Business Saavy Tips

According to the Nielsen Company’s recent Social Media Report, social networks and blogs reach nearly 80 percent of active internet users in the U.S. Social media has not only become a medium by which many people have shared their life stories, but more and more businesses are also using social media to share their brand’s message. Because social media is still a fairly new medium of marketing, businesses have yet to fully understand how to make a deeper, more personal connection with customers or potential customers via these platforms. It’s easy enough to post company news and blast special deals to people, but if you really want to build a powerful community of people who will happily promote your products or services, your social media strategy must...

Try as you may, you simply cannot avoid the presence of social media in today’s society. Everywhere you look, you see the familiar icons of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media applications on a variety of different informational outlets, from Web sites and blogs to more traditional marketing pieces such as print advertisements and television commercials. What started as a venue for people to communicate amongst themselves and share information with family and friends has turned into an increasingly important marketing component of businesses of all sizes. A growing number of consumers, especially younger ones, will visit a business’ social media site as readily as they would its main Web site. This creates a perfect marketing opportunity for a...

No one could argue that our world isn’t changing fast—and I don’t mean just technology-wise. Consumers aren’t spending like they once did, manufacturing and shipping costs are fluctuating wildly, and the age of the environment is slowly (finally) being ushered in. On top of that, the Internet has finally really changed the way people shop and buy – not to mention the way we entrepreneurs market our businesses. If you don’t change your business, and your marketing, to keep up with changing times you can easily become another failure statistic. Think about it…five years ago MySpace was all the rage. Since then its usage has dropped dramatically, you hardly ever hear about it anymore. You never run into a business owner giving MySpace any time or...

Let’s face it, starting a business can be very easy, but stayingin business can be very difficult given that our customers have too many choices on where to spend their hard-earned cash.  So the question I posed to small business owners was “How do you make your business stand out from the crowd so that people will choose to spend their dollars with you?”  Here are 30 of the best responses that I received from businesses located all over the world!  I hope there’s a few that resonate with you.   1. Give ‘Em What They Want   For us, at The Burger Dive, it was all about offering something that we didn’t think our city really had, and that we believed would be wanted. Our city is overflowing with fast food burger chains, and a couple of...

With the amount of Christmas online spending continuing to grow each year and the competition in the search results being at its most intense, what can you do to make sure you increase your sales and take a bigger slice of that Christmas spend? In this blog post I’ll highlight some changes you can make to your website, their desired effect and some examples of how they work in practice. At this time of year it is more important than ever to make your customers feel reassured with their purchase. 1. Create a dedicated Christmas section on your website highlighting products suitable for Christmas gifts and add this section to the main navigation of your website to make it prominent. 2. Offer clear delivery information on how long deliveries will take and the...

Home business professionals: we are a strong bunch. We’re smart, resourceful and most of us own our own business. We are also tenacious about figuring things out on our own. At some point, though, there is a level of frustration with a task or project. Overcoming frustration can be a matter of perspective. Here are three tips when you’re ready to throw up your hands and give up:   1. Recognizing that we do, in fact, have limits of knowledge. Oh I know, you can do it all. I get that. I’m not insulting your intelligence (or mine, for that matter). The fact is, we just can’t know it all. (Insert appalled look here.)   There are so many moving parts to any business, not to mention all the tools and technology it takes to KEEP it...