Existing Customers in which they suggest:

1. Show your face.
2. Ask customers what they need.
3. Sell additional services.
4. Exceed expectations.
5. Incentivise your employees.

These are good general suggestions, but it got me curious. I wondered what some of Tacony Corporation's most successful sewing machine dealers were doing to increase sales to their existing customers, so I visited a few Web sites and got a few great ideas. All of the stores hold classes on a regular basis, post sewing projects, and have special offers. Some of the sites posted testimonials and coupons and brought in celebrity instructors. Notice a trend here? All are designed to keep customers excited and coming back to your Web site or store even in an off season, if you have one.

A couple of other ideas are to hold a new machine owners' lunch once a quarter at your store. Or how about a a tailored e-mail to new machine purchasers with suggestions as to how they can get the most out of their new machine? Last but not least, how about a yearly event such as we posted about here (the event is mentioned in the last third of the posting). Do you have any other suggestions to add?

Google Local Tags

It seems Google is constantly developing new tools for small businesses. We did a quick check using The Internet category on the right side of this page and found out that we've done at least four postings in 2009 and 2010 on new tools Google has developed. Small Business Trends did a recent posting on Google's Local Tabs that describes how for $25 a month small business owners can add a yellow tag to their listing to highlight some aspect of their business, and even included an image on how that would look.

The article mentions that the tag could be used to mention a coupon, a video, your Web site, or maybe even a current sales event. Another new kind of Tag is Posts that allow a custom message to be posted that can be changed any time something new comes up. The cost is very reasonable and it would certainly be worth experimenting to see if a Tag for a specific coupon draws in business for that coupon, especially if you don't mention it in any other form of promotion.

Small Business and Brands

We ran across an interesting article on Bloomberg Business Week titled Manage Brand Fanatics and Brand Detractors that began with the question "What causes customers to fall in love with a small business or to hate it?". It started out by discussing problem customers and the rising trend about negative comments about a business that appear on the Internet (it seems with increasing frequency). The article makes the point that some customers are not going to like your business no matter what, but you can listen to their comments and allow your employees to try tom improve the situation. There are a lot of great links to other postings that give even more detail on handling this difficult situation.

The other side of the coin is how you can get customers to love your small business. The article mentions a couple of options and you can check them out. One of the suggestions we really liked is to create an event that happens once a year and make it a really fun event. We have found first hand here at Tacony Corporation that this is can be extremely effective and we have a great example.

One of our strategic business units, Nancy's Notions, had their first Sewing Weekend 25 years ago to celebrate the grand opening of their first official warehouse. 500 people attended, light refreshments were provided, and there was one seminar before the warehouse was opened for shopping. This year Sewing Weekend was from May 6th through the 8th and there were nearly 3,000 attendees. They could choose from 8 educational seminars, 6 hands-on workshops, free stage demonstrations, and more. The warehouse sale is also a very popular part of the event. This is always a successful, exciting, and fun-filled event that our customers appreciate and this is a great example of an event that gets people enthused about Nancy's Notions.

Is Print Advertising Dead?

We've done a lot of posting on social media and online advertising but only one recently on print advertising, so when we ran across an article in USA Today with a slightly different slant we thought it might be worth revisiting this topic. The article begins by questioning whether print advertising is dead as some critics say. The article maintains that similar to Mark Twain's famous quote "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." By the way I had to look this up on the Internet to make sure I got the quote right and you may be more familiar with this misquote "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

The article maintains that print advertising is still very definitely a worthwhile option and emphasizes the following benefits:

1. It is highly targeted
2. It does not evaporate
3. It is great for branding

Be sure and read the whole article for the reasons behind these three points and as an added bonus there are some statistics on improved small business confidence near the end of the article that we all might find encouraging.

Local and Social with Google

We did a posting in July of last year in Slick new Google tool how Google was improving their search by using a Google gadget to improve driving directions and improve local results. We all know that Google has never been a company to rest on one's laurels, so they have been working hard on improving search results by showing what is located closest to the searcher's neighborhood. Small Business Trends presents a very good summary on Google's new Nearby search option, as well as links that provide more detailed information. Check out the whole article on all the changes to Google to improve local search results.

Google has also been working on improving social search results so live news, tweets, and blogs post directly to the search results. The latest source to pull contents into search results is Facebook and the article describes how important it is for business owners make sure your Facebook Fan page is up to date with sales, events, and other important happenings at your business. There is a lot more information in the article on how important this is to market your business, and three excellent links near the bottom of the article on improving your Facebook Fan pages and getting people to join it.