Marketing Basics

5 Tips for Targeting Your Ideal Start-Up Customer Generating lots of traffic is only part of the battle. Here are some tips to help you avoid the blunders of blind traffic generation.    How to Add Personality to Your Loyalty Program Webinar: Smarter Online Marketing With John Jantsch Gary Vaynerchuk on Keeping it Real With Customers Why Your New Neighbors May Hold the Key to Your Business...

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How to Break Bad News to Clients

Delivering bad news to a client is an unpleasant task for any small business owner, but we all face tough conversations such as asking for a budget increase or deadline extension. Learning to do it effectively can turn an uncomfortable situation into one that improves your relationship with the client and boosts your credibility. Problems and mistakes are common during any project, so how you handle...

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How to Build Trust to Pave the Road to Wealth

In their book "No B.S. Trust-Based Marketing," authors Dan S. Kennedy and Matt Zagula detail strategies to build and maintain trust in your business, and in turn attract both customers and profits. In this edited excerpt, the authors explain how gaining customers through trust builds long-term equity, earnings potential and, ultimately, wealth. I've long believed that, rather than getting customers to make sales, it...

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Overcoming the Groupon Effect: How to Sell Merchants on Your Start-Up Deal Site

If you're sick of the daily barrage deal-site emails that flood your inbox, imagine what it's like for business owners. The field of daily-deal sites, which includes giants like Groupon, Living Social and Google Offers, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Not only are niche sites sprouting for kosher and vegan foodies, but there's even a daily-deals website for digitally distributed goods and online services. ...

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Why Your New Neighbors May Hold the Key to Your Business Success (Infographic)

Of course you know that finding loyal customers is important to your business’s success. But you might be surprised to learn that new residents may be bringing in more business than long-time residents. According to data compiled by Welcomemat Services, an Atlanta-based marketing company, new residents spend more in their first six months in town than an established resident does over three years. The top five small businesses most...

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Gary Vaynerchuk on Keeping it Real With Customers

In this special feature of 'Ask Entrepreneur,' Facebook fan Amanda Henry asks: How do I develop a relationship with a customer without being overly aggressive? Interact with your customers on social media channels that are important to them, and on topics outside of just the business. Why? Because it's fundamental that you understand who your customers are, outside of whatever it is you are hoping to monetize. As an investor,...

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Webinar: Smarter Online Marketing With John Jantsch

If you're marketing a small business and don’t know of John Jantsch, maybe you should. A marketing expert, Jantsch is best known for his blog Duct Tape Marketing and his book of the same name. His specialty is in simple, low-cost and effective marketing. It's always in high demand among business owners. That's why were excited to host a one-hour webinar with Jantsch, Wed. Nov. 14. The session, titled 7 Stages of a Total Online Presence, ...

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How to Add Personality to Your Loyalty Program

Photography by Bob Stefko Having his cake: Belly's Logan LaHive (left). inShare Regardless of what a small business sells--sandwiches, car washes, dog food--its customer-loyalty strategy usually consists of some variation of "Buy 10, get one free." But after that free coffee or frozen yogurt, what's next? At FoBoGro (short for Foggy Bottom Grocery)...

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5 Tips for Targeting Your Ideal Start-Up Customer

There's a big difference between visitors and customers. The logic is simple: Would you rather your startup have 10,000 monthly visitors to its site with a 10 percent sales conversion or attract the attention of 100,000 visitors with only a few finally deciding to buy from you? This question, as simplistic as it is, remains a big source of frustration for many online entrepreneurs. They often invest a...

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A Better Business Plan Can Lead to New Customers

These four steps can help get you on your way to enhancing and expanding your client base. One thing almost all small businesses need is more sales. John Doerr, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said that at a recent event I attended. Everyone in the audience -- which was made up of several hundred entrepreneurs, investors and service providers -- agreed. I wondered: How can good business planning help you find new customers? The key is to take a step back from your daily routine...

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Updating Your Business Plan

Our coach explains why constantly updating your business plan is the key to growing successfully. "When should I update my business plan?" The answer to that question is always. You should be updating your business plan every month, every week and every day; whenever things change, you update your plan. And things always change. You should update your business plan when you're alone in the shower, when you're caught in traffic on the way to work, and when you're walking alone. Update your business plan when...

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The Ingredients of a Marketing Plan

Ready to get it all down on paper, but not sure where to put it? We'll help you with the format and elements of your marketing plan. Every how-to book on the market has a different take on the essential elements of a marketing plan. Those geared toward the big corporate crowd communicate in a language few human beings understand. However, the words you use are much less important than how seriously you approach the task. This section outlines the key elements you need to include in your...

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How To Write A Business Plan

Now that you understand why you need a business plan and you've spent some time doing your homework gathering the information you need to create one, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get everything down on paper. The following pages will describe in detail the seven essential sections of a business plan: what you should include, what you shouldn't include, how to work the numbers and additional...

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3 Tools That Can Take the Headaches Out of Hiring and HR

Growing and managing a workforce is almost never easy. And when it comes to staffing up, business owners have to juggle issues such as tracking resumes, analyzing candidates and other human resources obligations. For smaller firms, the difficulties associated with managing these duties can often be amplified. The good news is there are several useful tools that can help. Though they will not replace a physical HR manager,...

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Plan Your Plan

How Will You Use Your Plan Believe it or not, part of planning your plan is planning what you'll do with it. No, we haven't gone crazy--at least not yet. A business plan can be used for several things, from monitoring your company's progress toward goals to enticing key employees to join your firm. Deciding how you intend to use yours is an important part of preparing to write it. Do you intend to use your plan to help you raise money? In that case, you'll have to focus very carefully on the executive summary, the management,...

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Plan Your Plan

Your Financing Goals It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to make a lot of money, but it does take some. That's especially true if, as part of examining your goals and objectives, you envision very rapid growth. Energetic, optimistic entrepreneurs often tend to believe that sales growth will take care of everything, that they'll be able to fund their own growth by generating profits. However, this is rarely the case, for one simple reason: You usually have to pay your own suppliers before your customers pay you. This cash...

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Plan Your Plan

Before you put pen to paper, find out how to assess your business's goals and objectives. You've decided to write a business plan, and you're ready to get started. Congratulations. You've just greatly increased the chances that your business venture will succeed. But before you start drafting your plan, you need to--you guessed it--plan your draft. One of the most important reasons to plan your plan is that you may be held accountable for the projections and proposals it contains. That's especially true if you use your plan to...

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Your Business Plan Guide

A business plan is a written description of your business’s future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you’ve written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan. Business plans are inherently strategic. You start here, today, with certain resources and abilities. You want to get to a there, a point in the future...

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Do You Really Need a Business Plan?

The experts aren't so sure--but entrepreneurs like the founders of Roaring lion energy drink say it's a must. here's how to know if writing a business plan is for you. Starting a business was the last thing on Sean Hackney's mind when he sat down to write a business plan. Hoping to persuade a soft drink company to hire him, Hackney scripted a plan for taking on his former employer, Red Bull North America Inc. But when he showed it to his corporate attorney father and former Red Bull managing director, "they...

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An Introduction to Business Plans

Who Needs a Business Plan? About the only person who doesn't need a business plan is one who's not going into business. You don't need a plan to start a hobby or to moonlight from your regular job. But anybody beginning or extending a venture that will consume significant resources of money, energy or time, and that is expected to return a profit, should take the time to draft some kind of plan. Startups. The classic business plan writer is an entrepreneur seeking funds to help start a new venture. Many, many great...

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