Every business owner wants their small business to grow into a bigger business. Everyone knows how important customers are to a business but only a few realize how equally important are great partners if you are looking to build an awesome business.
+ Every other business that works with you as a supplier or provider is interested in your growth. + Every business that does not compete with you but serves the same set of customers is a potential partner that you need to be collaborating with.
Most businesses claim spend money on marketing however very few of them actually understand marketing. What most businesses call marketing is really advertising. They buy ads in all kinds of print or online media with the aim of reaching potential customers.
There are many much cheaper and far more efficient ways of reaching customers. One of them is making friends with those who have already befriended your target customer.
We call this – A friend to someone I wish to befriend should be my friend. Seems logical when you think of it this way. The connectchief platform enables you to discover and collaborate with businesses which are most likely to already be ‘friends with’ your target customer. If these kinds of businesses exist (and there are many of them out there) then they are most likely also interested only if you are willing to return the favor.
As long as your businesses are mutually non-competing, they will be willing to introduce you to ‘your target customers’ that they know provided that you will be introducing them to ‘their target customers’ that you know. It sure sounds like a lot of work – unless you have a sophisticated piece of software (ahem…connectchief) that can make it happen for you both.
Now that we’ve told you about businessconnect, We look forward to telling you more about connectchief … particularly promoENGINE.
Advertising is a good way to attract new customers and as a by-product also remind existing customers of your presence. However the goal of advertising is to inform the cusotmer of your message. The message in ads can be of one of 4 types. See more here
Ads can be a good idea for your business if you have the following goals
+ You goal is to build brand recall
Digital display ads are a great tool when your focus is to re-engage with non-returning customers or to build brand recall
+ When ad spend meets a ROI watermark
We recommend you always have a clear ROI budget before you spend on ads. To achieve the right outcome, its equally important to be able to measure your targeted returns. As an example, if you say we want to get $1 back in revenue for every $1 spent on ads, thats an easy to achieve goal. However, are you measuring and more importantly are you able to reliably measure how much revenue you are generating from those specific ads. At connectchief, we often find ourselves saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there” This statement is as true for marketing spend on ads than anything else.
+ You wish to target users at a specific location or in a specific moment
Running an ad for your ice-cream parlor at or near the campus of a local community college or elementary school is a great way to be in front of your customers when they are most likely to think (students wanting to hang out or families with kids looking for a treat) of a business like yours.
Advertising a promotion is an even better way to run Ads
+ Promotions can be targeted to different user groups (aka cohorts)
Promotions give the business a lot of flexibility. You could provide incentives to users for shopping at your store or to buy a certain product or service at an advertised price or to receive a discount for making purchases on a specific day or time. The opportunities are endless and when paired with location targeting can produce phenomenal results
+ Promotions are also a great way to acquire new customers
Money spent on ads is cash spend. When money is given away through promotions, the spend is in goods or services – each of which have a higher perceived value to the consumer as opposed to the amount they cost you (the business owner to produce). Moreso, a promotion provides the consumer a way to try your product and services at a lower price point. You only spend, if they transact with you.
+ You are looking to engage with customers
Promotions are generally structured as some benefit that a customer gets in exchange for a certain action. So a call-to-action is always built-into the promotion but it may not be the case for an advertisement. The ad is simply a means of informing the target user of your message.
Advertising is meant to inform.
Promotions are meant to engage. Promotions can be advertised too!
What budget spend should one allocate on marketing activities ?
This is an age old question. The answer is, it depends. As a thumb rule, if it costs you $x to acquire a custome through ads, are you able to generate 2x or better margin (not revenue) from that engagement? If yes, then the ad was worth it.
Both ads and promotions are marketing tools. While advertising presents a reason to buy a product, sales promotion offers a short-term incentive to purchase
The ultimate goal is to (1) Either acquire a new customer or (2) turn a one-time customer into a returning customer. Achieve any of the above and you are it mostly right.
Any technology platform that offers ads allows you a lot of flexibility to experiment. Digital Ads are generally far more cost-effective over traditional media. They provide you to tune and customize your target audience. And most platforms are flexible where you can start, stop or even adjust your ad budgets at any time. The most important piece for any business (which most seem to forget is to measure if the ad or promotion is actually effective).
How does a business turn a customer into a returning customer?
Customers only return to businesses they like transacting with. They may find your product or services to be superior to other options. They may return because you are easy to do business with. They may return because your staff is caring and listens to its customers.
To know if you are doing the right thing, you as a business owner or manager need to be in touch with your customers’ perception of the experience you and your team deliver. In business transactions, particularly service-oriented ones, customer experience issues can occur. However, a business that listens and attempts to make improvements, even if they delivered a poor experience to start, has a way higher chance of the customer returning to them vs one that seem to not care. Coming soon! with VisitXP business owners can get a quick check of their service delivery experience
We’ve been busy thinking of a befitting tagline for connectchief. Below are a few that we thought of and our reasons on how well each does or does not align with our purpose, mission and vision. We appreciate you sharing your views and thoughts in the comments section below.
1. ‘Redbull’ for your business
Just like Redbull energizes the body of the peson who drinks it, ConnectChief adds a jolt of energy to grow in the business that uses ‘connectchief’
2. Everything big starts out small
Every micro, small and medium business can grow up to be a big business. connectchief is the tools you need to make that journey smoother, easier and maybe a bit faster. Big businesses have access to significant technology that enables them to automate, get better insights, move reasonably fast, be more efficient and more. Of course, its not cheap to build such high end technology and as a result most smaller businesses never get access to such incredible tools. Team connectchief is hard at work to change just that because we believe in the entpreneurial power of small businesses and we know first hand that everything big starts out small
3. the operating system for your small business
An operating system is nothing but a collection of tools that keeps your PC running smoothly. At connectchief we’re continuously working to bring you tools and solutions that bring a technology edge to tasks that your small business needs to perform. Whether it is marketing, branding, customer engagement, repulation management or shaping your business relationships – we’re all ears to hear from you so we can help solve the problems that a face by business owners like you!
4. Lets grow your business
We know you work hard every day to nuture and grow your business. We work to bring you access to superb technology that helps you supercharge the various aspects of and day-to-day activities for your business
5. Supercharge your growth
6. A discounts & promotions framework to power business
Well, its nice but doesn’t really fit connectchief. That tagline is too narrow and is a perfect fit for the promoengine tools that are a part of connnectchief. Personally I have worked at a number of organizations – whether direct to consumer, or business to business, selling services or products, storefront or online. The one common attribute across them all was that they needed to continously find ways to promote themselves – through coupons, discounts, loyalty points or simply advertisements. Thats something all businesses need to do but there hardly any tools or software that can help define, manage and execute on a full fledged promotions strategy. Well, thats been true but not any more. With connectchief’s promoengine – any business owner can now create, distribute and redeem promotions / coupons and put out advertisements to get attention from their customers.
We also went ahead and designed promoengine to be fully developer friendly so that any developer can take advantage of our API (appplication programming interface) and power their entire discounts & promotions infrastructure via our platform. It was simple, if every business owner has to do worry about this why not enable them all to use this scalable platform so they can save time, money and gain efficiency. Futhermore, business owners can use our dataengine tools to draw actionable insights on effectivess of promotions, where and when they get used, which promotions have a higher redemption rate and much more.
7. Software tools to grow your business. Harness tech like the big guys do
8. The growth platform that your small business needs
There are an est. 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone — which outnumber large corporations 1162 to 1.
70% of all small businesses are owned and operated by a single person.
Most small businesses employee fewer than 25 employees.
Running a small business is real hard work.
We asked ourselves, what do small businesses that grow up to be large businesses do differently?
Of course, they all get access to large amounts of capital that they invest and grow. But before getting that capital, they all have done a great job to attract new customers, retain existing customers and they keep discovering & offering more “things or services” that those customers need.
Why are these organizations able to do what they do?
They are always listening – to customers, to employees, to stakeholders and to anyone that is relevant to their business. Now they don’t necessarily listen to everything everyone has to say. They have an ear on the ground so the can hear what their stakeholders say and then do something about the things that matter.
What we found
After meeting with and analyzing the journeys of multiple successful businesses we found that the ones that did well where those who engaged with their customers, paid a lot of attention to what their customers were saying (or signaling through their behavior) and had managed to convert a larger than average amount of their visitors into to loyal users.
Customers exhibit a very interesting (and obvious) behavior – they tend to go back to businesses where they feel heard. Even if a customer didn’t have a great experience with a business at first, they feel comfortable giving that business a second or third chance if they feel that business heard them and is taking steps to do better the next time.
As a business owner its very important to listen for signals. And its impossible to listen to anything if you aren’t really trying. However, once you make an effort to listen there is an incredible amount of learning that keeps coming from it. Your customers can show you the way to succeed. Companies that are wildly successful have found various ways to engage with their stakeholders, to listen for feedback and they tend to put in the efforts in making continuous improvements along the way.
An incredible and very commonly known example of such outward focused behavior is Amazon. Amazon has been known to be laser focused on customers. They started out from being an online bookstore and have evolved into a company that disrupts and leads practically any industry vertical they enter. They’ve achieved this through maniacal customer engagement and an action bias driven by data. All this decision is powered through sophisticated technology and data analysis. However, not everyone can afford to do what the likes of Amazon can achieve. At connectchief, we’re focused on bringing to your business the competitive edge and technologies big business has used to GROW.
So what does connectchief do?
We build (software) tools that enable businesses to thrive.
We identified a few signficant needs for most businesses –
Every business needs to build and nurture its ecosystem for long term success …learn more about bizz by connectchief
Every business needs to promote itself – most people we spoke with do not make much of a difference between marketing, branding and advertising… learn more about PromoENGINE
Gain trust & build a reputation … learn about trustENGINE
Loyal customers are the lifeblood of growth businesses. …learn about loyaltyENGINE
A lot of internet or technology-driven businesses do not have a store front. They need effective ways to work remotely … learn about flexxWORK
Engage your audience – not just customers. Be in front of them. Talk to them. Listen to them… we’ll share some things about hearecho soon!
We built these by listening to you, our target customers. And we plan to keep building more solutions that help your business grow.
Simply put, a small business is a business thats ‘small’. While thats obvious, it doesn’t really answer the question
The definition of a small business can get quite confusing. What classifies as a small business varies by industry vertical, geography (country where the business is located) and a few other factors.
These factors can include –
Firm size by revenue – To many, a small business is based on the amount of money it makes
Firm size by employees – and / or number of employees at all (rather than at each) of its business locations
Establishment size – The size of the individual business location, especially if its an organization that is associated with or depends on a larger corporate entity (think franchise businesses) but runs
Business legal structure – The way a business is legally structured (Legal Form of Organization or LFO) also signals whether its a small business. Businesses organized as a corporation are often considered larger businesses while those that are sole proprietorships or partnerships are often thought of as “small”.
The U.S. Small Business Administration defines a small business as
The SBA, for most industries, defines a “small business” either in terms of the average number of employees over the past 12 months, or average annual receipts over time. In addition, as per 13 CFR § 121.105 , SBA defines a U.S. small business as a concern that:
Is organized for profit
Has a place of business in the US
Operates primarily within the U.S. or makes a significant contribution to the U.S. economy through payment of taxes or use of American products, materials or labor
Is independently owned and operated and is not dominant in its field on a national basis
The business may be a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or any other legal form. In determining what constitutes a small business, the definition will vary to reflect industry differences – especially size standards.
A small business is one which meets most of the below criterion meets our small business definition
Any business that is small in revenue relative to its peer group within its industry vertical.
Any business that is small in geographic reach (typically 1-2 locations)
All businesses that have fewer than 5 employees
Any startup business –
A business that runs traditionally and hasn’t yet taken advantage of all the technology backend infrastructure that is typical of a modern-day established business
A business that is independently owned by an entrepreneur or a a group of entrepreneurs
We haven’t written about that topic yet. We have quite a few things to say about it. Hang on! that blog is coming soon!
