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Research Roundup: New Entrepreneurs and Online Consumers
Feb 3rd
January is always pretty slow in business research land and this month has been no exception. So, I’m a few days late getting this report to you but that’s a good thing because I managed to wait long enough for the release of the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). This is their 13th annual survey and the news was good.
Entrepreneurship: Alive and Well
In 2011, GEM researchers estimate that 388 million individuals worldwide were actively engaged in starting and running new businesses. That’s fantastic because previous research from Kauffman tells us that most net new jobs come from new businesses. And that is borne out by GEM’s numbers: about 36% of these new entrepreneurs expect to create at least 5 new jobs over the next five years. In fact, 16.8% of them expect to create at least 20 new jobs over the next five years.
In the United States, the 2011 GEM entrepreneurship rate is estimated at 12% — this is not much different from what it was ten years ago and it’s a little less than twice the global average. On average, about 17% were necessity driven and 57% or so were opportunity driven, while in the United States, an estimated 21% were necessity driven and 59% were opportunity driven. This is interesting, because it’s not what you’d expect to find, given the job losses over the last couple of years.
I have a feeling that, when the nonemployer numbers for 2011 come out later this year, we’re going to see them starting to recover from the two disastrous years before.
Selling? Selling Online?
A couple of studies on retailing caught my eye this month and both of them offer some interesting possibilities for small businesses engaged in retail.
For starters, the National Retail Federation proclaimed to the world sometime around mid-month that they expect overall retail sales growth to hit 3.4% in 2012. Presumably, before the world comes to an end later this year, a lot of people are going to want to buy things.
According to a survey by The NDF Group Inc., almost half of online consumers have bought books, stationery and office supplies in the last 12 months, making this the most active category for online retail. Must be all those home offices out there. Apparel and consumer electronics tie for second place, each with 46% of respondents saying they had bought in that category within the last year.
This survey also found that 25% of respondents follow a retailer or brand on a social media site and 27% say they’ve bought something because of what they’ve seen there. But another study, this one conducted by Puneet Manchanda of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, found that the best social media site for your business may be your own.
Manchanda took a look at company-sponsored social networking sites, “using data from an unnamed retailer of books, CDs, and DVDs,” and found that unnamed retailer experienced a 19% increase in incremental revenue from their customers who joined their branded online community. In the community, members can recommend and review products, share favorites lists, make suggestions, and socialize with each other. The researcher also found that customers who were more active in the community, with larger numbers of friends, tended to spend more.
And this survey finds that you get a better return on the investment with your own branded community that you do by simply using Facebook. That will give you something new for you to factor into your online marketing strategy for 2012.
Ecommerce Photo via Shutterstock
Research Roundup: New Entrepreneurs and Online Consumers
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Star Trek Online Mastery Guide
Feb 2nd
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Get Online In A Tremendous Hurry – Goliath
Jan 28th
In 2011, More Than 35% Of Small Businesses In The U. S. Do Not Have A Website! Small Business Owners Desiring To Quickly And Inexpensively Create An Effective Internet Presence Will Find The 24 Video Tutorials Of Goliath To Be Exactly What They Need.
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How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action
Jan 27th
How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
One of the real underutilized opportunities these days is to use your online presence to drive local offline sales.
In order to do this you must think beyond the content aspects of your website and start to think about ways to tap local buying behavior and enable local buying tools.
The heart and soul of this kind of thinking is the tried and true call to action. Marketers have been using the simple act now, buy now, call now language to get prospects to take all manner of action since the dawn of advertising.
As Internet use has become the primary way that even local shoppers find information and make buying decisions, it’s become essential for local businesses to integrate local calls to action into their websites.
It’s easy to think this is something that only restaurants and salons can take advantage of, but with mobile and search use so high almost any type of business, even professional services, can benefit from this idea.
Example calls to action
Free pass
Let’s say you have a membership type of offer like a gym. Put a “get a free pass” button and form on your site so that you can put a free trial offer in their hands before they come to your door.
A financial planner could use this same approach for a upcoming seminar on investment advice. Or you could allow customers to grab a “bring a friend” pass for an early bird sale.
The easiest way to handle this would be a button that linked to a print friendly web page, but you could also use a form so you could capture a little info and send the pass to their mobile device.
Coupons
People love coupons and coupons certainly drive sales. This is an approach you can update and rotate with all kinds of new products, sales and sample offers.
A restaurant could place a coupon for a free appetizer on Tuesday night, but an insurance sales person could also place a coupon for a free iTunes card with every rate quote.
You can create your own trackable coupons through services such as Coupontank and don’t forget to use the coupon feature on your Google Places page as well as locally focused networks such as Local.com and Craigslist.
Click to call or chat
Many times people that come to your website either don’t immediately find what they are looking for or wonder whether you have that cute little dress on your homepage in their size.
By adding services like LivePerson, BoldChat or Olark you can make it very easy for people to call or chat with your business and get that one piece of information they needed so that they jump in the car and come into your business.
Schedule now
Businesses that run primarily by appointment must start making it easier for today’s mobile enabled customers to book a time on the fly. This means adding appointment booking functionality to your website so that prospects can schedule when it’s convenient for them and see that you have that perfect spot open in two hours when they are free.
There are a number of click to schedule tools like ClickBook, GenBook and Schedulicity. Or use the tool set from a service like Agendize that allows you to add call, chat and schedule options all from one tool.
Driving call to action
In addition to you creating compelling offers and tools you’ll want to promote the fact that you have openings, coupons and special.
Pay per click – Using locally focused Google AdWords in conjunction with your call to action is a tremendous way to get terrific offline bang for your online spend.
Social – Facebook has a very robust local targeting mechanism that offline businesses have been using along with strong offers to act. You can also use tools like the Wildfire app to create calls to action right on your Facebook page.
Don’t forget to Tweet your Tuesday offer and drive customers to your site to get their coupon.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
How To Sell Beats Online Like A Pro
Jan 26th
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Why Online Reputation Matters to Small Business
Jan 26th
You’re a small business owner. Most of your customers are the people who live within 25 miles of your storefront. Why does it even matter what the Internet has to say about your brand? That has no impact on your bottom line.
Right?
No. Dangerously wrong.
Weber Shandwick recently released a new report called The Company Behind The Brand: In Reputation We Trust [PDF] that breaks down exactly why business owners should be concerned with the online footprint they’re leaving (or not leaving) behind. One of the most interesting parts of the report for me was the finding that any disconnect between corporate and brand reputation triggers a sharp consumer reaction. That means even if your product or service is excellent…if the image of your brand is less than stellar, it will still hurt you.
According to the report, when a consumer learns that a product they like is made by a company they have a negative relationship with (54 percent of consumers responded they’ve experienced this), 96 percent of consumers took some kind of action.
What kind of action?
The most frequent response was that consumers stopped purchasing the product (40 percent). In fact, surprised consumers were twice as likely to STOP buying the product as they were to continue to buy it. And this is a product they originally admitted to liking! That was pretty startling to me. Just as noteworthy – consumers who didn’t immediately stop buying the product went online to try and learn more about the company.
Both of these statements speak to the importance of creating a positive Web presence.
- Consumers are using social word of mouth, online reviews, and other online content to form a judgment about your company. The judgment they form is then strongly tied to whether or not they decide to purchase your product.
- When consumers are conflicted, they go to the Internet to answer the “should I trust you” question. They’re then using the information they find about your brand to help them make that decision.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not trying to target a national audience. Local consumers are using the Web to find information about local businesses. It’s up to you to make sure they’re finding the right kind of information.
What should every small business be doing to help build their Web presence?
- Create a Web site: Your brand Facebook profile or Google+ business page is great. But your business still needs a Web site. Some place where you can talk about your product/services, establish credibility, introduce your team, offer resources, and be found for hyper-local keywords.
- Blog: There are few better ways to build industry authority than with an active blog. Producing content on a regular basis also ensures there’s always something you can promote and be found for.
- Get involved in social media: Maybe that means getting active on Twitter or Facebook. Or maybe it means developing a presence on a Q&A site like Quora or participating in a small business networking site like BizSugar. Either way, find out where your audience is engaging online, and set up a satellite community there. Talk to your audience and let them get to know you on a more human level. Just don’t get too human.
- Get involved in your community: Whether it’s sponsoring your town’s little league team, speaking at local events, or putting together an industry-related group at the local high school, by getting involved in the community that you live in you help to build a positive reputation offline, which can then carry online when people write about your efforts, link to sponsors, etc.
- Guest blog on relevant sites: Guest blogging is a great way to build goodwill, establish industry credibility, and introduce your company to people in other networks.
- Solicit & manage online reviews: This is a biggie and it’s only becoming more important. We’re going to sites like Yelp, Google Place Pages, TripAdvisor, etc, to learn how the experiences others had with your brand. Make sure you’re not only doing what you can to encourage customers to leave reviews, but positively responding to any negative or neutral comments that may be there. You not only help save that relationship, but you show everyone else who may find that review in the search results that you’re listening, you care, and that you hear them.
Online reputation management is important for businesses of any size. It’s about creating a positive Web presence to make your brand one that people trust and want to engage with. Because, as the report mentioned above shows, it doesn’t matter how great your product is – if people don’t trust you, they won’t be interested in it.
Why Online Reputation Matters to Small Business
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Guitarsimple – Easiest Beginner Guitar Lessons Online
Jan 13th
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Secret Consulting Riches – How To Make Money From Online Consulting
Jan 7th
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What Would Happen to Your Business If You Lost All of Your Online Data
Jan 6th
What Would Happen to Your Business If You Lost All of Your Online Data
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
I know you’re backing up your hard drive and network data, right? You use Dropbox, Carbonite, MOZY, AmazonS3, or JustCloud. Or maybe you’re a Mac Time Machine junky. Either way, here’s hoping beyond hope you’re doing this regularly.
Of course, now that so many of us are moving stuff to the cloud, we’ve got an increasingly perplexing new issue.
How do we back up all that stuff that sits on someone else’s sever?
Do you remember a while back when a whole bunch of Gmail users woke up and found their email files wiped out? We can argue whether or not that’s a good thing, but I’m guessing there were some really important emails that went missing.
Okay, how about this one – you fire up your WordPress blog and discover that your low cost host has decided to go out of business and take your SQL database (otherwise know as you blog posts) with them. (I suppose this could happen to your really expensive web host too, but you get the idea.)
And one last illustration to strike a little more fear. You fire up Basecamp in hopes of finding that critical contract your client signed and uploaded only to find a blank project folder. (Basecamp is an awesome product and I’m sure this would never happen, but what if it did?)
See, we’ve come to depend on all these tools, services and stuff that we routinely and perhaps a bit naively imagine will always work, sync and be safe.
I believe we all need to start looking into some redundancy in our backing up. You could make a case for having an external drive and Dropbox or Dropbox and Mozy for your regular backups, but the real gap may be in backing up all those services.
Here are couple services that are designed to help you do just that.
Backupify – allows you to create regular backups of all your social media updates, email, calendars, Google docs, and photo sharing sites. They even have a plan that’s made for Google Apps for Domains users.
CloudHQ – If you’re already a Basecamp, Dropbox and Google Docs user you’re going to this CloudHQ was built just for you. This service syncs and backs up all your Basecamp data, backs up most of your cloud data to Dropbox and really enhances collaboration using Google docs with Basecamp syncing.
BackupBuddy – It’s just a really good practice to routinely backup your WordPress blog. BackupBuddy is a plugin that can be set to make automatic backups to S3 or even Dropbox. I use Rackspace for hosting and they have a cloud backup tool as well.
I know this just one more thing to worry about, but once you set it up and automate it, it’s actually one less thing to worry about!
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Small Business Online File Sharing: Review of YouSendIt
Jan 4th
Have you ever had your email program tell you that you’ve exceeded send or receive limit? Essentially, the file you want to send or receive is just too big for the server to handle and it shuts you out or refuses to handle your message. This review of the online file sharing service YouSendIt is for you, then.
YouSendIt lets you send and share files quickly and securely. They even have a way for you to sign documents. Of course, like most web services today you can also use your smartphone or iPad or, even a prehistoric desktop version with a regular application you download. It works with Yahoo! Mail, but I didn’t see it for Google’s Gmail.
In their free “Lite” version, you get 2 gigabytes of storage and can send files up to 50 megabytes in size. Or you can upgrade to the pro plan for $49.99/year (or $9.99/month) which lets you store 5 gigabytes of storage and send files up to 2 gigabytes. The service also allows you to drop files into a shared environment where you can grant permissions to co-workers or employees.
What I Liked
- Probably one of the most powerful features is the ability to sign digital documents. For example, if you receive a contract via email as a Microsoft Word file attachment, you can sign it without printing it out. Once you upload that document to a cloud folder at your YouSendIt account, you can access it from anywhere. To access the digital signing capability, you can use a touch-enabled device like an iPad or Android-powered device or even your regular mouse.
When you open the document within YouSendIt via an iPad, the application opens up a signature block where you use your finger or stylus to sign your name. The signature becomes like an image that you can drag and drop anywhere in the document, in this case, right into the area where a signature is required. If you have occasionally struggled with finding a fax machine so that you can return a signed copy of a document, this one feature alone is worth the subscription fee.
- Mobile apps make it super easy to use when traveling.
- You don’t need to sign up to try it out. Right on the home page, you can input an email address, subject line, and attach a file. Click send and it asks you to enter a password of your choosing and instantly sets up a free account.
What I’d Like to See
- The service is elegantly simple and there isn’t much not to like, but I’d like to see the “Send a File” box be just a little bigger or more colorful. My eye jumped straight to the free trial option and I would have tested it with the widget first, before signing up for a free trial on a paid pro level account for which you need to enter credit card data.
- I’d also like the “Send a File” widget to explain the “Verify Recipient Identity” check box (visible in the screenshot at the start of this post) without having to hover over it. Small point, but if you click this option your recipient has to sign up in order to get the email. If you don’t check that box, they can access the file without sign up. It is a great validation process, though, if you want only that intended recipient to be open the email and file.
All in all, YouSendIt is a winner and a time-saver for busy owners who need to send or share large files quickly. With over 20 million customers in 193 countries, they have a pretty solid footprint. They have enterprise and workgroup editions if you find that you want to add more than just a few individual accounts for file sharing.
Learn more about YouSendIt.
Small Business Online File Sharing: Review of YouSendIt
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
