3 Proven way to grow your business by focusing your customer

Every business in this generation is surrounded with a variety of various challenges. It would be easy to just roll over and sink. Sadly many companies are even getting to the point where simply surviving has become their daily mode of operation. They’re cutting their marketing budget, laying off people and, unfortunately, worrying about their bottom line more than they do the customer. 

Growing your business and being a successful businessman is always challenging but growing your business is not also your ultimate goal as well. You have to grow your business, make reputation, bring maximum customers, increase sales volume and raise your profit. maximizing the profit is your ultimate goal. For all of this you need to hit in the mind of your customer that your product is the best option for them. That means you have to focus on customer to achieve ultimate goal of raising profit.

But the customer matters more than anything, and, believe it or not, customers and clients aren't as hard to reach as you might think.

You just have to focus on the customer, and the customer only. Because customers are your god. If they love you  can survive and if they don’t love you, you have to sacrifice your business. It isn't new advice, but it resonates now more than ever. Good old fashioned business works online and in social media because it revolves around people more than anything. It doesn’t depend on pictures, links or making sure your advertisement is mentioned 87 times in a week. It puts the customer at the focus of things and makes serving them the number one priority in the company. It is always true that the company which gives the priority to their customers more than anything else have better reputation and better performance.

Blogging Can be a Business

As a small business owner or even a corporation that is looking for some ‘revival’ to take place in your culture, take a look at how you got to where you are. Never forget what initially made the customer feel the most important, don’t forget the long nights of coming up with unique ways to stand out so people felt special. These strategies last even as everyone else rolls over and cries, “Economic crisis!”

Has the going gotten rough? Try these three strategies for growing your business instantly, but putting your focus back on the customer.

Have a conversation

Always do two way communications with customers. Listen them, know their desire, requirements and problems and try to full convince them. Use social media to stretch your ad dollars by engaging directly with your clients. Don’t depend on automated tools to do the work for you. You want ROI? Then have a relationship with your customers, just like the merchants of old did many years ago over a counter top.

Talk back. That’s an ingenious idea. Stop tweeting and posting and sending out your sales message 800 times a week. Care about people. Talk back to them! Real engagement is not how often your link gets clicked or your picture gets liked, it’s about people caring enough to verbally answer, engage and have relationship with you.

Simple Keys for Success

Hit the stationery store

Want to increase customer loyalty and your email open rates? Then send out a handwritten thank you card to every single person who buys something from you, even if it’s a digital product. What you do daily with your clients influences your email campaigns.

It’s important to be the one sender that they LOVE to receive mail from. Be the one they can’t wait to hear from, just like a good friend. Your company's emails should be a favorite. We want to hear customers say things like, “I have a special folder for your emails so I don’t miss a thing!” This means you won, and your open rates will tell the rest.

Obsess about them. 

Top 20 Reasons for business failure

Want to blow the socks off of your competitors and increase your sales? Then start obsessing about your customers and quit worrying about your bottom line all day. Your customers are your bottom line. Ignore them and you have a beautiful recipe for failure.

This whole “be less and don’t compete and just be content with where you are” is a pathetic scheme to disable the entrepreneurial spirit from our world. You were created to fight.

Life is not a playground. It is a battlefield. Inside every entrepreneur is a dream that if pursued and won, and I believe with all of my heart, the entire world benefits from this. This is about more than just dollars and ROI, it’s about economic change, creating jobs and creating a better world. The wealth will follow the entrepreneurs who resist the status quo and do everything they can to serve well.

Be more as a company. Your customers deserve it.

Continue reading 3 Proven way to grow your business by focusing your customer

Top 20 Reasons for Business Failure!

We youth people love business and want to be a great business person, some of us start our business with a big hope and big courage and do well as well. But business will not success all time. sometimes it may get failure as well. it is not necessary that all new business fails sometimes old and established business may fail as well. so here I am trying to give some ideas about the reason behind failure of business so that you can find your mistakes with two examples.

Last week, when I was enjoying my weekend leave, a friend of mine called me and proposed for the meeting. And I was agreed. It was long time we didn’t meet each other. We had completed our graduation from the same college and were best friends. After the graduation, I started to work in a bank and he started his family business. His father is a reputed businessman and he is handling one of his father’s businesses than.  In these three years we have done few contacts each other but were not in regular touch.

Is blogging a business

That day in our meeting after few formalities, he opens the main secret of this plan for meeting. He was in frustration. And want to share me. According to him, he started his family business before 3 years. He was happy enough and had some enthusiasm and some eager to do something. He wanted to pick of this business new height and earn more profit. He has knowledge as well and father gave some ideas as well. But after three years the business is in same stage. There is no loss he is earning profit as well but fails to increase significantly. According to him he is fail in the business. That’s way he is frustrated.

Another example is also here. In the office I have to meet various customers daily. Some of them are regular and well known. So I have been interacting them regularly. On day a customer, who is a reputed businessman, was in frustration. I couldn’t do long interaction with him but according to him the business is not like before and is in down falling.

Set targets make your way simple

After listening the problems, style of their business, marketing strategy and other all aspect of these two I have found that there are some significant reasons for the failure of business. In most of case we don’t know the reasons why we are failing, so that we can not apply corrective action. For the correction of the mistakes we have to know our mistakes. In these above two cases both were not aware about their mistakes and are unable to pick up their business. So I decide to write a blog post so that other businessperson who are doing business and who want to start business shouldn’t be suffer from this problem. I will write about how to pick up the downfall business but at first let’s find your mistakes.

So in most of cases the reason for the failure of business are follows:

• Lack of self belief: when you are doing your work(business) you have to believe yourself and must do work with confidence. But if you  lack your confidence problem appears there.
• Overspending: Many new entrepreneurs burn through their startup capital before their cash flow is positive. This often happens because of misconceptions about how business operates. If you’re just starting out, seek out seasoned veterans you can turn to for advice before making big expenditures.
• Lack of reserve capital: Be prepared for unexpected increases in the costs of things like utilities, materials, and labor. Make sure you keep enough reserve cash to carry you through tough times and seasonal slowdowns.

                           Simple keys for success

• Poor choice of location: Don’t let a cheap lease tempt you into choosing the wrong location. Consider competition (how many similar businesses are located nearby?) and accessibility (is the area well served by freeways, public transportation, and foot traffic?).
• Poor cash flow: Cash flow is the life blood of your business, without it you cannot survive. Even the most profitable firms can find  themselves going out of business because their cash is tied up in unpaid invoices.
• Lack of focus: If your business is trying to be everything to every man, then you're bound to overstretch yourself and your resources. By establishing a niche for your business and focusing on being great at what you do best, you will provide better service and create more satisfied customers. Without focus and achievable goals, many businesses find it hard to set priorities and achieve their full potential.
• Lack of planning: The most important document that any business has is its business plan, which documents what you intend to achieve during the next 12 months and how you plan to do it. This needs to be communicated to everyone in the business to ensure everyone is working for the same goal.
• Poor execution: Poor customer service and overall employee incompetence will quickly sink your business. Make sure your employees place a premium on customer service. Develop systems and processes for how tasks should be accomplished, and create internal controls to monitor them.
• Rapid Growth: Every now and then a business startup grows much faster than it can keep up with. You open a website with a trending product and suddenly you are inundated with orders you are not able to fill. Or perhaps the opposite is true. You are so convinced that your product is going to take the world by storm that you invest heavily and order way too much inventory and now you can’t move it. These are both additional paths to business failure.
• Following trend: The ability to recognize opportunities and be flexible enough to adapt is crucial to surviving and thriving. Learn how to wear multiple hats, respond nimbly, and develop new areas of expertise. If you apply your old strategy and style always then that may not work with the change in time.

                                22 tips to be a great entrepreneur

• Wrong People: The problem may with the people around you. If your employees are wrong, don’t have knowledge, lazy and don’t following your instruction clearly your business can’t go smoothly.
• No performance monitoring: So you have a plan, but that's not the end of it. You should constantly review your progress to ensure you're meeting your business goals and that your staffs are meeting their personal potential.
• Ineffective marketing: Customers can’t do business with you if they don’t know you’re there. It doesn’t cost a lot to advertise and promote your business through online marketing, social media, email, local search, and more.
• Underestimating the competition: Customer loyalty doesn’t just happen — you have to earn it. Watch your competition and stay one step ahead of them. If you don’t take care of your customers, your competition will.
• Not understanding your customer: To be successful in business you need to have your finger on the pulse and constantly adapt your business to meet the changing needs of your target market. A businessman needs to understand the needs and requirement of their customer and provide such service. But sometimes businesses fail there.
• Poor management structure: Leadership has to start at the top of the company, but there is more to the success of a business than the owner. Hiring the right people to delegate responsibility to, who you can trust to carry your business forward, is crucial.
• Insufficient funding: Without new investment flowing into businesses, many companies have found it difficult to grow – even if demand for their product exists. Bank funding has become increasingly harder to come by in the recent years, but alternative source of finance are available including grants, peer-to-peer lending and funding marketplaces.
• Not want to take risk: sometimes there may come opportunity while taking risk. But if you afraid to take risk and continue with business in old fashion there may be the chance of being failure.

                        Do you want to achieve your goals?? It's easy

Now it's your turn to find some other reasons for business failure! If you want to share them comment below in the comment box! Thank You!

Continue reading Top 20 Reasons for Business Failure!

3 Ways to Grow Your Business By Focusing on the Customer

Every business in this generation is being hit with a variety of challenges. It would be easy to just roll over and sink. Sadly many companies are even getting to the point where simply surviving has become their daily mode of operation. They’re cutting their marketing budget, laying off people and, unfortunately, worrying about their bottom line more than they do the customer.

But the customer matters more than anything, and, believe it or not, customers and clients aren't as hard to reach as you might think.

You just have to focus on the customer, and the customer only. It isn't new advice, but it resonates now more than ever. Good old fashioned business works online and in social media because it revolves around people more than anything. It doesn’t depend on pictures, links or making sure your advertisement is mentioned 87 times in a week. It puts the customer at the focus of things and makes serving them the number one priority in the company.

As a small business owner or even a corporation that is looking for some ‘revival’ to take place in your culture, take a look at how you got to where you are. Never forget what initially made the customer feel the most important, don’t forget the long nights of coming up with unique ways to stand out so people felt special. These strategies last even as everyone else rolls over and cries, “Economic crisis!”

Has the going gotten rough? Try these three strategies for growing your business instantly, but putting your focus back on the customer.

Have a conversation. Use social media to stretch your ad dollars by engaging directly with your clients. Don’t depend on automated tools to do the work for you. You want ROI? Then have a relationship with your customers, just like the merchants of old did many years ago over a countertop.

Talk back. That’s an ingenious idea. Stop tweeting and posting and sending out your sales message 800 times a week. Care about people. Talk back to them! Real engagement is not how often your link gets clicked or your picture gets liked, it’s about people caring enough to verbally answer, engage and have relationship with you.

Hit the stationery store. Want to increase customer loyalty and your email open rates? Then send out a handwritten thank you card to every single person who buys something from you, even if it’s a digital product. What you do daily with your clients influences your email campaigns.

It’s important to be the one sender that they LOVE to receive mail from. Be the one they can’t wait to hear from, just like a good friend. Your company's emails should be a favorite. We want to hear customers say things like, “I have a special folder for your emails so I don’t miss a thing!” This means you won, and your open rates will tell the rest.

Obsess about them. Want to blow the socks off of your competitors and increase your sales? Then start obsessing about your customers and quit worrying about your bottom line all day. Your customers are your bottom line. Ignore them and you have a beautiful recipe for failure.

This whole “be less and don’t compete and just be content with where you are” is a pathetic scheme to disable the entrepreneurial spirit from our world. You were created to fight.

Life is not a playground. It is a battlefield. Inside every entrepreneur is a dream that if pursued and won, and I believe with all of my heart, the entire world benefits from this. This is about more than just dollars and ROI, it’s about economic change, creating jobs and creating a better world. The wealth will follow the entrepreneurs who resist the status quo and do everything they can to serve well.

Be more as a company. Your customers deserve it.

Continue reading 3 Ways to Grow Your Business By Focusing on the Customer

7 Stupid Branding Mistakes Your Small Business is Making

When you think about great branding, Coca Cola’s distinctive red and white lettering, Nike’s swoosh and Adidas’s three stripes likely come to mind.  But as a small business, imagining the level of investment that’s gone into these iconic images can make the thought of undertaking your own branding initiative seem overwhelming.

It’s actually easier to do than most imagine. Just make sure to avoid some common pitfalls and branding mistakes.

1. Not understanding the power of a brand. From a customer-relationship perspective, having a strong brand is obviously advantageous.  For instance, when people think of online shoe purchases, they think of Zappos. You want to have that kind of immediate, definitive relationship with your buyers as well.

Defining your brand is also valuable from an SEO perspective.  It’s something of an open secret that Google likes to prioritize branded listings in its organic search results, since visitors are more likely to click on them.  More clicks tends to equal happier customers, which means that focusing on brand building could lead to unexpected website traffic and awareness benefits.

2. Forgetting to establish defined brand guidelines. So you know that your company may to develop a brand, but what exactly does that mean?  When creating a brand identity, you’ll want to establish defined guidelines that cover all of the following elements (as well as any others that are relevant to your field). Here are a few points to consider.

• Logo (both an overarching logo and any logo lockups your company uses for individual product lines)

• Brand colors

• Taglines

• Fonts and typography

• The “voice” used in your branded materials

• Imagery

• Mascots and spokespeople

Clearly, this list isn’t comprehensive.  If there’s some other branding characteristic you feel is necessary to define your business, go ahead and add it to your brand guidelines documentation.  The worst thing you could do is to avoid creating these important documents altogether.  Without them, your branding efforts will lack the consistency and direction needed for success.

3. Overcomplicating your brand. Take a look at how Coca Cola’s classic script logo has changed since its first usage in 1887.  While the fonts used have varied slightly, the original look is still largely intact after more than 127 years of service.

Small businesses can learn a lesson from this beverage industry giant.  When initiating the branding process, it can be tempting to add more variables than you truly need.  But your logo doesn’t need to involve six different colors, and it doesn’t need to have six individual graphic elements to represent the different arms of your company.  Clean, simple elements are more likely to be recognized and remembered by consumers, so steer clear of overcomplicating your company’s branded elements.

Related: 

4. Falling into the vague branding trap. But then again, don’t go the opposite direction and develop brand guidelines and elements that reveal nothing about your company and its value proposition.  Chances are you’ve seen this before in generic logos or in marketing language that’s downright repetitive. For example “best-selling” books, “championship” golf courses and “award-winning” ad agencies really don't mean anything.

Daniel Burstein, director of editorial content for MECLABS calls this type of lazy branding “wallpaper copywriting” or the use of vague, catch-all nonsense that’s been repeated so often it’s lost all meaning. 

So what’s the solution?  Clear language, logos and imagery.  For a great example, take a look at the following screenshot of mobile-payment processor Square’s landing page.  Not only does the company’s logo mimic the product in a way that’s unmistakable, the value proposition stated in the company’s tagline “Start accepting credit cards today” is clear.  

5. "Cheating” on your brand guidelines. So you’ve sat down, crafted careful brand guidelines and begun implementing them across all of your company’s marketing materials and online properties.  But two months down the road, you need to create a new ad for a product line you’re launching, and it’d be really great if you could use a few colors outside of the palette you specified out in your branding documentation.

Can you do it?  Of course you can. But keep in mind, every time you deviate from your stated brand guidelines, you dilute their power by some small amount.  By doing so, you’re essentially introducing a new brand image to your customers, diminishing the strength of the association they’d have to a more unified branding campaign. 

6. Not policing your brand’s usage. Developing and implementing your small business’s brand guidelines is only half the battle.  In addition, you’ve got to be proactive about monitoring where and how others are using your branded elements on your behalf. If not, you could have competitors creating a logo that looks similar, a review website using your logo and not linking back or a partner publishing an ad featuring your logo but with the wrong colors.

Some of these issues may be minor, but in other situations, it may be necessary to pursue legal action if you feel your branded elements are being infringed upon. 

7. Rolling out brand changes poorly. There’s nothing wrong with rebranding. That is, unless you approach it poorly.  Bear in mind any changes you make to your established brand reduces the connection you’ve built with your customers.  Therefore, it’s important to only make changes when the benefits truly outweigh the risks of losing business. If you do decide to make an alteration, you need to clearly educate your followers on the changes you’re making.

While branding is certainly a marketing discipline in its own right, it doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.  Good intentions -- and avoidance of the mistakes described above -- will go a long way towards helping your small business form vital connections with your target customers.

Continue reading 7 Stupid Branding Mistakes Your Small Business is Making

Lacking Motivation? Follow These Steps to Get Back on Track.

Not long ago, a business owner who reads my column asked me this question:

I was wondering what do you do when your motivation level is lacking, as well as your self esteem? What do you do to regain the motivation needed to move on with your plans and pursue your networking endeavors?

This is a great question, and here’s my answer:

First of all, let me say that I am as certain of what I’m about to say as anything in my life: Motivation comes from within you, not from outside you. No one can motivate you but yourself. I’m speaking long-term motivation. Many years ago, author Frederick Herzberg wrote about motivation in the Harvard Business Review, where he said that others can motivate you but only in the short term. He called that KITA (Kick in the… Anatomy – that’s really what he called it).

On the other hand, long-term motivation comes from within. So, that begs the question: As a business person, how do you motivate yourself when your motivation is low?

First, you should understand that virtually all people have to deal with this at some point throughout their professional lives. I’ve never met anyone who was immune to this (I certainly am not). So, what do I do as an entrepreneur and businessman when I feel down?

Here are some of the things that have helped me:

1. Minimize contact with negative people. This isn’t always completely possible but do it as much as you can.  At least do this for a short while. I really believe that some people complain as though it were an Olympic event! Keep clear of them while you are trying to get your mojo back.

2. Maximize time with people that refuel your energy. You become the five or six people with whom you hang out the most. Hang out with people who make you want to “do” and “be” better.  Set some meetings with them.  Go to some business events together – anything that puts positive people around you.

3. Read/listen/watch positive things. If you are feeling down, read a positive book. Listen to an audiobook or podcast with a positive message. Watch something that makes you laugh. Surround yourself with some things you love to be influenced by. Let that in to your life as much as possible.

4. Prioritize the things you want to do and must do. Make a list. As a businessman, I live by lists. The more I can get a handle on the things I need and want to do – the easier it is to tackle them.

5. Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Take that list you’ve created and tackle some of that list EVERY DAY. If you really do this, you will be amazed at how much you get accomplished. The more you accomplish, the better you will feel. They feed each other.

There’s plenty more we can do to generate motivation, but I believe the list above is a good start. Also, keep this in mind: If your motivation is low it helps to step out of the small picture (the day-to-day) and remember the big picture (why are you doing what you do?). Allow yourself to be motivated by your bigger vision, and let goals drive you. Remembering why you are doing what you do in business can most certainly help you find some new energy to keep going.

If you’re still struggling with motivation after reading and trying the above, one of my friends had a great suggestion: Let your to-do list (suggestion no. 4) be driven by a short-term goal: What would you like to achieve in the next week or -- at most -- next month, that inspires you to act today? A small “win” can be very motivating.

Continue reading Lacking Motivation? Follow These Steps to Get Back on Track.