In business it pays to be different, but when you’re selling the same products or services as everyone else in your industry, it can be hard to find a way to stand out.

It’s important to work out your point of difference, that is, what you do that makes you stand out from the crowd.  If people understand what you do, why it’s different and how it can benefit them, they’re more likely to do business with you.

So how do you determine your point of difference?  Here are a few ideas to get you thinking.

Experience

Take a closer look at what you bring to your business and clients that your competitors don’t.

• Have you been in business longer or had more industry experience? Have you worked for major companies?
• Have you built your business out of your own need, so have first-hand experience with the issues your clients face?
• Do you specialise in an area others don’t?
• Do you have any specific qualifications that are hard to attain or very exclusive?
• Have you dealt with difficult or uncommon situations that have given you more specialised knowledge?
• Are you or your business more well known and trusted than competitors?

Processes

Are there any key differences in the way you develop, produce (or source) and deliver your products or services?  Do you have better client follow-up process?

Exceptional quality and/or consistent results 

Can you prove your products or services are of a higher standard, have more value or achieve better results?  A potential client will likely select your business if you can, even if you are more expensive.

A wider range of products or services

Do you offer a wider range of products or services?   If not, could you?

More personalised and/or quicker service

Do you provide an exceptionally quick turnaround on products or services compared to others in your industry? Do you have more personalised customer service?  Many people will choose a business and pay more if products and services are received quicker and/or the service exceeds their expectations.

The key to finding your point of difference is to get a little creative. Look closely at the needs and frustrations of your prospects and clients as well as what your competitors are doing and, more importantly, not doing. Soon you will start to identify your existing points of difference and additional opportunities for you to stand out.

 

Many of us have started 2018 by setting some goals and the best intentions of being structured and organised for the year ahead.  Here are some tips on how to stay on track each day.

Determine when you are at your best

Everyone has a time of day when they feel the most energetic, fo some htat’s in the morning for an hour or two, others might be later in the day.  Make sure you schedule your most important tasks to that period and don’t let less important tasks like replying to emails, returning phone calls etc cut into that time.

Write tomorrow’s To Do list today

Every single evening, make a list for the next day. Your sub conscious will work overtime otherwise reminding you what you need to do tomorrow.  Write it down and you will sleep much better.  It’s also a very rewarding feeling as you cross everything off the list as you move through the day.

Work out your MIT’s (Most Important Tasks) for the day and do them

To help prioritise your to do list, work out which tasks that are the most important.  Put them at the top of the list and make sure you get them done.   Imagine the feeling of achievement and relief as you complete each one.

Schedule email response times

Turn off your email throughout the day. When your email is pouring in, it’s easy to get distracted. Schedule time to read and respond to emails. If there’s something urgent, someone will call or text you. But when you have your email open, those distractions interrupt your thought flow and it’s harder to get back on track.

Take frequent breaks when working

It’s important to take frequent breaks. Get up, move around and leave your desk.  If you’re working for yourself, it’s easy to run on fumes and not even know it. Keep your mental, emotional and physical states at peak levels by breaking frequently.

Turn off social media app alerts

Incessant social media app alerts aren’t helping you with your productivity. Turn them off. You don’t need alerts every moment or to know everything happening with your friends. It’s not important. What’s most important is to have some peace of mind and be better able to focus on the task at hand.  This could even be extended to your mobile phone.  It wouldn’t hurt to put it away while you are trying to focus on a particular task.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that it couldn’t possibly be Christmas already and that 2018 is right around the corner.  I can’t believe that 2017 has passed so quickly but the calendar doesn’t lie, and time waits for no one (as they say).

The end of the year usually brings with it a time of reflection, both personally and professionally.  Did I achieve everything I wanted to this year?  Did I make the most of it or did I just let it pass me by?  What will I do differently next year?

This is also traditionally a time when everyone takes some time out and everything slows down, even if it’s just a little.  Families head off on holidays and some business may close until into the New Year.

Which make this the perfect opportunity for small business owners to get set for the year ahead.   Whether it’s something as simple as a stock take of your office supplies or a long overdue spring clean.  Ensuring your workspace, office and mind are ready to tackle the year ahead.

You may also take this time to make some plans for the year ahead, tweek your website and think about how you can continue to build on your client relationships.  Consider bringing in someone to help you if necessary and share your plans – helps makes it real.

If you’d like any suggestions on how you can improve your client experience, I’d be happy to help.

Wishing you all a safe, happy and prosperous New Year.

ARE YOU LOSING TOUCH WITH YOUR CLIENTS?  ARE YOUR CLIENTS LEAVING?

IF YOU’RE NOT CONTACTING YOUR CLIENTS, SOMEONE ELSE IS!

When was the last time you received a handwritten card in the mail?  How did that make you feel?

Give your clients the same feeling – send them a hand-written card this Christmas.

It doesn’t cost that much, it just takes a little bit of effort and planning.

If you feel that you don’t have the time, at Emporia we can do all the work for you.

All you need to do is send us the details and we’ll do the rest.  We can even help with Gift Hampers and Personalised Wine gifts.

It couldn’t be easier!

Phone today 0409 134 742

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site with close to 500 million members, over 6 million of them in Australia.

Linkedin is a very powerful business-oriented search engine and can certainly help generate more leads.  But before you spend too much time trying to source more leads, you need to ensure you will be creating a good first impression by ensuring your personal profile and company page (if you have one) are in tip-top shape.

Here are some quick tips on sprucing up your profile:

Ensure it’s complete.

Have a professional photo – Profiles with a photo are much more likely to be viewed.

Have a compelling headline – Rather than just your “title” tell people how you can help them.  You have 120 characters to use here.

Ensure you have completed your Contact details.

Instead of just listing your website, if you edit the link and choose Other instead of Company website, you could add a link to anything you like.  It might be an e-book on your site, for example.

Add a summary – this sits right at the top under your photo and contact details. You have up to 2000 characters so make the most of it, use them to add value to your ideal prospect.  Don’t just write all about you, but rather how you can help.  Have a call to action.  What’s the next step?  Tell them how they do business with you.

Have detailed Experience – Not just the title, but a description in there.  What did you achieve in that role?  What skills did you learn that help you today? What was your greatest achievement?

Have Recommendations & Endorsements – Recommendations are more important.  They are written individually and take more time to be written.  Don’t be afraid to ask for recommendations.  You can edit & remove endorsements if they aren’t relevant to you.

Hopefully these are a few helpful tips to start you fine-tuning your profile

It’s very easy to advertise on Facebook.  You’ll notice that most posts you make come with an offer to ‘promote’ it.  This isn’t a free of course.  So before you take the plunge, I thought I’d give you some food for thought.

Would you believe that 10 million Australians are active on Facebook every day?  9 million of those are using a mobile device, so if you are advertising on Facebook to increase traffic to your website, you’ll need to ensure your site is mobile responsive.

By advertising on Facebook you can define your target market to ensure you advert reaches the right people.

You can target by:

• Location: state, postcode or even just the area around your business
• Demographics: age, gender and interests
• Interests: choose from a large range of categories such as sport, retail
• Behaviours: this is based on the things they do via Facebook, ie places they ‘check-in’.

To ensure we are getting our return on our investment Facebook have a number of measurement tools so you can get an insight on how your ad is performing.

Unfortunately, things have changed on Facebook and we can no longer rely on our ‘Likes’ and organic reach to increase traffic to our page, you do need to pay.   Facebook have done us a favour and made it “easy” to do.  As a safeguard, you can set your budget, either a daily or lifetime budget, so you can easily dabble without breaking the bank.

Unless you have had your head buried in the sand, you are probably well aware of social media. Facebook, Linked in, Twitter, Instagram etc seem to be mentioned in the media almost as frequently as economics, the environment and politics.

But why should I have a social media strategy for my business?

• It’s Free
• It can improve your search engine ranking – Facebook pages rank highly in Google and can improve the search engine ranking of your business’ website
• It helps keep your business top of mind – If you update regularly it keeps your business top of mind amongst clients as updates will appear on their ‘newsfeed’
• A client communication vehicle – A simple means of providing valuable information to clients
• A means of attracting new clients and a great way to get client feedback.

Do

• Ensure you update regularly.  Post relevant and helpful information
• Post questions or conversation starters. This will help you engage your audience and enlighten you about their needs
• Mix up your updates to keep them fresh e.g. Links, photos, discussion topics, latest promotions etc.

Don’t

• Use anything other than your business trading name
• Use your business page for personal interactions (ie. communicating with friends in an open forum)
• Overtly sell your services all of the time.

A good rule of thumb when deciding whether to post something online – would you be comfortable with this appearing on the front page of the newspaper?  If so, post away!!

But which one should I use?

That decision will need to be yours, but here’s quick overview of a few different platforms to pick the one right for you.  If you want to be active on a number of platforms, there are providers such as Hootsuite or Buffer that help you update multiple platforms at the same time.

Linked In – LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site, ideal for B2B relationships.  Australia has over 6 million members on LinkedIn and over 40% of members log in and check their news feed every day.

Facebook – Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues.  Through your business page you can share a variety of content, like updates and keep in contact with your clients.  Just keep in mind the most effective posts aren’t the advertisements, it should be something casual that starts a conversation.

Twitter – Twitter enables users to send and read short messages – “tweets”. Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them.  The problem is there is a lot of traffic on Twitter, so it will take some effort to stand out from the pack.  Use a tool like Buffer to schedule tweets throughout the day, tweeting 2 – 5 times daily.  Keep your tweets relevant, short and include hashtags where you can.

Instagram – Instagram is an image and video based platform best suited to business within the food, fashion, luxury, or lifestyle industries.  Instagram is owned by Facebook, so it’s easy to share your Instagram content on Facebook.

Pinterest – Much like Instagram, Pinterest is a great platform for anyone involved in the food or fashion fields. However, Pinterest has been shown to be an effective platform for travel, design, home decor, and anything related to DIY. Think of it as a virtual pin/ideas board.

YouTube – If you’re offering advice or sharing expertise, there’s no reason why you can’t be creating informative and useful videos for your customers. You could also create ‘meet the team’ footage.  Add a link from your other social networks to your YouTube video.  Because Google owns YouTube, these videos do extremely well in search rankings.

Google+ – Google+ is a social network that builds off a Google Account.  Contacts are arranged into ‘circles’ so you can decide what you share within each ‘circles’.  ie friends will not be in the same ‘circle’ as your clients.

If you haven’t seen it already, click on the link below to watch a video showcasing the power of social and mobile. Created by bestselling author and keynote speaker, Erik Qualman (@equalman).  Always interesting viewing.

#Socialnomics

Social Media Revolution 2017 by Erik Qualman

Most of us have been using email for many years.  Now that we have access to our emails 24/7, we find ourselves checking them constantly and it’s now expected that we will respond promptly.

For those of us old enough, remember the days of letters and internal memorandums, it was entirely acceptable if you didn’t get a response for a week or two, and somehow we managed.  If it was urgent, we’d pick up the phone.

Feeling the need to respond urgently can cause problems.  So here are some basic business email principles:

• Consider whether an email is appropriate at all, some things are best discussed verbally.
• Slow down.  This helps remove the opportunity for mistakes or sending prematurely.
• Use proper grammar and punctuation.  It is a business communication tool so make sure it also includes your business name, contact details, logo etc.  Your business will be responsible for what is said within the email.
• If the email you received upsets you, walk away and take time to respond.  And be very careful of the ‘forward’ button.
• Always think of emails as if they were written on your business letterhead.

I know it’s not rocket science but sometimes it’s worth getting back to basics to make sure we are always taking a professional approach.