Tag Small Business / SOHO

Entries 38 Total

Busting a few blogging myths for small businesses

Feb 4, ’12 2:59 PM
Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Blogging, Business Marketing, Marketing/PR

When I speak to business owners, whether to a group or one on one, about social media and, particularly, blogging, I often get a sense of unease in the room.

A lot of that is to do with people’s fears about writing, being wrong, being creative, having enough time, criticism from others etc etc.

This post aims to bust a few myths about blogging is and is not, from my perspective and was inspired by an exchange I had with another blogger on this site, Lorraine Allman, the other day on Twitter where I shared my perspective on blogging and what it is to me.

Lorraine Allman tweet

So, let’s bust a few blogging myths:

  • A great blogger does not need to be a trained writer. Like Seth Godin says in Talker’s block write like you talk. Everyone has something to say.
  • Blogging is like a muscle. You have to train yourself to get better. However, with practice you do get better.
  • When you blog, you don’t have to be right.
  • Blogging is about sharing your opinion, your analysis, your perspective.
  • Blogging lets people know what you stand for, should be part of your branding efforts. In a world, where many of us are looking for a more personal approach to doing business with a company or a person this is a great way for you, your personality and your thoughts to reach beyond you needing to be there.
  • A blog post doesn’t need to be long. In fact, some of the best blog posts I have ever seen are short.
  • A blog post doesn’t need to be written. It could be a video or a sketch or a photo or an audio recording (podcast) or a slideshow or……

Shall we blog?

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The mindset of small business

Nov 29, ’11 9:53 PM
Author Lorraine Allman Categories Business Infographics, Business Psychology, Micro Business, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business / SOHO

I recently came across a couple of interesting INFOGRAPHICS relating to small and micro-enterprises in the UK and USA which I would like to share with you.  The first is from the UK based on research from Smarta – the DNA of Sole Traders. In a nutshell it says that UK sole traders are ‘motivated by freedom; are web-savvy but use a spread sheet to do their accounts; go to bed late, don’t have a pension and don’t like the government’.

DNA of a Sole Trader

DNA of a Sole Trader

The second is the US ‘Small Business Happiness Index’ indicating that 77% of micro-businesses are happy or extremely happy that they work for themselves; have more customers than they did at the start of the year; welcome expert advice on a whole range of business issues and rely heavily on referrals as the most effective marketing tactic.

Given the economic climate world-wide and the lack of support generally for micro-enterprises (by this I mean businesses employing 0-10 people, including sole traders) it’s a wonder we’re not all shutting up shop and yet the number of new business start-ups continues to grow. In the face of adversity, feeling the pressure of economic downturns, established small businesses are clinging on and making the best of what they have, and it would appear remaining optimistic and positive about working for themselves.

Later this week, the Enterprise Rockers web site re-launches with a brand new look and clear mission – to make life better and fairer for micro-enterprises. For this to succeed, the positivity and energy of small business needs to be channelled into supporting each other through inter-trading, improving the quality and value of essential services, and finding a united voice which stands out loud and clear that micro-businesses matter, that micro-businesses make a positive difference to our communities, our economies, and to the general wellbeing of our countries. The tenacity, resilience, perseverance, flexibility and absolute self-belief in what they are doing make micro-business a force to be reckoned with.

There is much to be learnt from the mindset of small business – isn’t it time to start listening?

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‘Build it and they will come’ leaves too much to chance

Nov 28, ’11 10:06 AM
Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Marketing/PR

There’s an old adage “Build it and they will come”. I’m not sure where it originates from but it was popularised by James Earl Jones, playing Terence Mann, when speaking to Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, in the film: Field of Dreams.

I’ve heard this seen and heard this idea used in business, particularly by retail or e-commerce websites or hotels or restaurants.

However, this particular sentiment leaves me with the questions: Come where? And, how will they know where to come to?

‘Build it and they will come’ leaves too much to chance. Too often have I seen business owners and managers take refuge in or get caught up finessing or fretting about their product/process/service or technology or website and forget about finding, attracting and securing customers. This can be a very natural thing to do as more often than not it is the delivery of something that has taken you into business in the first place.

However, although I tend to forget the finer details of many of the economic theories that I have learnt in the past (I am an economist by training so please do forgive me!), I never forget the fundamental concept of supply and demand.

Marketing (and I include selling in this) is the demand part of the equation and is of equal importance to everything you do to ensure that you supply great products, services or experiences to your customers. Without demand there will be nobody to supply to or rather you leave your ability to supply too much to chance. It’s basic economics.

Are you leaving too much to chance in your business?

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Building better relations with your customers starts at the end

Nov 18, ’11 12:11 PM
Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Ideas, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur, Failure, Generation-Y, Generation-Y, Personal Business, Relationships, Relationships, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, grow your business

Today, I want to tell you a personal story of doing new things, taking risks, being innovative and being willing to fail in the quest to create something of value for my business, the people that I know, the small business community and my customers.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

We live in changing times. We live in times where the power of the consumer is rising and it is changing everything. We live in times where harnessing the power of relationships with our customers and our employees is becoming more and more key to our future growth and innovation.

Therefore, the onus on business leaders to learn, share ideas and network is rising as we think about how we grow our businesses.

There are many events in existence for businesses but these can be:

  • Either for large or very small businesses;
  • Organised by professional or trade associations and vendors of some sorts;
  • Filled with talks/speakers that talk for around an hour that are ultimately trying to show you how smart they are or are trying to sell you something; and
  • Don’t offer enough time for attendees to network, talk about and debate the issues that are presented.

Therefore, we thought it’d be great to develop and deliver an event for established small businesses, especially those with growing teams, across sectors.

In order to do this and to try and create a truly different event, we first started by describing the customer experience ie. what did we want the potential attendees to feel after they attended our event.

Here’s what we came up with:

Imagine this.

An event where you get to the end of the day and your attendance has solved a number of your most pressing problems, you have heard some great people speak, you have met a number of great contacts and your head is full of ideas for the future of your business. So much so, that when we hold the next one that you’ll want to bring a number of business contacts along it was so good.

Does that sound good?

Why did we do it this way? Well, rather than being lead by the features of our products or services, we started with the end in mind as we believe that is a better way to create something that will have an enduring emotional connection and value with our customers.

With that in mind we developed RARE Forum (www.rareforum.co.uk), an event that is:

  • A place to share ideas, experiences and to discuss and debate the issues of the day;
  • Not focused on selling anything (although there was be a price to attend);
  • Filled with with a number of punchy 20min speaker slots (TED style) centred around a theme;
  • Full of facilitated networking and debate;
  • Where the whole day will be recorded (video) and made available via the website to the attendees for them to watch again at a later date or share with their team and contacts; and
  • Where the output of discussions and answers to Qs posed by speakers will be collated and made available via a digital resource.

All this thinking and development was done earlier this year and I am pleased to say that on the 3rd November at The Drill Hall in Central London we held our first RARE Forum under the theme: ‘Business is Personal’. Talks over the course of the day covered subjects like:

  • Business is personal and why it’s getting more so
  • Unearthing killer customer insights
  • The world is changing fast, how can we keep up and change with it
  • How you can use your customers to help rally your troops?
  • Creating a customer centric business
  • What does being a leader mean in this new world?
  • Generation Y and Z and the future of the talent pool
  • What will our customers want in the future?

The day was a great success and was the first of many, we hope. We are now busy making plans for what happens next.

One of the things that we promised to do was to capture the ‘story of the day’ afterwards so that we could share that with the attendees as an aide-mémoire and as a way of capturing the essence of the day. You can check out the ‘story’ by following the link below. You really should take a look it as it includes all of the slides that the presenters used, pictures from the day, some sketches from our artist in residence and a whole set of tweets from our twitter hashtag: #rareforum. It’s also been done on Storify which means it looks pretty cool even if I do say so myself.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

For the team involved and myself personally it was a huge learning experience. Both exciting and scary in equal measure. What it did teach me, however, was that starting with the potential attendees, my customers, and what sort of experience and feeling I wanted to create for them helped give us a better understand of not what to do. But, more importantly, what not to do. Once we understood that we had a great platform to build from.

Another big lesson that I learnt is that if you want to make your business great, if you want to stand out from your competitors then you have to be willing to fail in public. However, done with the right intention and in the right way the actual risk of failure gets much, much smaller.

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Inbound marketing – it’s new and it’s hard but we must get better at it

Nov 9, ’11 10:00 AM
Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Business Trends, Marketing/PR, Online Marketing, Small Business / SOHO, market and sell

There’s two types of marketing. The first is outbound and it’s largely about ‘buying’ attention, whether through print, TV, radio, banner advertising or cold calling. We’re familiar with this type of marketing as we learn about it at school and college, we see it on TV, hear it on the radio, see it all around us, read about it in many marketing 101 books and have experienced it throughout our working lives.

However, in recent years we have become more jaded and less trusting of what businesses say about themselves (ie. outbound marketing or paid media) due to the rise of the internet, how that impacts how we search and buy and how we are placing more store in reviews and recommendations.

Enter a different type of marketing: inbound marketing.

Recently, there was a great article and infographic across at Mashable called Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC] all about this topic that you should check out. The folks across at Voltier Digital produced a great infographic that highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing. Statistics from the article highlight the decline in outbound marketing where:

  • 44% of direct mail is never opened, wasting a huge amount of time, paper and postage.
  • 86% of people skip through or just skip the adverts on TV by going to make a cup of tea.
  • 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have left a website due to an irrelevant or intrusive ad.
  • The cost per lead in outbound marketing is more than for inbound marketing.

So, what is inbound marketing? Well, it’s a style of marketing that helps a company get found by it’s customers. The sort of tools that you might use in inbound marketing could include:

  • White papers
  • Ebooks
  • Blogs
  • Search engine optimisation
  • Podcasts
  • Infographics
  • etc

Aha!, I hear you say. It’s what we’ve been doing already with a fancy new badge.

No, not exactly. It’s not about packaging, it’s more about approach. I wrote about this on my own blog a little while ago in Is your marketing both interesting and interested? and what I was saying was that inbound marketing is not about buying attention, it’s not about broadcasting your message and it’s not about trying to more ‘interesting’ than your neighbour or competitor. Inbound marketing focuses on producing materials and campaigns that are ‘interested’ in and useful to your customers.

This is what people are looking for, this is what people will share, this is what will fuel your retention, this is what will help you get found and this is what will drive your sales in future.

However, this is profoundly different to how we have been taught marketing and how most of us do it right now.

That means it’s not going to be easy to do as it’s new and it requires a different set of skills than the ones that many of us have already learnt.

However, all of us, including small and micro businesses, need to get better at it if we are to compete.

What does that mean? Well, one thing that is clear is that all businesses need to get better at writing, and writing a lot, if we are to produce the type of content and material that is going to help us get found.

One thing you could do is to start dusting off your writing skills or start finding the ‘writers’ in your team. You never know, they could be your marketing stars of the future.

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The true cost of trade-marking

Oct 30, ’11 5:04 AM
Author Lorraine Allman Categories Business Startup, Micro Business

There’s been some interesting publicity of late about large corporations fiercely protecting their registered trade marks. Simon Cowell is currently embroiled in a potential trade mark infringement with voluntary organisation Rhythmix and that well known company Apple are threatening a small family run coffee shop in Bonn with infringement of their Apple logo

All this got me thinking about the true cost of Trade Marking. The actual protection process itself can be relatively affordable if you want to register say just in the UK under 2 classifications. Multiple territories and classifications means costs start to mount, but add to that the time and costs involved with monitoring and then taking action should there be an infringement, well that’s a fair chunk of money.

Big companies usually have deep pockets but this is not often the case for smaller enterprises. You have to balance up the value of a trade mark or multiple marks for your business against the costs of monitoring and potentially having to take action should someone blatantly copy or infringe your mark.

I’ve been through the Trade Marking process on two separate occasions; once when establishing one of the first UK online business information portals and secondly more recently to protect my company name.  The first time, we instructed a Trade Mark Attorney to complete the registration for us across a number of territories and to ensure continued monitoring for potential infringements. We hadn’t trade marked anything before and on first look it seemed to be a complex process so appointing professionals seemed the best approach. The attorneys were put to good use a while after successful registration as a couple of potential infringements appeared but were swiftly dealt with. The financial cost was significant to us, however the attorney’s argument of course was that this was not as significant should the company infringing continued to trade on our company name and goodwill. Fair point.

Second time around we’ve decided to do it ourselves as we are keeping things relatively straightforward by registering in just one territory (the UK), were clearly able to identify the classes to be registered in, and used the Right Start system through the Intellectual Property Office (UK) so could pay by 2 instalments – a helpful option when cash flow is tight.

It’s too early to say yet whether doing it ourselves this far will prove to be the better option. I guess it depends on whether anyone tries to register or trade under a similar name. But let’s be clear about one thing – simply securing a registered trade mark is not enough. You have to be prepared to monitor changes and new marks for infringements (you can pay for a trade mark watching service starting at around £110+ per class per year), monitor new company registrations and trading companies, and be prepared to spend the money to take action should someone attempt to copy or infringe your mark. If my company discovers someone is infringing our mark then we will almost certainly need professional help to defend that mark.

Do I have a view on what’s going to happen between Apple and the coffee-shop? Well I’m not a lawyer but to my eyes I can see no infringement of their apple logo at all. I really hope in this case the small business wins but I can’t help wondering at what cost….

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Small Business IT, SEO and Social Media Trends

Oct 4, ’11 5:22 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Business Trends

I just read one of the best blog posts by Dion Hinchcliffe about “The Big Five IT trends of the next half decade“. In my opinion Dion is spot on, you should read his blog post to gain a valuable insight not only from an IT perspective.

To get you interested here is his graphic for the post, which really says it all:

Small Business IT, SEO and Social Media Trends

21st century IT, SEO and online marketing trends are unavoidable and a crucial ingredient for future business success. Changes are faster and more frequent than they have ever been.

Your engagement in these technologies is needed NOW.

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It’s more than only about the cloud

Sep 29, ’11 8:11 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Business Psychology

I went to a Kleinwort Benson Entrepreneur Forum last night and invariably cloud computing came up as a discussion point. On the way home it got me thinking about what makes my customers special, is it all about cloud computing, do they get it or is it even important to them?

We recently had looked at our client base and we looked at how old businesses are and how long clients had been with us, how many had gone out of business and so on. The mortality rate of our clients is way below the national average, in fact over 23% lower.

Surely that must be the result of our great cloud computing small business framework – software, e-commerce and services – right?

Wrong, the fact is our clients don’t care about anything like that. The don’t care about cloud computing, having the greatest and flashiest website or our services.

They care about their business, they care about their clients, they care about their staff, they are passionate about their business, they love doing what they do and most of all, they are focused.

Software, website and many other things are mere distractions to them. They expect us to do our end of the deal, to provide them with their small business framework and apart from that get out of their way.

To our clients, we are just a small cog in the finely tuned machine they call their business.

That is what makes them different and successful.

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The Small Business Blog Is Changing.

Sep 26, ’11 4:48 PM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories SME-Blog

After five and a half years writing articles about small business issues on this blog, I am going to follow many of my fellow bloggers and open my blog permanently up to a select group of interesting and relevant authors for my readership.

In the next few weeks I will start introducing new authors with the aim to make my blog even more relevant and offer more insight into other aspects of running a micro business or small business.

I hope you will enjoy the new content. As always please come and join me (us) on our Facebook page for comment and discussion of the topics covered or anything else related to small business.

First up is Adrian Swinscoe, his first contribution will be on Wednesday.

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Big Business working with SMEs/SMBs

Aug 6, ’11 8:51 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories NASDAQ Small Business

Over on my NASDAQ.com column I have just posted an article about how big business can work with SMEs and SMBs. All to often big businesses fail at the first hurdle to engage with small business – read on….

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