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7 Steps to Using Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you may be wondering how social media can help grow your business. Or, if you've already attempted marketing your business through social media but had little success, you might be wondering what you're doing wrong.

Before you start seeing results, there are seven key steps you'll want to follow:

1) Asses the situation. Ask your customers where they're spending their time and check up on the competition. What do you have to offer to your customers that your competitors do not?  

2) Learn. You don't have to be an expert on social media, but you need to know what questions to ask and have a desire to learn a new way to market.

3) Set achievable goals. If your budget for social media is a little small right now, don't set goals you can't attain. Take a look at your budget and create reasonable results you want to attain from your marketing.

4) Seek professional help. It can be hard to determine social media best practices and know where to start when you have no idea about social media. Ask for help from marketing professionals to get you started in the right direction.

5) Don’t view social media as an “add on.” Most small businesses start off assigning social media tasks to a person in the IT department or another area where the employee has no idea about how to market with social media or best practices. Take a look at your current budget. If you've been spending money on less traditional advertising (newspapers) it may be time to reallocate your budget and hire a dedicated social media manager.

6) Re-assess your opportunity. Start brainstorming ways you can engage your networks of customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Then, think of how you can reach totally new audiences. Involve your employees and come up with a game plan. 

7) Expect realistic outcomes.  Remember to focus more on expecting long-term goals rather than short-term ones. It's all about developing customer relationships and building trust. This will increase your reputation and boost your sales over time, but don't expect  you're company to go viral overnight.

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Brought to you by the business-to-business training blog B2BMarketingZone, and Wheel Media, an American web design, Sacramento social media, and SEO company.

 

6 Ways to Create the Perfect Mobile-Ready Website

With the use of smart phones and tablet computers increasing at super speed, the need to have a mobile-ready version of your business website is more prominent than ever. However, there are a few factors to take into consideration when getting your website ready for mobile use.

1. Use photos carefully. Displaying high-resolution images is appealing to smart phone and tablet users, but you want the images to load quickly. Find a happy medium between quality and small file size for each graphic you use.

2. Think about using responsive design. This is a new web design trend that allows your site to adapt to the device being used and create a unique display, rather than creating multiple versions of your website for different devices.

3. Be consistent. Whether your site is being viewed on a PC, tablet, or smart phone, your site should have the same look and feel.

4. Make navigation simple. Make it easy for users to touch or swipe icons without accidentally hitting the wrong button. Tablet and smartphone navigation is different than using a mouse or trackpad.

5. Check out your competition. Before designing the mobile version of your website, see what your competitors are doing. If there's something missing from their websites, incorporate it into yours. If they have unnecessary extra features, make sure you leave them off your site.

6. Borrow from the pros. Take a look at some mobile websites you feel give you a great user experience. What do you like so much about them? Borrow some design and navigation features to improve your own customers' experience.

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Great tips brought to you by Network Solutions and Wheel Media - a web design, social media, and Detroit internet marketing company that helps businesses nationwide market themselves on the internet. 

The New Way to Review Employees: 6 Key Points to Analyze

Annual employee reviews can be so much of a hassle, that many managers wish there was an alternative review process. Fortunately, there's a great new alternative format for assessing the progress of your team members. It allows managers to bullet-point key areas to discuss with employees and isn't just limited to annual reviews. Think about incorporating this new review process after an assignment, before a promotion or role change,  or even as a quarterly assessment.

Consider these 6 Key Points When Reviewing Your Team Members:

1. The 3-5 Core Deliverables of the Role—This does not reflect on the employee. This is an evaluation of the impact the role makes on the department or business. For small businesses, this generally relates to income, cost, operational performance and customer satisfaction.
2. The 3-5 Biggest Company Achievements—The manager should evaluate what things the employee did to make a difference. This should be a measurable evaluation (i.e. boosted sales by 5% because they did "x").
3. The 3-5 Personal Traits You Most Appreciate—These are not tangible elements but are important because they relate to how the employee performs to better improve their work (i.e. Productiveness, cost-consciousness, sense of humor, loyalty, ability to follow directions, etc.
4. The 3-5 Company or Department Goals—Discussing company goalsin the review process allows a chance to cover the contributions and employee can make. employees want to know that their valued and important and this gives you the opportunity to do just that.
5. The 3-5 Biggest Challenges Expected for Next Quarter—This is a great opportunity to discuss what you believe to be the biggest upcoming challenges for the next quarter with your employees, and often you'll find that your employee will have an idea you may have missed completely. This is an excellent time to strategize and plan for the future.
6. The 3-5 Biggest Contributions the Employee Can Make—take this opportunity to let your team members know what you want from them. It lets them know how they can make the boss happy, make a difference, and avoid getting in trouble. A mutual understanding of this is a big step towards achieving company goals.

This new review process not only allows your employees to understand the impact they make on your company and that they are valued, but it also keeps your business on track and allows you to plan for the future.

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Brought to you by the business minds at Smart Brief and Wheel Media, a national social media, internet marketing, and Bay Area web design company.

Learn How to Correct a Struggling Employee

When an employee is struggling with his or her job, your entire business takes a hit. Although it may start off as one issue affecting just one person, it can soon impact a whole department and trickle down to the rest of your business.

The number one reason an employee may be having a difficult time often stems from a lack of management. Many managers are overworked or have subpar managing skills and do not have the time to determine what might motivate an individual employee. The way one employee operates will differ from the next.

Before a problem ever arises at all, managers should make it a point to schedule regular meetings with employees and make sure they're equipped with all the tools they need to perform their job properly. Additional employee training is another option. Taking one of these two routes will either fix the problem and give the employee a whole new take on their job, or the manager will realize that the employee is not a good fit for the company.

If disciplinary action is needed, written warnings are proven to be the best course of action. This clearly defines the problem for the employee and put them back on track. The manager should also list further disciplinary action on the written warning (including possibility of termination) if the behavior does not improve. Often times, the employee will correct the behavior on their own and no further action is necessary.

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Thanks to BenefitsPro and Wheel Media, a Charlotte web design company, for the ideas.

 

4 Steps to Getting Started with Pinterest for Business

Pinterest is rapidly becoming one of the most visited sites on the internet and with all the buzz surrounding it these days, it would be detrimental to pass up an opportunity to use Pinterest as a valuable business tool. If you've never used Pinterest before, don't sweat it. It's easy to get started and with these quick four steps, we'll show you how to start wielding it to your advantage.

1. Click 'Sign up' and select your business type. Pick whether you're a local business, professional, public Figure, brand, media outlet, online marketplace, retailer, or institution/non‐Profit organization. Make sure you choose the most accurate discription of your business and take the time to fill out your profile information and use keywords associated with your business.
2. Click 'Agree' to the BUSINESS terms of use. It's very important that you choose the Business terms of use rather than the Users terms because Pinterest will help guide you on how to use its site for business purposes when choosing this option.
3. Verify your website. After you've agreed to the business terms, you'll need to verify your website. This is crucial, because it allows your website to appear as a clickable link in your profile. All you need to do is download the HTML file provided by Pinterest and upload it to your server. After you've uploaded the file, return to Pinterest and click the 'Settings' button to verify you've completed this. Once Pinterest detects the file, you're ready to go!
4. Integrate the Pinterest tools with your website. Now that you have a business account set up, you'll have access to the Follow and Pin buttons, and Profile and Board widgets that you can embed on your website to easily allow your visitors to pin your posts - increasing your traffic.

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We'd like to thank SmartBrief and Wheel Media for the ideas. Wheel Media is a national company with expertise in San Francisco social media services, online marketing services, and web design.

6 Steps for Creating Successful Websites with Strategic Design

Web design is more than just a visual element. It takes a number of different skills to build an interface that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but produces functionality as well and conveys credibility, trustworthiness, and professionalism to your potential customers.

In order to get successful results, strategic thinking is key. These 6 steps will lead you down the road to building a successful website:

1. Establish your goals - What is the goal of your website? Is it to sell, inform, entertain, or provide a service?

2. Identify your audience - Age, gender, profession, and tech savviness all play a role in how you should design your site. Identify these key demographics and build around your findings.

3. Determine your brand image - Think about the colors you want to use, the feel you want your site to have, and the emotions you want to invoke in your visotors.

4. Goal-driven design direction - Sync your design with the web design strategy you've implemented in steps 1-3. Think about your main goal and expound on it. For example, if it's to get more subscriptions to a web service, make the sign-up button easy to find by using contrasting colors and ensure your copywriting is well-written and tells the visitor exactly what your service is about.

5. Measure results - After you've got everything up and running, analyze your results against the main goals you established in step one. Are you achieving the outcomes you desired? If not, find the problem and establish a solution to get back on track.

6. Improve your site - There is always room for improvement, no matter how good your website is. After your site is designed, set time aside to look at it at least once a week and ask yourself if you can make it better. Consistently taking small steps will ensure your website is always the best possible version of itself.

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Brought to you by Wheel Media, a San Francisco online marketing and social media company.

4 Simple Steps to Being a Rockstar at Your Next Meeting

Most people have come to hate meetings because so many of them are poorly run. However, rocking your meetings and getting your employees pumped about the next one is easier than you might think. These four steps will catapult you from boring boss to complete rockstar:

1. Clarify outcomes from the get-go. This means expressing what you want to happen by the end of your meeting. This is the most important action you can take to instantly improve your meetings. Using a visual element to express this (i.e. whiteboard, powerpoint, etc.) will also make a big impact.

2. Create an agenda. Make a list of things you need to cover, and prioritize them with the most important thing at the top of the list. You can also create a graphic "time block" next to each item to show how much time you want to spend on each task.

3. Clearly define roles. Make sure everyone knows exactly what their roles are. Using metaphors is a great way to do this: Are you a coach, referee, driver of the meeting, a designer, or evaluator? All of these are leader roles but vary quite a bit from one another.

4. Lay out rules. Come up with protocol for how you'll handle certain situations when and if they arise, so your team knows what to do in advance. This can often prevent these situations from ever happening at all. This way, there is no confusion and everyone knows what is expected of them.

There's nothing worse than confusion about what you want from your team. By laying everything out in a clear and concise manner and using visual elements to help make your points, there's no way your next meeting won't be a refreshing change of pace for your entire team. Make it a point to incorporate each of these steps and your employees will be on top of their game and your business will be running smoothly.

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If you're looking to give direction to your online business strategy well, we recommend Wheel Media; a national web design, social media, and online marketing company who specializes in San Francisco online marketing services.

5 Tips for Hosting a Webinar that Will Wow Clients and Prospects

Webinars can be an excellent tool for demonstrating your expertise on a particular subject and provide a medium for developing a more personal relationship with your clients. These five tips will have you rocking your webinar like it’s nobody’s business:

1. Follow the training

2. Record a practice presentation

3. Have a co-presenter

4. Don’t rush

5. Make room for Q&A

If you haven’t thought about hosting a webinar to highlight your products and services, it’s worth looking into. Webinars are a great way to boost your credibility. Remember, positive feedback from just one customer can impact another one’s buying decision.

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If you feel like you need help with your online strategy and planning, Wheel Media is a national company that specializes in Sacramento SEO, web design and social media services.

Inspiring Business Story: What One Man Did After a Tornado Wreaked Havoc on His Shop

When a tornado hit Tuscaloosa, AL last year, a local Express Oil Change & Service Center franchise got pulverized in 45 seconds flat. Nothing except for a lone lift station was left standing. Even the 14 vehicles left on the property were completely destroyed. The owner, John Carney, was left to pick up the pieces - and it wasn’t easy.

He almost wasn’t allowed to rebuild at all, since his city’s building codes had been complicated after going into business 25 years prior. He had to switch his entrances and exits, use different building materials, and add additional parking spaces, incurring almost $300,000 in extra costs. His insurance ran dry four months before being able to open and he had to pay his employees out of his own pocket, including benefits - an additional $175,000. All of this was done by using his and his brother’s home equity credit.

Although most of his street is still empty from the tornado, John did about 90% of his old volume in the first two months. When he reopened in August 2012, John had a line of people that waited for 20 minutes. He credits his success to the fact that he is honest with people and tries to do the right thing for the community.

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For more inspiring business stories, check out Wheel Media. They specialize in Charlotte online marketing services, social media services, and web design.

Kentucky Rebrands Itself and Gets Pithy

Kentucky is doing a marketing 180. Unhappy with the current “Unbridled Spirit” state motto, Kentuckians pitched this brand new campaign in an attempt to ditch stereotypes and encourage tourism and pride for the state:

 

What do you think - too cheeky or a refreshing point of view? Regardless of your thoughts, it just goes to show that it’s never too late to rebrand yourself.

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Need help marketing your brand? Check out Wheel Media, the San Francisco SEO company.