Up and Running Blog

November 2011

Three Inexpensive Ways to Create Buzz for Your Business

by Guest Author on November 3, 2011

Wherever you are in the world, you’d have to have been hiding pretty well to escape all the news of economic gloom and doom. Markets are taking a rollercoaster ride as people speculate what will happen in both Europe and America, while the growth in the Far East that was supposed to be helping has so far not materialized.

This could not have been timed much worse if you are running a small business, with the peak time for many companies, Christmas, fast approaching. Many are  scratching their heads, wondering whether to invest in marketing and promotions or hold on to their cash and brace themselves for what might happen in the future.

So what promotional activities can you undertake in the lead up to the holiday season whilst keeping an eye on the dark clouds that are gathering on the horizon? The key is value for the money, so let’s take a look at where your efforts should lie.

PR
Newspaper and magazine advertising has been perceived as a dying art for some time, but newspaper and media exposure can still be an important way of getting your name known. There is one problem with this however — cost.

Using a simple bit of PR and getting it seen by the right people can be one way in which to appear in publications without paying the high costs demanded by their advertising departments. Use a bit of imagination and come up with something newsworthy that your company can be involved in. For example, do something for charity or to help the local community to get some local press coverage.

Another tactic is to distribute questionnaires and quizzes to your customers  to find lots of interesting ideas on which to base your press release. UK company called Engraved Gift Ideas did this, found out that This one questionnaire led to a press release that captured valuable national press coverage in newspapers and on radio. Best of all, it cost next to nothing!

Online
The days of ignoring online marketing are well and truly gone, and many businesses could not survive without the money brought in by traffic to their website. Using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be quite expensive, but it shouldn’t cost you the earth to do some basic optimization on your site so that you appear higher in Google’s organic rankings.

Don’t be intimidated by the technical side of thing. If you’re running your site by yourself, now might be the time to invest in a little training to help you make the most of your online presence. Then, with a  few little tweaks, you could make a big difference to your online visibility. Take the time to research Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and see how you can drive new traffic to your site.

Promotional Gifts
Building and maintaining relationships with clients is an important part of running a business and with the festive season coming up, now is a good time to look at sending promotional gifts.

The days of giving holiday gifts to everyone in your database are long gone, but using promotional gifts to maintain relationships with your best clients can be an effective way of keeping their custom.

The headlines might make for gloomy reading but a little investment in the right places now could help you ride out the rough times that are to come. With the holiday season on the horizon, the opportunity is there to insulate yourself against the worst of the downturn. While it may seem a little scary to invest money now, the quality of how you spend on promotion ,rather than the quantity, will help to put you in the best possible position should the worst case scenarios come true.

Author Bio:
Alan Grainger is an in-house B2B web marketer in the promotional gifts sector and manages SEO for The Promotional Gifts Company. He writes articles exploring the issues faced by the B2B web marketer, giving an “in the trenches” view from an in-house SEO department. Follow him @alanjgrainger.

{ 2 comments }

The Right Time for Business Planning

by Tim Berry on November 2, 2011

(This was first published last week as a guest post on richardduffy.com, where my friend Richard Duffy offers information, tools, and insight for SAP Business One users.)

When’s the right time for business planning? My favorite answer is from an old African proverb (or so I was told; I got it from Twitter):sapling

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Given the increasing pace of change, and the needs of a business to anticipate, track, and manage that change, the right kind of business planning is something that happens regularly, and continues forever.

Real planning isn’t a business plan document; it’s management. It’s setting strategy, tactics, activities, responsibilities, and budgets, plus the numerical goals and measurements required to track progress towards goals.

Much like the proverb about the tree would imply, it’s hard to get started, but more because people misunderstand the tool and the process than because it’s really hard. To help motivate yourself as you start, jump in and do parts of the plan without worrying about finishing a complete document. Start where you like: some prefer the context, such as vision statement or objectives. Some prefer the strategy, like target market and product-market mix. And some prefer the nuts and bolts, like the sales forecast. Try to think of your plan as a connected set of components or modules. Think of it as something that will change often, and therefore should remain flexible.

Don’t worry about having a finished plan. In the real world, if your business plan is finished, then it’s already obsolete. If your plan is finished, then your business is finished.

As soon as you get started with a plan, set a review schedule in advance. Don’t take too much time, but do set up a monthly review. In my company we always did that on the third Thursday of the month, around lunch time, so we ordered lunch in to save time.

Always list your assumptions. You’ll start your monthly meetings by listing your main assumptions and discussing how well they have held up. One key to the difficult question of when to revise a plan is to identify when assumptions have changed.

In plan review meetings, stay collaborative. The comparison between planned results and actual results isn’t a tool to catch people who underperform their measurements; instead, it’s to catch performance problems early and to work together to solve problems. It’s also to catch things that are working, and adjust priority to make sure resources match strategy and opportunity.

In the early stages, planning process is pushing things forward because they should be considered. As your organization gets used to planning processw, it becomes hard to imagine how you ever managed without it.

{ 2 comments }

BPG_GoodBizLeadBeingPrepared-300x205

Good Leadership Skills Means Being Prepared

by Linda Finkle on November 1, 2011

Last week I found a website on business preparedness launched by the SBA. The website indicates that roughly 40-60 percent of small businesses never reopen their doors following a disaster. They defined disaster as long-term power outages, hacker disruption, fire, earthquake or other catastrophes. I’m confident many of you reading this post have disaster recovery plans for your technology and maybe have addressed the other possibilities through insurance options. Congratulations for your good business leadership skills. It made me think, though, that being prepared isn’t just about disasters. Yet we often focus our preparedness on dealing with disasters, should they occur, and not on the week-to-week or month-to-month preparedness that would be helpful to the business or our company.

I think good business leadership means being prepared for all eventualities. Here are some examples.

What happens if a key person in your organization leaves? Recently one of my clients had an employee leave who was the only person in her company who performed a certain critical task. In her words, “I feel like it’s Hiroshima.” She’s now hiring a replacement and intends to train three people to handle this role so she’s never so vulnerable again.

The same question relates to customers. What if your key customer/client leaves? Do you have enough business with others to weather the situation, or will you find yourself out of business? Consider hiccups that can arise with projects, such as delays, outcomes different than expected, or the project’s going totally awry. Even situations such as a family illness or emergencies, staff vacations or illness, and weather can play havoc if you are ill prepared or not prepared at all.

Don’t let your focus on disaster recovery interfere with running your company. Good business leadership is being prepared for any
eventuality, disasters being just one of them.

 

{ 1 comment }

Newer Posts »