Events, Awards and Contests Not to Miss |  |
- Events, Awards and Contests Not to Miss
- Holiday Postage, Mobile Engagement and WordPress Websites
- Business Intelligence is the Icing on the Cake for a Local Bakery
- Smooth Failing: Being Inspired by Others’ Spectacular Failures
| Events, Awards and Contests Not to Miss Posted: 30 Nov 2013 05:56 PM PST Welcome to our latest curated list of events, contests and awards for small businesses, solo entrepreneurs and growing companies. To see a full list or to submit your own event, contest or award listing, visit the Small Business Events Calendar. Featured Events, Contests and Awards
The BIG Innovation Awards recognize organizations and people who bring new ideas to life. Whether that idea is big or small, these ideas change the way we experience the world. We recognize every innovation that our judges deem worthy!
Denver small business owners get a huge dose of practical marketing insight. Sponsor: Infusionsoft. Chris Brogan, online marketing celebrity, keynotes, along with Zack Mangum, Ramon Ray and Travis Campbell. Hashtag: #smallbizbigthings
Dell World is Dell’s annual tech conference. This year it features a keynote address by Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, and one by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal. Entertainment by CAMP FREDDY. Small Business Trends will be there! Hashtag: #Dellworld
Win $25,000 in pay-per-click advertising budget for 2014, plus marketing tools from WordStream and Constant Contact. Grade and get paid today! Hashtag: #25KforPPC
AM Days is the must attend event for affiliate managers who are responsible for their company’s affiliate marketing strategy, management and operations. Whether you have an existing affiliate program or you are creating a new initiative, AMDays offers you valuable insight into how other online retailers are successfully implementing and managing their affiliate programs. Topics include: Affiliate program set up; Affiliate recruitment techniques; Affiliate marketing fraud; M-commerce; and much more.
#ICON14 is the eighth annual conference for small business, hosted by Infusionsoft (previously called Infusioncon). Over 3,000 attendees expected. Confirmed speakers include Seth Godin, JJ Ramberg and Peter Shankman. Hashtag: #ICON14 More Events
More Contests
This weekly listing of small business events, contests and awards is provided as a community service by Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology. The post Events, Awards and Contests Not to Miss appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Holiday Postage, Mobile Engagement and WordPress Websites Posted: 30 Nov 2013 12:30 PM PST
It’s time for our weekly community news and information roundup with the latest news and articles from sites we follow on the Web. You can help gather news about new websites or online tools or suggest articles you think we should feature here. Just drop us an email at sbtips@gmail.com or share it at the BizSugar community and we’ll include it if we can. Holiday Postage a Good Investment (Fletcher Prince) If you were planning to send your holiday greetings out by email, don’t do it. Marketing consultant Mary Fletcher Jones says your clients would much rather have a traditional card. Holiday Interaction’s Gone Mobile (iBlogZone) On the other hand, in some ways interactions between businesses and customers have gone super high tech. See this infographic shared by Francisco Perez about how mobile is changing the engagement between consumers and brands. Why WordPress is the Right Choice for Websites (Outside Raleigh) The debate rages on as far as blog platforms go. But Web marketing and SEO expert Eric Erickson now insists WordPress is the best choice, not just for your blog, but for your Website, too. Employees and Your Brand (Visible Logic Inc) While you’re busy fiddling with your Web presence and marketing campaign, don’t forget your employees are also building your brand. Here’s a discussion from the BizSugar community with Emily Brackett. Bringing on a New Team Member (Luxr) One way to make sure employees are in tune with your business’s brand is to get them acclimated to the company culture from the beginning. Here’s another discussion from the BizSugar community about the major challenges involved. Why Credibility Matters (Squirrel Business Hub) Of course, you want to be professional and build respect for your brand with your online presence. But Kylie Harker and Tracey Stoll want you to know there’s an even more compelling and immediate reason to create credibility. Figure Out Your Cash Flow (Go Forth Institute) As important as worrying about making sales may be, so is figuring out how to manage the money once it gets into your business. Cash flow is the lifeblood of your company. Here’s how to figure out whether or not you’re managing it well. Tools to Manage Your Community (SocialMediaData.com) As with cash flow and Web presence, you must also manage your community. Adam Post, founder of the Bright Age Digital Creative Agency, shares some tools that may help. Figure Out Your Portal Problem (Vera Claritas) You’ve created a solution for a problem your customers don’t even know they have. The challenge is to show them that they have this problem in the first place. Fortunately, there is a simple approach. Free Trials May Not Be The Answer (M4B Marketing) Susan Oakes has this great take on marketing as a way to find the right customers. The trick, she says, is choosing the right way to reach them. Reading Photo via Shutterstock The post Holiday Postage, Mobile Engagement and WordPress Websites appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Business Intelligence is the Icing on the Cake for a Local Bakery Posted: 30 Nov 2013 09:00 AM PST
Most businesses collect information on their customers. But many may be unaware of how valuable that information can be. Using the data effectively can be the key to identifying your best customers and figuring out how to serve them better. It can also be the key to growing your business by increasing sales or cutting unnecessary costs. Here’s what happened in the case of Butter Lane, a specialty bakery with a focus on cupcakes and locations in the East Village, New York City and Park Slope in Brooklyn. Co-Owner Pam Nelson says the company has always collected information on its customers and had a fairly large customer database. But that database was used primarily just to send out email blasts in the past. At the time, no practical option existed for separating out Butter Lane’s best customers for special attention or more customized marketing. Also the company has participated in three Small Business Saturdays so far. But Nelson says the company has so far also had no way of telling how many repeat customers were gained as a result. Thus, there has been no way to determine whether any extra investment associated with participation is getting a good return — until now, that is. Gain More Insight Into Your CustomersOver the last year, Butter Lane has made a change. The company has been using a business intelligence application from Swipely to gather data on its customers. And they will use this data in a very different way. Swipely integrates with point of sales technology used by established retailers, restaurants, bars, salons and similar businesses. The company says it tracks credit card numbers to sort out first time from repeat customers. ”And that’s a big deal for us, just in general,” said Nelson in a recent phone interview with Small Business Trends. The new tracking allows Butter Lane to figure out what special events, offers, or other marketing efforts result in greater earnings and in increased numbers of return customers. Today, Small Business Saturday, Butter Lane is launching a new loyalty program in an effort to use customer data to gain even more insight and grow its business at the same time. Customers entering either of the bakery’s locations today will be prompted to sign up for the program by text or on an in-store iPad. Butter Lane will then be able to track customers by name every time they make a credit card purchase.
Customers will get cash back rewards the more they spend. Nelson says customers may also receive those rewards in the form of free products like cupcakes or other goodies. So Butter Lane has found an easy way to reward its best customers automatically and perhaps encourage them to keep coming back. What Customer Data Tells YouBut that’s not the only thing Butter Lane can do with the enhanced data the company will be collecting. Matthew Oley, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Swipely, says data collected on customers can be used to learn many things about a business. For example, by collecting data on your customers through loyalty programs, you can discover what products or services they prefer and which customers tend to spend above a certain threshold. You can use this information to segment your customer list and target specific customers with offers most suitable to them. By importing outside data you can determine whether other factors like weather conditions or even social media campaigns or mentions have an impact on your business. You can even use that social media data to track your average Yelp score or keep up with the latest social media mentions about your company. It’s also possible to import social media data for some of your major competitors to compare with your own. Track the amount of business during a slow time of day to figure out whether it makes sense to stay open that extra hour. Or experiment to see whether expanding your hours boosts revenue or number of return customers — or both. Bottom line: The more you know about your customers the better. So figure out how to collect and utilize that data in the way most effective for you. Images: Butter Lane Bakery The post Business Intelligence is the Icing on the Cake for a Local Bakery appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Smooth Failing: Being Inspired by Others’ Spectacular Failures Posted: 30 Nov 2013 06:00 AM PST
So writes Barbara Weltman in her latest book, “Smooth Failing: Top industry leaders share their secrets for turning Pain into Profit.” Weltman – an attorney, tax expert, small business expert and author — is well-known as the author of the J.K. Lasser’s Small Business Taxes books and guides. She’s also the author of several “how to” books on small business topics, including The Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Home Based Business. Smooth Failing is a departure from that type of book. Weltman (@BarbaraWeltman on Twitter) tackles a subject that most of us who are entrepreneurs have lived through: failure and how to get past it. Smooth Failing is a book of case studies and lessons. It covers the failures of successful entrepreneurs – and some of the failures are so over the top that they could have been ripped right from the pages of a thriller novel. Yet they are real. Money laundering. Lies and cover ups. Cyber blackmail. Software logic bombs that surreptitiously delete software code. A stock market crash. A business partner with inoperable cancer. This book has it all! Entrepreneurs Candidly Share FailuresIn interviews with 10 successful business owners and entrepreneurs, Weltman manages to wheedle out stunning admissions of failure, such as as lying to a client. Yes, that’s one of the stories. It comes from New York Times contributor Gene Marks who told the story of how he lied to cover up some shoddy performance of his company’s proprietary software. He regretted lying and eventually the software became obsolete. That happened years ago. The lying made him physically sick, and he learned an important lesson that changed the way he did business. And then there’s the story of the FBI showing up at one entrepreneur’s doorstep. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing was stunned. One of his then-clients was accused of money laundering. Jantsch, of course, never had a clue about what his client was doing. However, he had to spend time preparing for and testifying in front a grand jury that ended up indicting the client. Jantsch himself was promptly cleared. But that experience helped propel him to radically change his business focus. Or what about the entrepreneur who, desperate to get his new business off the ground, offered a sales rep the ability to earn 50% equity in the company in exchange for meeting certain sales targets. The sales rep was hell bent on meeting those targets — so much so that he nearly drove the business into the ground. That’s the story told by Tim Berry, founder of Palo Alto Software. And imagine being Peter Justen, formerly the CEO of MyBizHomepage, and now the CEO of business dashboard product Five Plus. When he learned his Chief Technology Officer was planning to start a competing business, Justen terminated him. However, his former employee had planted “logic bombs” in the company’s software product. Logic bombs are pieces of code that launch on certain activities, and delete code or data, or make it unusable. In short, the former executive — someone Justen had thought was a friend — sabotaged the product. Justen literally had to start over, and build a new product from scratch. But that was only the beginning. The former executive launched a defamation attack against Justen and his family, hacked into their email and social accounts, and attempted to blackmail Justen. It turns out that the executive lived off the grid and managed to hide his tracks in order not to be found by authorities. Phew! After stories like those, my own story — which is also included in the book — sounds positively boring. My story is about having too many irons in the fire. I drifted along and lost focus on my goals. Once I got my goal mojo back, and brought in some help, the business leapt forward. In my case the CTO was the hero, not the villain. Yeah, I know … not nearly as exciting as grand juries and logic bombs. What I liked best about this book is the way Weltman manages to distill each case study down into a few lessons. That is harder than it sounds, and I’ll tell you why. I can remember back almost a year ago when the author contacted me. We arranged a lengthy phone interview about my experiences. In the book everything is laid out cogently. The lessons are succinctly summarized. You might get the impression that I was super articulate that day, and delivered everything on a silver platter to Barbara Weltman. Nope. I rambled. I just started talking without necessarily identifying my own lessons or even what I was going to talk about. The story took shape and the lessons emerged only after probing questions from the author. That’s what a skillful interviewer can do. Innovative Publishing ApproachThe book is published by Indigo River Publishing. On its website it describes itself as a “modern and progressive publishing house and we believe in a more dynamic and entrepreneurial approach to the building and marketing of our books.” The book is published in two editions. One is a standard edition containing only the 10 lessons currently in there now. But here’s the innovative part: the other editions is called a “Living Edition.” This means that additional case studies and lessons will be added. And entrepreneurs can request to be considered to be included in the book. Those why buy the Living Edition (which is electronic) will have access to the additional entrepreneurs added later. Why Get This Book(1) The stories are enthralling and not just about business, but about life and human nature. (2) You may know one or more of the entrepreneurs profiled. Many of them are active online and in social media. I don’t know about you, but often it’s hard for me to relate to the one-in-a-billion success of someone like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. I find little that is relevant to apply to my own business, because the scale is so different. But I can relate to the experiences of a John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing or a Norm Brodsky. (3) It is useful. The lessons are encapsulated at the end of each chapter. (4) But the best reason to read Smooth Failing, in my opinion, is that ultimately the book is positive and uplifting about not giving up. You must adapt and reboot your business. When you are feeling like nothing is going right — and you will feel that way at some point in your entrepreneurial journey — it may be the motivational shot in the arm you need. The post Smooth Failing: Being Inspired by Others’ Spectacular Failures appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
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