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Communicating With Customers In A Crisis: Tips For Small Businesses

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As communities across the world work to contain the COVID-19 virus, small businesses are in upheaval. Retailers, restaurants, service providers, sole-proprietors, and everyone in between are focused on preserving business and communicating updates with customers during the crisis. The result? Changing government protocols, massive amounts of company emails flooding our inboxes, and a constant social media barrage, have led to lots of confusion for customers. How can you be sure your customers hear your message? Follow these tips: Update Your Website With Critical Information. Don’t forget the basics. Specify your operating hours and the best way to contact your business […]

COVID-19 and Google: How to Update My Business Listings

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This is timely and important for any business with a Google My Business listing, read on! As of March 23, Google is temporarily scaling back some important offerings for Google My Business users due to the impact of COVID-19 to Google staff. Here is what you need to know: 1. No new reviews or replies to reviews will be published. 2. No new Q & A submittals 3. New Listings, Claims, Verifications and Business Edits will be scaled back and prioritize critical services. Other business listing updates will take longer. Expect a delay! What is NOT impacted? Your Google My […]

How to Pivot Your Small Business During a Crisis

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The last week has been very challenging for many small business owners. In the matter of a few days, our existence and income have been drastically altered. No matter how prepared you were as a business owner, it was impossible to predict this crisis, let alone have a plan in place to pivot your company. Many proprietors are left wondering how they can continue under our new reality. Besides abrupt changes to living our everyday lives, many of our customers are feeling added stress, anxiety, and worry too. As a small business, it’s hard to imagine it is a good […]

Facebook Freakout

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Changes to the famous Facebook algorithm are in process. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Mark Zuckerburg made a major announcement earlier this week. While we should expect a big adjustment to what we see, it seems the biggest change will be in the News Feed. Expect more posts from our friends and family. Facebook is looking to shift the focus back toward “meaningful Interactions” with our personal connections. At first glance this change may not make sense. Why would Facebook make it more difficult for a paying segment like publishers and businesses to get attention? Remember who is […]

Six Hacks for Managing Social Media

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We all have to make choices about how we spend our time. As business owners, we spend much of our time on the most immediate and pressing problems. Meeting client needs, filling orders, putting out fires, bookkeeping. The daily task list is often longer than the hours in our day. Social media upkeep is easy to push to the bottom of the to do list. If we do that on a regular basis, our marketing suffers and our lead generation efforts suffer. So what it the trick to maintaining a healthy social media presence while keeping a focus on important […]

Six Types of Social Proof and How to Use Them

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Social proof is a powerful tool that offers a business big impact for a nominal cost. But what exactly is social proof? Otherwise known as informational social influence, it is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. In other words; we are influenced by our peers’ experiences. Peer influence has always been a powerful persuasion tactic. Word-of-mouth marketing has been around since people have had something to sell. In the old days, shop owners had to wait for customers to rave about their services to friends and family, who would eventually […]

Do You Suffer From Blank Blog Page Syndrome?

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Coming up with creative ideas to keep your marketing content fresh can be tough. As a small business owner your head is already spinning with a million pressing things that need to be taken care of to keep your business running smoothly. It can be exasperating to sit down and draw a blank about what you would like to say in your next blog post. Not to worry. This post will help you banish your fear of Blank Page Syndrome! When thinking about what you would like to write, try thinking like a customer. Think about feedback and questions you’ve […]

How Do Your Customers Use Social Media?

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How do your customers use social media? Are your customers Early Adopters? In the Majority or maybe even Laggards? [infographic id=”x1469733840038″]           I was introduced to Rogers’ Bell Curve many years ago in Marketing 101 class. The original model was introduced in 1957 as The Diffusion Process.* It was designed to explain how farmers adopted new hybrid corn seeds. Soon others began to see the value in the curve and for many other disciplines from sociology to technology to marketing. In the years since it was first introduced, the curve has been studied and expanded to guide […]

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