What staff can do to help boost agency profits

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | What staff can do to help boost agency profitsWorking in an agency can be a fantastic experience, but unless you work in sales or account management it can feel like there isn’t much you can do to help the company achieve better profits. Actually this doesn’t have to be the case at all, and there is plenty that you can do help your company be more of a success financially.

Make yourself accountable

There can be a problem at all levels of agencies where members of staff do not feel like they are accountable for the success of the company. In fact, everyone at the business has a role to play in ensuring the success of the organisation, and it is up to individuals to make themselves accountable to this fact.

For managers, the issue may be that there is no one to check to make sure they are accountable to the things they say they are going to do. For other members of staff, they may not feel that what they do can have a financial impact. However, as we will see, this is not true.

Find cost savings

There is a misconception around company profits with members of staff, and this is that the easiest way to boost them is by making more money. Of course, no-one is doubting this as a concept, but it hides the fact that there are other opportunities. One of the most important ways that you, as an employee, can improve your company profits is by spending less money.

If you can find cost savings in your department or your role, those savings act as pure profit for the company. That is money that was being spent before and is now no longer being spent. Consider where you and your department spends its money and look for ways you can reduce it.

Provide management with ideas and information

Don’t lose sight of the fact that you are the person who does your job every day, which means that you understand it better than anyone else in the company. That means those things that might seem completely obvious to you, may also be completely obscured to those in management. This puts the onus on you to provide your management with any ideas and information that could help you do your job, or help the business succeed.

Often it is the day-to-day activities that actually make the biggest difference to a business’ bottom line. So don’t be afraid to voice your opinion on matters, good management will find it extremely valuable.

Be dedicated and go the extra mile

No matter what your job entails you have options with how you perform it. You can go through the day doing the bare minimum, or you can actually show hard work and dedication. Businesses love engaged staff and it is not just because this means more productive employees – when you show your dedication to the business you are showing your potential for the future.

This means that being that person who goes the extra is not only a great benefit to the company, it also provides you with far better career prospects.

Request training that you’ll actually benefit from

Ask yourself: how many times have you been on a training course where there really doesn’t seem to be much point at all to it? Too often when businesses provide training, they are have actually just followed the ideas of someone who doesn’t really understand what will be a benefit to your team.

Instead you should be proactive. Talk to your manager about the kind of training that you would actually benefit from. Once again this will pay dividends in that you will get the training that can help the business, but it will also provide you with valuable tools and skills to make it easier for you to advance your career.

“One of the biggest issues I see in owner-managed agencies is the gulf in understanding between top managers and their employees/managers. If you hope to bridge this gap, you have to invest in training your future leaders.”

Da Costa Coaching

Stop overservicing

Interesting details from the State of Agency Workflow Management report revealed that nearly half of all agencies revealed a loss of 11% due to overservicing. Overservicing is a term that means that those agencies were delivering work for clients that they were not getting paid for – and that is a major problem.

The old adage ‘time is money’ is never more appropriate than when talking about agencies, and if you are spending your time doing work that no-one is paying you for, then you are wasting both your time and your money.

How to Get Reviews: 3 Ways to Get More Product Reviews

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |how to get reviews|How to Get Reviews: 3 Ways to Get More Product ReviewsDoes your company need reviews but you’re not sure how to get them? We’re here to help. Product reviews are important in showing potential customers that you have a community of customers that use your products, increasing brand reliability.

Building a community with your customers through reviews can help them feel they have real-life advice and insight into your products. Many times, product reviews can even answer questions other customers may be having about a product.

Increase your sales and improve your brand reliability with reviews. Keep reading this guide so you can learn how to get reviews today.

1. Make Leaving a Review as Easy as Possible

Like all things Ecommerce, leaving a review comes down to user experience. Making sure that leaving a review is easy and simple will increase your chances of customers leaving them.

A great way to do this is to create a space to leave a review on every product page. Give your site’s visitors an easy way to review, like leaving a rating and brief description.

Make sure you’re also sharing awesome reviews on your site and making them visible to other customers. This original content is also great for upping your SEO rating.

2. Incentivize Customers to Review

Incentivizing your customers with discounts or an entrance into a giveaway is a great way to persuade them to leave a review. A discount can be a great idea if you also want your customers to make another purchase with you. Making a loyalty program is a great idea for returning customers, who can continually make reviews and receive points for doing so.

Mention your incentives and giveaways on social media so that your customers can leave reviews on many platforms, from Facebook to Google as well as your site.

3. Send Follow Up Emails

Another great way to catch your customer’s attention is through email. If your launching a review incentive program or giveaway, send an initial email out to your customer letting them know about this exciting offer. After this initial informative email, set up an automated email that goes out to customers after they receive their products from you.

Try sending an email asking your customers how they like the product, encouraging them to write in a review about a week after their purchase. This makes sure that you give the product enough time to ship, but the product is still fresh in your customer’s mind. This also shows that you care about customer satisfaction.

While all companies hope their reviews are great, it’s impossible to please everyone. If you have bad reviews you’re hoping to get rid of, learn more here.

Tips and Tricks on How to Get Reviews

Reviews are essential to building trust behind your brand and creating a community with your customers. If you need more reviews, keep these tips on how to get reviews in mind today and start implementing them into your marketing plan.

For more advice on business, Ecommerce and more, head to the “Insights” section of our site!

Tips for Outdoor Signage

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Tips for Outdoor SignageVisibility

Although the design of your outdoor sign is crucial, the creativity and effort involved will go down the drain if you don’t think about visibility. The objective of it all is to make your target audience know that your product or service exists and they won’t spend a lot of time looking at your sign.

Your goal should be to stand out but not go overboard in the process as this can make your audience take a considerable amount of time to actually figure out what your business is all about. Built-up signs are a great way to achieve this. It’s highly advisable to keep your signs simple and straight to the point. They should also be appealing and placed in locations where people actually see them.

When your audience understands what your business is all about by viewing your signs, they will be more likely to walk in and make a purchase. On top of this, signs that stand out are more shareable as they are different from other signs that consumers are used to seeing.

Less Is More

Now, the actual content or message you put on your business signs should be brief and concise. Going with the ‘less is more’ way may seem like the absolutely wrong thing to do, but actually it’s not. As already mentioned, people don’t spend much time looking at signs. So, your sign needs to grab their attention with as little information as possible.

Don’t plaster a whole paragraph of text or a rainbow of colours on your sign as this can confuse your audience. Instead, use simple words and brief messages that will arouse interest in your audience.

Remove The Clutter

To add on to the previous point, it’s important that your outdoor signs only have essential information about your business/brand and product. You may be tempted to share everything about your business on the sign, but this goes against the previous point. Remember, you should keep the text on your signs simple and brief. Remove anything that may seem unnecessary. Intuit recommends that signs should have a maximum of 7 words.

Including more content only makes it difficult for your audience to read and understand the information you are conveying. Something worth trying is designing your signs with a lot of white space and some text and graphics to catch the attention of the public.

It’s totally normal to want your sign to have an assortment of beautiful images and graphics. However, you should not use too many to the extent that your signs become illegible.

Studies suggests that at least 35% of your sign should be white space. So, remember this when designing your next outdoor sign for your business.

Choose Attractive Colours

Next, you need to think about the colours you are going to feature on your sign. Colours are closely related to your business/brand identity. Your audience will see the colours in your sign before anything else. Studies note that 80% of brand recognition is done based on colours.

Placing light shaded letter on top of dark background in a popular choice for many businesses. You can also use trendy, vibrant and bright colours as they are able to draw the attention of your target audience much faster.

Use Easy-To-Read Fonts

So, using fonts like Comic Sans on your outdoor signs is not the best idea. Your choice of font can be the difference between having an ordinary sign and a sign that your audience actually loves and shares as it’s so unique from other signs out there.

Choosing the right font that matches the identity and style of your business is very important. When you pick a good font, people will not struggle to read your sign. A bad font can disappear into the background and make your sign look dull and cluttered.

Also, heavy fonts are known to blend together making letters to seem combined and wavy. Using all Caps letters in your text may seem like the appropriate thing to do to make your message loud and clear, but this is not the case. Huge letters can easily disrupt the visibility of your sign.

Some simple but attractive fonts that you can use on your outdoor signs include Display, Helvetica, Sans Serif, and Serif fonts. These fonts stand out adequately and they are easy to read when combined with images and graphics.

An important point to note is that you should not use more than 2 fonts in one outdoor sign unless it’s really necessary. Always go with 2 fonts that match your brand identity and style. You will never regret this decision.

Choose Suitable Materials

There is no need to design a perfect outdoor sign that can effectively market your business and boost sales if you are going to use a poor material. The beauty and creativity of your outdoor sign can only be appreciated if has a suitable base or canvas. Rough or uneven bases are difficult to print on, so you can expect the print output to be sub-standard.

Choose the right material will ensure you end up with the perfect outdoor sign. Some materials are considered better for specific type of signs. For instance, acrylic is suitable for indoor signs used in stores and businesses. It is definitely not the best material for outdoor signs.

How To Find Your Winning Business Idea

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StrategyDriven Innovation Article |Winning Business Idea|How To Find Your Winning Business IdeaThis post will outline the exact framework I’ve used to come up with four very different ideas for my multi-million dollar ecommerce brands. This process will help you not only come up with a product to sell, but also help you create more clarity around your brand vision – something you’ll return to again and again.

First up, if you already have a product on the market this lesson will be equally as important for you, because it’s going to get you thinking about your brand in an entirely new way, so definitely pay attention here.

Right now you’re probably thinking what do I even mean by a “problem first approach to ideation”. What I mean here, in its simplest state is that your product should be the solution to a problem and this is the very first thing to know before starting an e-commerce brand.

You’re not just creating a product, you’re solving a problem. Something that I’ve said time and time again: “The world doesn’t need more products”, so rather than asking yourself what product can I sell, instead ask yourself what problem can I solve?

By flipping this thinking on its head, from finding a product to finding a problem is important for several reasons. First up, if we’re thinking differently to others, we’re more likely to come up with something different and better than what’s already out there.

This method gives you the opportunity to find a better solution to the problem than other standard products on the market. Also if your product is solving an existing problem that your target market or customer already experiences, you know it’s going to add value and be of value to them.

Acing a problem-first approach will also make it easier down the track to create more products that make sense for your brand, because you’ll always have that starting point or brand vision to work from. In fact, coming up with a solution before you know the problem you’re solving can actually be seriously detrimental to innovation. Once you have a solution in mind, it’s really hard to shift from that, even if you know and you’ve got that it might not be the best possible one.

It’s a little like answering a question before you know what the question even was. Even if you take a good guess it’s always going to be a little bit off the mark. Identifying the problem that you want to solve before making your product will make sure that you never lose sight of what your brand is trying to achieve or end up with a product that does miss the mark.

Finding a problem and coming up with multiple solutions means that you’re better equipped to find the best possible product for your brand to sell. What we want to do here is find a problem that you already know exists or better yet you’ve experienced yourself. This is what I often refer to: “scratching your own itch”. That means you’ve felt the pain point yourself, so you’re better able to empathize with your target audience. Ideally, the problem that you’re looking to solve will be in an area that you’re passionate about – you want to be able to do it day in day out, for the foreseeable future.

Let’s use an example that I’ve spoken about before, I’m truly interested in protecting our shared environment for future generations. My interest in this might stem from the fact that my mom is it a little bit of a hippie, she’s taken to doing things like lining her bin with old newspaper instead of plastic bags, religiously takes her own plastic bags to the supermarket, etc. The huge environmental issue is our unprecedented production of waste and dropshipping products – both landfill and recyclable.

So the problem that my brand will solve is how to decrease waste from everyday disposable items. A good way of coming up with your solution here is by turning a problem into a question and your solution will be the answer to that question.

The question could be: How do I decrease waste from everyday disposable items? And one answer would be to make those items reusable and this is something that I do a lot when coming up with solutions – I come up with a problem and ask myself what the polar opposite of that problem would be?

Like I said, the opposite of disposable is reusable this is another strategy that you can use. So we have our problem – the waste from disposable everyday items and our solution making them reusable. Now we want to have a bit of a brainstorm around what some of these disposable everyday items could be, that we could make reusable. This is going to help us come up with some potential product ideas.

So, now let’s start thinking of some items that you use daily, are disposable that you could make reusable. First things that immediately come to mind: Erasers (shopify best sellers), tooth brushes, takeaway coffee cups or straws. Now you want to begin to have a think and do some research around each of these potential product ideas in terms of what you think has:

  • biggest market potential
  • competition

It’s important that they aren’t being done as well by other brands. You can fast forward and go for the item of areas which has the least market saturation (which in our case, from the items listed is the disposable straws).
Then we want to focus in and start to do some additional research around our problem and solution. We want to look at some facts and figures that you can focus on to highlight the problem of disposable straws. Apparently an estimated 500 million straws are used each day in the US alone – this is a powerful number and it can help you convince the customer the importance of making a change.

Then we want to highlight the fact that plastic straws cannot be recycled and they sit in our landfill for years or pollute our waterways. So, you’re starting to create a compelling reason for your prospective customer to switch to a reusable straw, by getting them to understand and even empathize with the problem.

If you’ve felt the pain point yourself, you’re not only going to be more motivated to solve it, but you’re actually going to be more equipped to solve it as well. If you ask yourself your problem as a question, your solution can be the answer or another approach is thinking of the polar opposite of your problem, for example: Disposable and reusable dehydration and hydration or in the case of SkinnyMe Tea (my brand if tea) toxins and detox.

If you’re stuck on ideas you can look at websites like trendhunter or Kickstarter, for example. On trendhunter you can search according to a category you’re interested in:

If you’re interested in health and wellness, then you can go into the health category and maybe look at some of the top trends for that month in the health and wellness space or you can see if anything really catches your eye.

For me obviously if detox teas was written down, I would have found that really interesting and I would have tried to think about some of the ways that I could solve that problem differently to what was already being presented.
Another good place to do some research once you have a general idea is Pinterest. You can type in things like: “the benefits of hydration” or “dehydration” or “detox tea recipes” and look at some of the DIY tips and trends there. As an action item I’d like you to come up with five broad problems that you’re looking to solve.

How to Decide if a Franchise is Right for You

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Many entrepreneurs wish to start a business based on an idea they have that they believe fills a gap in the market – or creates a new market. However, in many cases, you might wish to start a business but lack a viable opportunity in your location. This is where franchises come in. The basic idea is simple enough; you pay an established company for the right to use their business model and brand and run your own business under their umbrella. Some of the biggest commercial names run on this model, but how do you know if this would be a good fit for you?

Advantages

The main advantage of a franchise is that you don’t need to establish your business in a competitive marketplace. One of the main strategies of a new business will be to run effective marketing campaigns, which can be time-consuming, costly and a lot of work. With a franchise, you have that brand awareness in place already, and the marketing burden is largely taken off your shoulders. There is still a requirement for a degree in marketing, depending on the contract you sign, in which case you could look at social media marketing for franchises for example. The other key advantage is that the business model, including supply chain, IT systems, and personnel management is already in place, saving a huge amount of work compared to starting a business from scratch.

Disadvantages

The first thing that might spring to mind is the initial investment required for a franchise. This can be a sizeable sum for a major chain, and you will need to have a sound source of funding to be able to take on a franchise. However, before you dismiss the idea on these grounds, consider how much you would need to invest as an individual if you were starting from scratch. Factor in the costs of running marketing campaigns to the set-up costs and you may find that this puts the franchise cost into perspective.

One main issue is not so much the finance, because to start a business you will need investment anyway; rather it is your perception of the loss of autonomy. You will be bound by your contract to operate within the company regulations, normally with very little freedom to go your own way. Franchisors want their customers to be essentially unaware that the branch they are in is a franchise, so if you’re in an establishment in Delaware, it will be exactly the same as the one in Richmond, or Boulder. If you would find it hard to function with this lack of control, then franchising is probably not your best option. If, however, it is the challenge of being productive and profitable that is your passion, you could find franchising a perfect fit.

When considering the pros and cons of franchise opportunities, remember that with so many potential franchises to evaluate, there will be corresponding variations in the degree of control you have, so there could well be a business model out there that fits you. Read more on how a tree service franchise opportunity could be the business you are looking for.