Leadership Tips for Happy, Productive Working Teams.

As businesses grow, entrepreneurs need dedicated employees. However, it is important to promote a balance between work and life, in order to have a more productive staff. In addition, turnover is typically lower when companies emphasize this balance, especially when achieved through supportive and strong leadership.

Here are a couple of important tips that can make a positive difference to how your teams perform throughout the day:

FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES

The ‘affiliative’ leadership style places focus on employees and their individual needs. In general, employees are more efficient, happier, and motivated when they have more flexible schedules. Leaders typically have the power to let workers share jobs or shift schedules. One effective way to do so is not only giving employees deadlines, but also allowing them to manage their schedules in order to meet goals. When given alternatives, employees may become more focused, as well as dedicated, to finishing work.

BREAK UP THE DAY WITH VARIETY

Employees may feel happier and more balanced when they can vary their jobs throughout each day. Leaders can empower workers by breaking up their day, and suggesting employees do the same. For example, spend time doing paperwork in the morning, attend necessary meetings, and then go for a walk to process the day.  If a leader leaves early on occasion, employees should have the same freedom. This autonomy allows them to attend family events or other necessary responsibilities, once their work is completed. This also helps employees to balance their job's demands, while feeling at peace with the work they have completed. 

A work-life balance is a delicate concept. This varies for every employee and every professional. However, with 24/7 access to people and information, this balance is not as it was in the past. Entrepreneurs and leaders must spearhead positive change and foster an environment that promotes peace, balance, and extraordinary efficiency.

Drive Business Growth by Focusing on Your Customers: The Facts and Tips.

The customer is always said to be right for good reason: a business cannot succeed without a customer base.  Trying to understand and satisfy customers should be a priority focus for businesses with equal time and effort applied as put in to other initiatives, such as marketing. Without enough focus on your customers, you're costing your business its success.

In a recent article on the Salesforce blog, research from a variety of sources revealed the following facts about customer service:

• 45% of customers will abandon an online transaction if their concerns are not addressed quickly
• It is around 7 times more costly to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one
• 89% of customers have stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer support
• Customers are twice as likely to share negative customer support experiences than they are to talk about positive ones
• It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience
• 55% of customers would pay more for better customer experience

TOP TIPS FOR GETTING RESULTS BY FOCUSING ON CUSTOMERS

1. Train Your Team for Effective Customer Care: The main issue with customer care in most companies today is lack of effective training, or care for the customers. The concern of most customer support agents is to quickly deal with a customer, and as a result they do the minimum task of answering a customer's questions with an inadequate answer.  Invest the time to train your team to go above and beyond for the customers.

2. Take Care of Your Employees: For your employees to really care about your customers, leading to explosive business growth for you, it is important for you to care about them first. One of the reasons most employees aren't invested in helping customers solve their problems is because the company they work for doesn't really take care about them; this can be manifested in the form of low wages, poor positions, or lack of training. If you want your employees to care about your business and go above and beyond for it, you need to lead by example and make them feel valued and cared about.

3. Enforce a Customer-Centric Sales Practice: Most businesses prioritize making sales over their customers' needs, and as a result will do anything to increase sales even if it is at the detriment of their customers. Apply a customer-centric approach that is based on trust between customers and your company.  This means listening to your customers' goals and concerns and being able to respond effectively and with care. Take the time; make the effort and the return on success will be positive growth outcomes for your business.

Tips and Techniques for Better Marketing Practices

Marketing is never an exact science. Although there are common guidelines that all marketers and companies should follow, every audience and every business is different. The best way for the latter to interact with the former depends on many different factors and can often change over time.

The eventual result of this is that every company, even the firmly established and successful ones, has room to improve on their marketing practices.

The following quick and easy tips any company can apply to their own marketing endeavors, whatever their marketing plans may be.

Opt for Original Content Over Reposts

When it comes to online marketing, content is king. This is especially important to remember when it comes to social media marketing, a major trend and powerful tool for businesses everywhere that is only going to get bigger.

As Forbes online marketing writer Jayson DeMers asks, why would a company want to share another brand’s content when they can share their own? As DeMers points out, research on online content marketing has shown that “created posts – as compared with shared posts – receive far more viral reach, organic reach and engagement than those that are simply shared.”

This, of course, does not mean that companies should take credit for content that they did not create. Instead, it means that companies that take the time to create their own blog posts, photos, social media messages and so on will experience drastically improved marketing attention as a result.

If you’re not sure what content to create, you can still take pointers and ideas from other companies’ content. For example, if you read a breaking relevant news article on a news website, don’t just repost it. Instead, write your own take on the story and reference the site that you heard it from. Your audience will appreciate a fresh voice on a subject more than they will your ability to copy and paste.

Follow and Favorite Content Sharers

Once a company has created and released social media marketing content to their audience that does not mean that they are done and can forget about it. Companies need to keep track of how their target audience reacts to, and shares, this information.

One great way to do just this while also gathering more followers for the company is to follow individuals who share and repost the company’s content. As content crafter Belle Beth Cooper explains, taking the time to show appreciation to marketing audience members is a great way to entice them to follow the company even closer in the future. It will also help boost a company’s reputation amongst audience members as a business that pays attention to them and takes an interest in what they have to say.

Double Check Consistency

With any type of marketing endeavor, online or offline, consistency is an important consideration. A lack of consistency is also one of the easiest marketing mistakes to make without noticing, which is why all businesses should take extra care to make sure that they are presenting a steady marketing image.

To help companies with their marketing consistency, Bozeman Daily Chronicle marketing writer Doug Weber advises companies to double check that they are using the same tagline throughout all of their promotions and a color scheme that is consistent across their brand. It is also important that companies use the same logo, or family of logos, in each of their marketing efforts. The more consistent the marketing, the better idea customers and other audience members will have of who the company is and what it does.

Stop Marketing to Unprofitable Customers

At first glance this can sound like counterproductive advice. After all, ignoring customers to chase profits is an easy way to paint a company as cold and uncaring, a reputation that will definitely not help their marketing efforts.

But on closer inspection, this advice proves sound. After all, if a company stops spending time and money marketing toward customers who do not respond well to their advertising, then they will have more resources to direct toward those customers who do.

As Atlanta marketing consultant Michael King told Microsoft’s Business Hub, “More than likely, 20 percent of your customer base is contributing 150 percent to 200 percent of total annualized profit (TAP).”

A remaining 70 percent of customers are “breaking even,” while the final 10 percent most likely cost a company between 50 and 100 percent of their TAP, according to King.

What this means is that companies should take a closer look at how their customer profitability stacks up. Premium marketing services should only be directed at those customers who are most likely to return with a boost in profits, not those on whom this marketing will most likely be wasted.

Naturally, there are many more ways that a company can improve its marketing endeavors and draw in more and more interested customers.

Bottom-line, marketing can be daunting, but the important thing is to focus on the audience and the most important marketing tasks while trimming away inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

Weighing Up the Pros and Cons of Starting an Online Business.

There are many advantages to turning to an online business. Whether providing your customers with online purchasing options, or building a business that exist solely online, there are several advantages that exist over traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

1. Advantages

Online Stores Have Fewer Limits

When it comes to the obvious practical benefits of an online business versus a traditional one, online stores do not suffer from the same time constraints as brick-and-mortar ones.

With any traditional business, there will come a regular point in time during the day that business simply cannot happen. Employees go home and customers must wait until they come back again to make purchases. With online stores, this isn’t a problem, as retail websites are open all day, every day, all year long. This is more convenient to the customers, which translates into more sales.

Compounding this advantage is the fact that there are also no geographical constraints to an online business. With a physical store, you limit your customer base to those people who are already close enough to frequent your shop. When you go online, you make the whole world your potential customer audience. There are effectively no limits to where or when online businesses can draw their customers.

Online Stores Are More Cost-Effective

One major and tangible advantage that any business owner can see with an online store is the lower costs involved with opening, running, and maintaining it. This reduction of business comes from:

 Real Estate – Since online stores do not need a physical building in which to exist, there are no real estate costs involved. Website hosting and registration fees will almost certainly be less expensive than paying rent.

Staff – With an online store, many processes are automated for both customer and business alike. These include operational processes such as inventory management, billing, payments, and checkout. This in turn lowers the number of employees that the business needs to function.

-        Marketing and Advertising – Many channels of advertising for online businesses can prove much more cost effective than with traditional businesses. Traffic from sources such as social media sites, pay-per-click advertisements, and search engines are all either free or very cheap.

These cost savings can be passed on to the business’s customers in the forms of better deals or lower prices. In this way, online businesses can turn their own lowered expenses into even more customer traffic.

Online Stores Offer Better Convenience

For many customers in many ways, online businesses are vastly more convenient than traditional businesses with physical limitations. For this reason, simply being online is often enough for a business to draw in customers that it might not otherwise have had.

With a well put together online retail business, customers can find your products almost instantly with just a few clicks. There are no lines, no crowds, no waiting times, and no need to travel out of their way. They can also more easily compare products and find relevant information on them as necessary. All in all, for those who embrace it, online shopping is much less of a hassle in many respects than traditional shopping.

2. Disadvantages

Like any business model, though, online retail is not perfect. While it has many advantages over traditional, physical alternatives, online business does come with a few disadvantages that business owners need to consider. These include the following examples.

Customers Cannot Try Before They Buy

Unless your product is purely visual, there is no way for your customers to experience it fully for themselves before buying it. They cannot try on clothes, test out electronics, or flip through books that they buy over the internet. For some customers, this can be a turnoff to online business, especially when it comes to major purchases.

Online Purchases Take Time

The tradeoff that online retail makes to gain many of its time saving conveniences is a bigger delay on customers actually receiving the product. They can shop, compare, and buy relatively quickly, but for any tangible product, they must then wait for their purchase to ship to them. For this reason, customers may prefer to simply go into a physical store and buy it so that they can walk right out with it in their hands.

Security Concerns Are Greater

It’s probably a safe bet that most customers worry less about being robbed in a store than they do about having their information stolen online. With online businesses, customers have to write out their personal information to complete many transactions. This can naturally make many customers uneasy, as this information may possibly then be stolen by a third party and used to commit identity theft.

Fortunately, businesses can take steps to emphasize the advantages of their online stores while lessening the drawbacks. With careful planning and consideration, almost any business can utilize online commerce to their developmental benefit.