Archive for August, 2011

What is Packaging? A Chance to Enhance Your Brand

By | August 31, 2011 | Micro Business Issues, Micro Business Tips, Retaining Customers | No comments

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Chances are you have probably ordered something from Amazon, Omaha Steaks, RueLaLa or Zappos at some point recently.

When you receive a shipment from one of these companies you are getting much more than the product that you ordered, even though you might not even realize it. While delivering the shoes, steaks, books or clothing in a reliable fashion is all you may care about, to these companies the packaging is a useful marketing and branding tool that should not be overlooked.

If you don’t believe it take a look at the box for your next online order. You’ll see that each one of these companies has branded the packaging. This allows them to increase brand awareness as the package gets shipped from warehouses to your door. Every time the package is handled or seen, another person has been exposed to their brand.

While you might not have the budget of Amazon for your packaging, you can still leverage their shipping methods to turn your packages into traveling billboards.

Below are three ways to increase your brand exposure on your packaging without breaking the bank.

Stickers – In general cardboard boxes are dull. You can easily liven up the white or brown canvas with a full-color sticker that shows off your company name, logo and website on it. And stickers are a very cost effective way to quickly and easily liven up a package.

Custom Labels – If you don’t have the budget for stickers and want to still show off your business name, you can either purchase or print up your own custom shipping labels. These look more professional than a hand-written address and help reinforce your company in the customer’s mind.

Stamps – A good solution if you are shipping out merchandise in paper envelopes is a rubber stamp. Unlike stickers or a label, this option will not increase postage, but will also allow you to increase your brand exposure as the envelope gets sent from point A to point B.

Have you seen any great examples of micro businesses branding their packaging? Do you currently brand yours? If so, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Looking at the History of the Small Business Administration (SBA)

By | August 29, 2011 | Business Stories, Micro Business Issues | 1 Comment

We came across this interesting infographic around the history of the Small Business Administration (SBA). Remarkably, the SBA has been helping kick start millions (over 20 million to be more specific) small businesses over the past 60 years. Here are some more interesting facts about the Small Business Administration you may be interested in.

While discussing the SBA, we’d be interested to hear your experiences with this group.  Have you  reached out to them to help get your micro business up and running?

Micro Business Roundup

By | August 26, 2011 | Micro Business Issues, Micro Business Roundup | No comments

Hello everyone and happy Friday! Much like running a micro business, you never know what you’re going to encounter living in the Northeast. From experiencing a rare earthquake earlier this week, to expecting hurricane-like conditions over the weekend, it’s never a dull moment. In this week’s edition of the Micro Business Roundup, we’ve compiled five great articles on small and micro business that you may have missed this week. Topics range tips to make your business more efficient to steps to make your SEO efforts payoff better for you. Please be sure to let us know if there are any articles that we may have missed in the comments below. Please have a safe and relaxing weekend!

5 Tips to Make Your Small Business More Efficient – Whether you realize it or not, the efficiency in which you run your micro business can determine how smoothly your company runs, as well as how successful it becomes. No matter how efficient you may be, it never hurts to review your activities and see how you can become better. To help get you started, feel free to check out these five tips from SmallBizDaily.com. Our favorite tip was don’t be to be superman/superwoman.

When Giving Away Your Product Or Service For Free Is A Smart Move – As most of you who read this site know, much of Vistaprint’s success is credited to it’s ability to give products away to help attract (and retain) customers. If you’re thinking about giving away your product or service for free to help generate customers, there’s a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. This recent OpenForum.com post showcases a small business that gave away it’s product and the gains and setbacks they experienced in doing so. Have you ever given your product away? What were the results?

Choosing Between Profits and Growth – It’s a nice choice to have… do you gear your business towards short-term profits? Or do you look at long-term growth? Businesses of all sizes are different in what they want. To help give you some prospective, this New York Times article looks at one company that is in the midst of making this decision. If asked today, what direction are you guiding your business? Obviously both are always welcome, but when making decisions, what thought process are you thinking?

How to Craft Your Personal Brand Statement – Does your micro business have a personal brand statement? If you do not, we highly recommend checking out this recent article from SmallBizTrends.com. Not only does it shed light on why you should have a personal brand statement, but it also offers tips on how to help you get started.

How Should a Small Business Plan Their SEO? – It’s a valid question… how are you planning your SEO strategy? We’ve discussed SEO planning a lot on Micro Business Perspectives, but we wanted to offer an outside opinion on the subject. This recent BigMarketingSmallBusiness.com article takes you through six easy steps to help evaluate your SEO thought-process and help make you more effective. How has your recent SEO efforts worked out?

 

Image courtesy of scoremonroe.org

Best Approach to Potential Investors

By | August 25, 2011 | Micro Business Tips Thursday | 3 Comments

In this week’s edition of Micro Business Tips Thursday, we asked the Vistaprint Facebook community about financing. With all this talk of debt ceilings and economic uncertainty, how are new entrepreneurs going about getting their funding? What tactics are working for them? To find out, we posed the following question to the group: What is the best way to approach potential investors (banks/financial firms, family/friends, etc.) for your micro business?

Once again we received some great responses from our resident micro business owners. However, when the smoke cleared, we decided on one that stuck out from the rest. So thank you to Jeff Wyskiel for your feedback:

“Make sure your meeting is short, make it about an hour long but have a half an hour for answering questions after the presentation. You want the material to be fresh in their minds. Of course, keep it organized, concise, and to the point. Discuss the product you want to introduce to the marketplace, introduce the management team and their experience, then present a business plan and make it easy to understand, remember to always stick to the point. Afterwards, ask if anyone wants to ask questions and if there is nothing solid, restate some questions that they may want to ask and then keep those in mind for next time to constantly find ways to improve yourself. The biggest part of this is to always follow up because investors have very busy schedules, show determination until you finally have an answer.”

To see all of this week’s entries, please visit the post on our Facebook wall.

To continue the discussion, have you looked to funding to help start (or grow) your micro business? What worked for you? What didn’t? We’d love to hear your experiences below in the comment section.

Be sure to tune into our Facebook page next week for your chance to be featured on this blog.

 

Image courtesy of datacraftrockford.com

What Is a Customer Survey

By | August 22, 2011 | Micro Business Insight, Retaining Customers | No comments

Image courtesy of 89studios via freedigitalphotos.netCustomer feedback is priceless information for companies, but it can be a vital component for micro businesses and small business owners. Aside from seeing positive feedback from customers, businesses can also see areas that they need to improve upon via negative comments. While social networks have allowed companies to see an array of unsolicited feedback, it is often all over the grid and cannot be scaled to identify particular areas of strength or weakness.  In other words, it’s hard to corral the feedback and synthesize it into actionable data.

An easy way to get high quality feedback and identify customer pain points is to conduct a survey of your existing customer base via email. If you don’t have an email list of your customers, read this post around building an email list before reading on.

When you are ready to plan out a customer survey, be sure to keep the following in mind: 

What are you looking to learn? – When you plan a survey, it is important to outline what you want to learn from your customers. This direct approach will allow you to write the customer survey in a manner that generates the desired intelligence. For example, if you wanted to learn how courteous your staff was to customers you would ask questions like:

  • How helpful was our customer service staff?
  • Was your problem addressed in a reasonable amount of time?
  • What can our team do to make your experience with our company more pleasant?

Open ended answers vs. multiple choice – One of the things most survey tools allow you to do is gather feedback in a number of different ways.  For example, you can ask questions with pre-determined answers, or multiple choice questions.  Or you can ask questions that allow the customer to write in their own words the answers.  Your survey might be best served to have a mix of both, because you can then get some actionable data, like X% of customers found the wait staff to be “exceptionally helpful,” and you can find trends with free flowing answers to a question like, “what didn’t you like about your experience with us?”

What is in it for your customers? – While customers will often give you feedback for free, you are more likely to get a response if there is some sort of incentive for the customer. This can be anything from $5 off their next purchase or free shipping on their next order. This gratuity not only shows your customers that you value their time and input but also gives them a reason to return to your business.  You can let them know what the incentive is for taking the survey ahead of time, then give it out upon completion.

Tools of the trade – Aside from your customer email list the most important thing that you will need to conduct a survey is an online survey provider. This type of service will host your survey and tabulate the answers that your customers give you. Many of these services will even put the data into charts for you.  The cost associated with these tools varies; some free offerings include SurveyMonkey, Kwik Surveys and Zoomerang.

Once you have the data in hand, take time to look at it and digest what your customers had to say. If there are areas of dissatisfaction, line up ways to improve upon them. If your customers note that you are doing something well; be sure to keep it up – you don’t want to let them down.

It is also important to keep in mind that while your customers are a great resource to tap into, you want to be judicious about mailing them surveys. If you over-send these types of emails, you will see a decrease in participation and potentially email subscribers.

Have you surveyed your customer base?  If so, we’d love to hear what kinds of questions you asked in the comments below.

Micro Business Roundup

By | August 19, 2011 | Micro Business Issues, Micro Business Roundup | No comments

Hello everyone and happy Friday! In this week’s edition of the Micro Business Roundup, we’ve compiled five great articles on small and micro business that you may have missed this week. Topics range from finding customers BEFORE your micro business launches to a compilation of interesting quotes from some of the world’s best marketing minds. Please be sure to let us know if there are any articles that we may have missed in the comments below. Please have a safe and relaxing weekend!

Finding Customers Ahead of a Startup Launch — When setting up your micro business, there is a whirlwind of activities to be done. Write the business plan, figure out your financing, creating a marketing plan and many other important tasks. For many entrepreneurs, creating a pipeline of potential customers can be difficult without a product or service to show them upfront. In this recent Entrepreneur article, the author takes a look at a start-up tech company that’s success relied on lining up customers prior to launch. The piece offers a few helpful pieces of advice that you could adapt to your micro business start-up plans.

How 4 Companies Used Yelp to Woo Customers — Does your company monitor what is being said about you on the popular review site Yelp.com? If you are not, you should be. And if you are, are you curious about how you could be utilizing the site better to retain (and possibly gain) customers? This OpenForum.com post features four small businesses stories about how they utilized Yelp.com to provide jaw-dropping customer satisfaction. Does your micro business have a similar story to tell? Please feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.

What Satisfying Picky Customers Can Mean to Business — Has your micro business dealt with a hard to please customer? If you haven’t, chance are you will at some point during your company’s life cycle. No matter the size of the business, everyone is going to have a fussy customer or two (and possibly many more). This New York Times post discusses how you handle this small niche of your customer base (possibly 5% or so) can say a lot about how your business will operate.

5 Mistakes Businesses Make When Going Green — Going green just seems like the right thing to do, right? No one is ever going to look at your business and judge you negatively for doing your part. Surprisingly though, mistakes can be made when going green. In an attempt to help you identify what mistakes are commonly made, SmallBizTrends.com put together this top five list of going green mistakes that are made most often. Are you making any of these mistakes? Are you surprised to learn it was a mistake?

101 Marketing Quotes From the Best – Not really a small business tip post to pass along, but we came across this interesting compulation of quotes from some of the best marketers of all time. As you have time, look through the different quotes and let us know which ones really stick out to you. We came across far to many that we enjoyed to mention here!

 

Image: HowToLaunchAStartUp.com

What’s Been Working Lately to Drive New Customers?

By | August 18, 2011 | Micro Business Tips Thursday | 12 Comments
drive-traffic

In this week’s edition of Micro Business Tips Thursday, we asked the Vistaprint Facebook community about recent marketing tactics. While the summer months can be difficult for marketing and driving new business, the show must go on, right? So to find out what has been successful this summer, we posed the following question: What is the most effective thing you have done to drive new customers over the past month?

We again received a ton of great answers, but there was one that stuck out to us above the rest. So thank you to Carolyn Lemons Larson of Bennett Larson Photography for your response:

I like to send out thank you notes to people who have shown us even the slightest favors, especially in business (such as receptionists with whom we have spoken – trying to get to the decision makers, etc). And it seems like every time I stay on top of the thank you notes, and send out a batch of them, then suddenly more business starts coming our way… even from people who haven’t received a thank you note yet! I get a little lax about the thank you notes sometimes, but I sent out a batch of them at the beginning of this month, after skipping several months, and now new business is flowing our way. Also, we started setting daily sales goals starting this month, and we are reaching them. I think it has to do with having an attitude of gratitude, as they say. Not to mention our fine website and other great products we recently started buying from Vistaprint! Thanks so much for all your great products and services!

To see all of this week’s entries, please visit the post on our Facebook wall.

To continue the discussion, what have you done to attract new customers to your business in the past month? We’d love to hear in the comments below in the comment section.

Be sure to tune into our Facebook page next week for your chance to be featured on this blog.

Micro Business Marketing Terms

By | August 17, 2011 | Marketing, Micro Business Insight | No comments

Since late 2008 when we launched Micro Business Perspectives, we have sought out to give you the knowledge and guidance to help you make successful decisions for your micro business. As we’ve discussed different marketing subjects, we have often times quickly mentioned some key terminology that some readers have had questions on. In an attempt to help further grow the education of budding micro business entrepreneurs, we want to offer a few key marketing terms in an easy to digest format.

With that said, take a look at our first installment of micro business marketing terms we’ve received questions on. After reading please feel free to leave marketing terms you’d like to see outlined in the comment section below.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – The process put in place by micro businesses to help manage their customer relationships in an organized format. Often these systems will track all information for a customer including contact information, a communication record and sales history for each particular customer all in one system. Customer relationships should be one of the most important aspects of your micro business.

Expected Lifetime Value Of A Customer – This is how much profit you expect to make on any customer over the entire lifetime of your micro business. This formula can help you make long term decisions and how you go about obtaining new customers. To easily calculate this figure, you need to determine how much profit you make on your average customer and how long on your customers purchase from you average. The formula looks like this: Profit Per Year x Average Customer Duration In Years = Expected Lifetime Value Of A Customer

ROI (Return on Investment) – Is the ratio of money gained (or lost) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Many micro businesses will use ROI to compare how successful one marketing campaign was against another. For example, a $100 email marketing campaign could potential provide a higher ROI over one that cost $500, hence the importance of measuring ROI.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The practice of creating online content that will help increase your micro business website rank within different search engine results. Here are a few tips on how to improve the SEO of your website landing page.

Unique Impressions – The number of people who view a piece of your micro business marketing material (website, flyer, online advertisement, etc.). For example, if four people each view your website five times, the unique impressions would be four. However, total impressions would be 20. It’s important to remember the difference as some marketing companies will promise you high numbers of total impressions, which can be misleading towards how many individual people actually see your messaging.

 

Image courtesy of: HelloTrade.com

Micro Business Roundup

By | August 12, 2011 | Micro Business Roundup | No comments

Hope you had a great week and have some big plans for the weekend. In this week’s edition of the Micro Business Roundup, we’ve compiled five great articles on small and micro business that you may have missed this week. Topics range from the debt ceiling to entrepreneurship and keeping your business small. Let us know if there are any articles that we may have missed in the comments below.

Friendship6 Reasons to Keep Your Business Small – In our past research, we’ve seen that many of our customers would prefer to remain a micro business rather than grow to a mega company. This article in Inc. offers some additional reasons why small might not be so bad after all.

Small business news: the debt ceiling deal. Good for small biz, or not so much? – Last week congress raised the debt ceiling while also trimming the US government budget. While this was good for the country, its impact on small business is something that is still very much up in the air. This post on the Crowdspring blog offers eight ways that this deal may impact small business owners.

2 Ways to Get It All Done: Moving Your Business Forward No Matter What – Have you ever gotten stuck with your business and wondered how to keep things moving forward? This post from Jamilah Warner on Small Business Trends offers two areas to focus on that will keep you running strong.

How Does Your State Rank for Entrepreneurship? – This post from Inc. shows where each of the 50 states rank in terms of entrepreneurship according to a recent research report from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Why You Should Treat Every Customer Like An Influencer – Social media is changing the way companies interact with their customers. This post from Open Forum offers some interesting reasons as to why you may want to reconsider how you handle your customers.

Planning ahead – holiday marketing tips

By | August 11, 2011 | Micro Business Tips, Micro Business Tips Thursday | No comments

Holiday Cards

In this week’s edition of Micro Business Tips Thursday, we asked the Vistaprint Facebook community about holiday marketing. While the weather may still be hot, the holidays will be upon us before we know it. To help plan for this important marketing season, we posed the following question small business owners to consider: what is one marketing tactic that small business owners should utilize to help make the holidays a success?

Out of the dozens of great answers we received, our team selected this response from Heather Morissette as this week’s top tip:

Depending on the business type…if the business sells products and/or Services, Send a holiday card, and on the envelope, mention there is a holiday gift inside! And in the card, offer 2 generous gift cards,1 for them-around 30% off entire purchase, and the 2nd (for their friend!) could be 15-20% off. This way, they will come back and purchase with their 30% off, and they will bring their friend! Of course Branding is a must (the card, customized gift cards, envelopes) but so is getting the customers in. In this case, the business owners chances of seeing that customer and their friend soon after they receive the card, is extremely high. Hopefully they have an awesome experience there, and they tell all of their friends…Word of mouth is very effective!

To see all of this week’s entries, please visit the post on our Facebook wall.

How do you market your business over the holidays? We’d love to hear in the comments below.

Be sure to tune into our Facebook page next week for your chance to be featured on this blog.

 

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