Yelp Says It Can Generate $8,000 for Local Businesses

Yelp Says It Can Generate $8,000 for Local Businesses
How to Use Knowledge to Connect to Your Customer
Managing Your Small Business Inventory With InFlow Inventory
Go Remote: 10 Ways to Free Up Your Business With a Tablet

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 02:16 PM PDT

yelp revenue estimation tool

Yelp is trying to help small business owners quantify how much the company’s website is helping them.

The site announced a new feature, the Yelp Revenue Estimation Tool, that acts as a revenue calculator for business owners to determine how much money Yelp customer leads have generated.

The announcement of the new calculator comes on the heels of a study from Boston Consulting Group showing that local businesses had generated $8,000 per year through a free listing on Yelp and $23,000 annually if they were a Yelp advertiser, writes Matt Halprin, Yelp’s Vice President of Revenue and Analytics, in a post on the company’s official blog.

Of course, these figures should be used as examples and may be slightly exaggerated considering the source. The concept of putting a dollar figure on revenue generated from a particular web visit, however, is certainly interesting and different than trying to determine how much a page view from a particular ad campaign is worth to a company.

The Yelp Revenue Estimation Tool multiplies the number of leads Yelp claims to have sent to a particular business by an average amount that a customer will likely spend.

The study from Boston Consulting Group found that small businesses dedicate little of their advertising budgets to online resources such as Yelp, just 3 percent, according to the study.

In the report, authors Sebastian DiGrande, David Knox, Kate Manfred, and John Rose write:

Most small businesses operate the old-fashioned way, with little recognition of the Internet as a channel or a source of leads. Many small business owners are not even aware that they have an online profile that they could be actively managing on many popular sites.

Yelp believes the Yelp Revenue Estimation Tool will allow business owners to determine which online advertising outlets are giving them the best return on investment and will provide them with statistics that are more meaningful to their bottom lines.

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How to Use Knowledge to Connect to Your Customer

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 11:00 AM PDT

use knowledge

Knowledge is dead. Have you heard this?

It's a meme making the rounds in marketing circles right now. This happens periodically, when advances in technology make accessing information easier, faster and less expensive than it was previously.

It creates a type of existential angst in the industry: What's the point in showcasing expertise when anyone can be an expert?

Any question can be answered with a quick web search. We don't have to know anything, we can Google it.

Well, I'm here with good news for you. Knowledge isn't dead. Knowledge isn't even sick. What knowledge is, however, is fundamentally misunderstood.

Google Happened. Good For You.

Yes, Google happened. The Internet is indeed out there, in all its splendid, schizophrenic glory, cram packed full of data points, which may or may not be factual, that the Internet will return to you when you do a search. But reports of knowledge's death are entirely premature.

Proof of concept: An Internet search for "How to cure cancer" will return to you as one of the top ten results, a site that promises that the cure can be found in your kitchen cupboard—specifically, baking soda. Does this "knowledge" mean you're ready to go forward and start healing the sick? Probably not.

Knowledge isn't the accumulation of data points. Knowledge is the ability to judge the quality of the data points you encounter. When you're knowledgeable about a subject, you possess a frame of reference informed by your experience and education.

How to Use Knowledge to Connect to Your Customer

Knowledge Applied is Knowledge Alive

As a business owner, your knowledge of your field is greater than your customer's knowledge is. Demonstrating this is to your advantage. The digital landscape may be flooded with lots of information, but it's not packed with knowledge. You have to bring that to the table. This concept needs to be at the core of your online marketing strategy.

For example, if you're a web designer, you know that your clients can go out and search the Internet for how to build a website. They'll find a lot of information out there—all kinds of things like HTML, CSS coding, CMS systems, mobile compatibility, responsive design, etc. And it suddenly becomes clear to them that they need help navigating all of this.

Implementing this approach and philosophy means understanding the following:

Full Buy-in

Before you begin executing this type of strategy, you need to be sure that you and your firm truly buy into this strategy. You cannot get caught up in worrying that your competitors will learn from you.

You need to be completely confident in your company and your own depth of knowledge and experience.

Become Detail Oriented

Your online presence should clearly establish that you know the facts—and not any random detail, but the most valuable particulars that are highly relevant to your customers. Tell a story no one else is telling.

This is your chance to demonstrate that you understand who your customers are and what's important to them.

People Don't Know What They Don't Know

Answering your customers' questions before they even knew they had questions is a very powerful and convincing sales technique. Don't just give your customers the facts. Give them the facts that matter to them.

For example, an adventure travel company's most popular blog post isn't focused on an exotic getaway destination as you might expect. Instead, it's a guide to traveling internationally with small children. This travel company understood that their customers were parents first and adventurers second.

They took their specialized knowledge about adventure travel with children and put it out there.

Knowledge that applies to your customers’ lives is knowledge that's alive – alive and building your business.

Knowledge Photo via Shutterstock

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Managing Your Small Business Inventory With InFlow Inventory

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 08:00 AM PDT

It’s no easy task for a business to manage inventory. In addition to tracking the actual number of products in inventory, you deal with customer orders, purchase orders and re-ordering stock. This review of inFlow Inventory is for the business owner or executive who is ready to move beyond the spreadsheet.

Manage Inventory with inFlow Inventory

inFlow Inventory comes in three flavors: Free, regular and premium. We'll focus on the free edition, of course, and it differs from many of my reviews in that it is not a web-based solution. It is software that you download. But since you can use the free version with up to 100 products, it is better (in my mind) than the 30 or 45-day trials you get with web-based software. The paid editions are $299 and $499 per license, respectively.

I have been working on a small eCommerce project and dealing with tracking product inventory. Of course, I started out using a spreadsheet. But that quickly got cumbersome, so I went searching for an easy-to-use solution. That's how I found inFlow and gave it a test spin.

Once downloaded and installed, it was a piece of cake. Since I had 107 products to load, I quickly went looking for the "import" tool and found it intuitive and comprehensive. I could map all my product data to the inFlow system and it worked perfectly after I remembered that I had to get rid of 7 products for the free edition. But this was no problem for my test needs.

What I Really Like:

Make small business look big: Easily produce sophisticated business documents such as invoices, purchase orders, sales orders, receipts, shipping documents. All customized to your needs and look/feel.
Intuitive dashboard instantly shows outstanding orders, a top 5 list (which you can see in the screenshot below, although this is pre-sales, thus the flatline) and has a customizable graph of cash flow, sales, profits and costs.

Auto Backup. It is a simple thing, but it automatically backs up your data. You can set it for whatever interval works for you.
Less time on manual entry with intelligent features such as the "auto fill" button and the one click purchase order option when low stock is detected (which is half the reason most would want to use it – know when you're running low on something). Plus, inFlow is barcode-capable, too.
All product information in one place including locations, pictures, prices and categories.

What I Would Like to See:

Some user help in the main dashboard about connecting to my eBay (or Etsy) storefront. They do have a help desk support thread with how-to information on downloading transactions from eBay and Etsy, but I had to search it out on my own.
QuickBooks integration. Some sort of automatic integration with the dominant financial account software would be great. For now, integration with QuickBooks (or any other software) is manually through exporting inFlow data and inputting into QuickBooks via CSV. They do have a help sheet.

InFlow focuses on the small business owner with 10 or less employees in wholesale, retail or manufacturing. The site and reviews show that the software is used by over 315,000 businesses in over 60 countries – that's a solid footprint.

If you're in the market for moving past a spreadsheet for managing product inventory, take a closer look at inFlow.

The post Managing Your Small Business Inventory With InFlow Inventory appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Go Remote: 10 Ways to Free Up Your Business With a Tablet

Posted: 26 Mar 2013 05:00 AM PDT

tablet for business

Get away from your desk. It may be ruining your creativity and productivity. If you think the iPad, BlackBerry Playbook, Google Nexus 10, or Amazon Kindle Fire — to name just a few brands — are just for entertainment or reading, think again. Tablets are quickly changing our work habits and the way our businesses operate.

We tapped into the mobility expertise of Plantronics marketing director, Judi Hembrough, to get her take on how small businesses are using tablets today. Below are 10 business ways lightweight tablets can untether you and your employees from your desks, help you get out among customers, and get more done in your business.

10 Ways to Use a Tablet for Business

1. Bring Your Point of Sale System to the Customer

Restaurants are placing tablets in the hands of their waitstaff, or even more revolutionary, placing the device right on the table to allow the customer to browse and send an order directly to the kitchen. You see more and more tablets at trade shows, farmers markets, and festivals where the small business owner just adds a Square, Pay Anywhere or Intuit credit card reader and can accept payments on the go. Don’t think you need to bring the customer to the cash register or order entry system – flip that around because with a tablet you bring it to your customer wherever he or she is.

2. Use Your Tablet as a Phone

I don't mean you should hold that thing up to your ear; you'll look quite strange. However, if you load it with Skype or Google Voice, and add a Bluetooth headset, you can easily use a tablet as an internet phone to make and receive calls.

3. Conduct Training with Multimedia

If you have to train your team, or yourself, why not sit down with a tablet where you can listen and watch? You could subscribe to a service like Lynda.com and arrange technical training for your entire team using their mobile and tablet apps. Or you can simply set up your own hand-picked curriculum on a corporate intranet.

4. Use it for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Of course, you can view and retrieve customer information from your Salesforce or Sage data, while in the field, but you can also use service like Cardmunch or Bump to put data into your tablet.

5. Create a Digital Portfolio

This is quite possibly one of the highest ROI uses of tablets for business – showing your presentation to a prospective client on an iPad or other tablet. It helps get sales. From photographers to real estate agents, tablets are useful for showing your digital portfolio. Plantronics marketing director, Judi Hembrough, recommends that you connect the device to a larger screen (even a TV screen) using HDMI for even better viewing. A wide number of apps can help you create a great presentation on a tablet.

6. Manage Documents

As you are noticing, a tablet is just as good as a desktop or laptop in many cases. One of the reasons for growth of the cloud is because we want access to our documents from anywhere and to any device. Keep your documents in the cloud and access them with a tablet, for true mobility.

7. Create and Edit on the Go

Document management for many people is simply an issue of accessing a static document. But for true mobility, we also want the ability to create and edit documents even when out of the office. This need to work from any device, at any time and place, has helped fuel the spectacular growth of Evernote and its competitors. I just read that the very popular Dolphin mobile browser now supports increased Evernote functionality making it easier to share websites from a tablet or phone.

When it comes to editing documents, today editing brings to mind entirely new capabilities — and you don’t need to be in your office, sitting next to a printer or a fax machine to use them. For example, you can use a tablet for receiving contracts, and then use an electronic signature platform to sign, save and return the signed documents. Services like HelloSign and Adobe's EchoSign are very helpful for managing the signing process from a tablet. Another out-of-the-box way to “edit” and finalize documents is by creating a web form with Wufoo and then using a handy stylus like Pogo Connect to fill out the form digitally.

8. Conduct Inventory

The inventory process is always tedious, especially for those without a more sophisticated barcode system, and it usually means keeping a tally on paper. But a tablet can make the inventory tracking process a lot easier – you can use one of the many apps out there, such as Inventory Tracker, or inFlow Inventory via the web. Or you could go as far as creating your own database with the Filemaker platform for iOS. No more clipboards and taking notes in pencil.

9. Keep Track of Time

Employees can manage time tracking with tools like Toggl, Timr, or TSheets. Of course, they all have mobile apps that work on any tablet. This is especially important for businesses that bill based on hourly work, and makes sure time doesn’t slip through the cracks and is invoiced, especially when work is performed in the field, while on business trips or when employees are working from home.

10. Get Paid Faster

Okay, now we're down to the serious part of tablets: You can issue estimates, send invoices, and scan your receipts. With FreshBooks, or Outright, or QuickBooks, you can manage your accounting right from the tablet.

If you think that shiny new Nexus 10, or iPad3, or Kindle is just for entertainment, think twice. As this list suggests, there are more apps and mobile tools available to small businesses than ever, at a price point from free to low cost, to make running a business easier. Oh, and don't forget to get a good wireless keyboard.

How are tablets changing the way your business operates?

Tablet Photo via Shutterstock

The post Go Remote: 10 Ways to Free Up Your Business With a Tablet appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013