2016 Editions
Content Marketing: 5 Powerful Data Visualization Tools You Absolutely Need to Discover
Irresistible content is crucial to keeping your audience engaged with your brand and data can be a powerful tool in achieving this…when it’s understandable and not boring.
If you want to see your social media shares skyrocket, here is a selection of powerful data-visualization tools you need to check out:
- LiveStories lets you create engaging visualizations from your spreadsheets and provides access to its own databases.
- StatTrends
- DataHero lets you integrate data from multiple platforms, including MailChimp, SalesForce, HubSpot, and Shopify.
- Vizzlo allows you to easily create data visualizations for your website or social media channels. Choose what type of chart you want to create, add/import your data, and watch your creation magically appear before your eyes.
- Dataseed is another top tool for brand builders. Its handy interface lets you create data-rich visualizations perfect for sharing on social media and in your content marketing blog posts.
Thanks to terrific tools like these, marketers no longer have to rely just on photographs or videos to provide eye candy for their content.
Your Online Reputation Can Launch or Torpedo Your Business
Bridle the Internet Beast and Make it Work for You
(Our In-Depth Article This Month)
Today, retailers must protect their brands by responding appropriately to negative reviews, promoting positive ones, and posting helpful information for an Internet-connected public.
Hersh Davis-Nitzberg, a Beverly Hills, California-based consultant suggests letting a few key principles guide your actions. The first is to realize that building a great reputation means more than responding appropriately to negative reviews. “You need to do more than just repair damage that is done online,” he says. “You also need to create a positive image for your brand.”
You need to know which social media are preferred by your customers, monitor your mentions, and respond appropriately and thoughtfully. Setting up a Google alert for your business name is one good way to get started.
Avoid the temptation to ignore the negative review. A lack of response makes a terrible impression on the public. People will think, “That retailer does not care about taking care of customer problems.” At the same time, avoid a knee jerk response.
When problems arise, you can take the “spat” offline, exchanging emails or talking on the phone. But if you do, be sure to post the resolution online so others can see the positive outcome.
What Kids Can Teach You About Selling
Recently, I was talking to one of my brothers about his attempt to teach his granddaughter how to ice skate. He had taken her out a few times to the local skating rink; she was making progress, but slowly.
Then one day she saw a young boy pushing off the edges of his skates and building up real speed. This gave her a clear vision of what she needed to do and how to do it.
It reminded me of how we need to learn from others and what I once learned from a drilling fluids salesman. He was frustrated with an engineer prospect who he couldn’t make any headway with. Then he heard about another salesperson’s success and got an idea.
Find out how a lesson in ice skating success helped that salesman land a big account by re-framing a situation from a perceived negative to a clear positive when you read the full article.
Is Your Family Business Prepared for Transition?
When the time comes for a new generation to take control of your family business, will the process go smoothly? One way to find out is to take the quiz below. Give yourself 10 points for every “yes” answer.
- Have you established a structured plan to transition your business to a new generation of ownership?
- Has each family member communicated a personal vision of their role in a business transition?
- Have all family members bought into a shared business vision?
- Are all members of the junior generation involved in some way with the business?
- Has each member of the junior generation begun a program of education to meet the needs of his or her desired role in the transitioned business?
- Has a role been established for the senior generation in the business transition?
- Have you considered the use of non-family interim managers?
- Have you established a system to provide career satisfaction for valued non-family employees who might be shut out of advancement into management positions?
- Have you shared your transition plans with interested third parties such as customers, vendors and bankers?
- Have you a solid understanding of the financial requirements (including any requisite funding for buy-outs and taxation) for a successful transition to new ownership?
Total your scores, then rate your transition readiness on the following scale:
- 90-100: Congratulations! You are well on your way to a smooth ownership transition.
- 70-80: You have addressed your needs for a successful transition and need to do some final paving on the road ahead.
- Less than 70: Time to preserve the future of your enterprise by taking productive steps toward a smooth transition to a new generation.
Grow Your Business Fast Using Another Company’s Clients!
Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on trying to find more customers using hit and miss blitz marketing programs. There is an more effective strategy and there are only two questions you have to ask yourself to take advantage of it are:
- What do people really want to buy from me?
- What related products are they already buying?
Learn how to find potential customers without wasting precious resources on hit-and-miss blitz marketing programs. There is a more effective strategy and the only two questions you have to answer to take advantage of it are:
- What do people really want to buy from me?
- What related products are they already buying?
With these answers, you can find other businesses with the same customer base that you can customer share with. You then strike up a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.
The trick is to make sure you’re getting enough lifetime value from these new customers to justify your incentive. Here’s the formula for figuring that out: LV = (P x F) x N – MC.
- LV is the life time value of a customer
- P is the average profit margin from each sale
- F is the number of times a customer buys each year
- N is the number of years customers stay with you
- MC is the marketing cost per customer (total costs/number of customers)
If you need help working through this process, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources.
- By Coach Phil Gilkes
Saving the Family Business: How to Balance People and Profits
Too few family businesses survive into the second and third generations of ownership because the emotions of family members conflict with the demands of the bottom line.
Consider, for example, the damage that results when siblings compete for the position of company president. Sadly, parents often opt to ignore these issues.
“There needs to be a shared understanding of the purpose of the business, beyond just making money. People who possess a shared vision will be willing to make the necessary tradeoffs,” says Kathyann Kessler Overbeke, principal of GPS: Generation Planning Strategies.
Further, “Consideration has to be given to not just family members but all stakeholders,” says Paul Karofsky, Founder of Transition Consulting Group. “That means in-laws, bankers, suppliers, customers, and the cadre of non-family employees who are impacted by any business decision.” It may well be unclear if the second generation is capable of taking on the reins of management, or if they might be able to do the job with some additional education.
“The transition needs to be an exceedingly cautious, well played out scenario,” says Karofsky. Time must also be sufficient to recruit where necessary, to assess candidates, to create professional development plans, and to help the senior generation move to roles of significance.
Read the article's in-depth advice on what you need to address and resolve to keep the family business afloat - and in the family.
Winning in Life and Business: Understanding The Right Ratio of Attitude, Skill and Knowledge
I received a call from a client in the oil and gas drilling sector. He asked me how I was doing; I think he was expecting me to go down the “ain’t it awful” rabbit hole.
I answered, “It’s never been a better time to be in business, granted maybe not so great in the oil and gas exploration business these days, but in the business performance coaching and training profession it surely is.”
I talked with him about the Carnegie Triangle and how it identified the common traits of highly successful people in virtually every endeavor: skill, knowledge and attitude.
The Carnegie report said that 85 percent of a person’s success is due to interpersonal skills or attitude; only 15 percent of their success is the result of technical knowledge or skills. This 15 percent was split in half between knowledge and skills at 7.5 percent each.
Attitude plays the biggest part in the effectiveness for all of us. A good attitude equals a better life. You can train for skill and educate for knowledge, but if your attitude is negative you are not going to be able to have sustained change.
- by Coach Phil Gilkes
3 Ways To Positively Motivate In Safety
Instead of focusing on negative outcomes, re-frame communications to be more positive in safety.
Safety, like any other message or idea, needs to be marketed to employees. Safety needs reminding. The more a safety message is repeated, the more employees become comfortable with the message.
The overwhelming focus of safety marketing in past has been wrong. Scare tactics, sad stories and data charts do not provide inspiration or motivation to buy-in to safety. They create fear and accident avoidance. That's a short-term result that needs to be constantly fed and reinforced.
Safety is focused on achieving compliance instead of developing an affinity with personal values. A cop at the side of the highway causes short-term compliance. Values alignment creates safety buy-in so that cops become unnecessary.
Instead of focusing on negative outcomes, re-frame communications to be more positive in safety. Here are three ways you can begin to re-frame how you communicate your safety message:
1 Shift away from behavior-avoidance. Negative-based safety messages of “don’t do this” focus on behavior-avoidance. People want to know what they should do - not what they shouldn’t do. “Don’t do this” is not a complete set of instructions.
You don’t go to the grocery store with a list of things not to buy. You don't buy-in to a financial plan because of what you might lose. You don't buy-in to a healthy lifestyle because of what you might lose. You do those things because of what you will gain. But safety is focused on reminding workers of what they might lose if they don't comply.
Broke people don’t get invited to speak at financial planner conferences. Fat people don’t get to offer their “don’t do what I did” advice to fitness trainers. People don’t want to know what NOT to do. They want a plan and strategy for success - one that builds on strengths and teamwork - not negativity and fear. Show your people how safety makes life better.
What exactly would you like your people to do better? Be specific about what you want them to do. Point all of your energies at accomplishing that.
2 Remove irrelevant messages. At a safety meeting, the safety manager ended with a gut-wrenching video of injury. After the video, one employee stood up and asked why they shown the video?
The employee pointed out its irrelevance. The story happened twenty years ago. The events depicted in the video could not happen at this company because there are too many checks and balances. The safety manager was embarrassed.
Employees know what makes them respond positively. They know when they're being manipulated. You don’t build a solid safety culture by appealing to a fear of failure. So remove the negatively-reinforced and irrelevant messages from your workplace. Especially from your PowerPoint slide deck. Be relevant.
Lay out your specific plan of what you want your people to do. Then sell only that message. Do not try to add shock-value or scare tactics. It confuses what you’re trying to do.
3 Ask them to take ownership of the safety program. In sales, the person who doesn’t ask the customer for the sale rarely gets it.
Safety is the one thing that everyone can agree on. No one wants to see someone else get hurt. Your people are on the same page as you in that regard. So, you assume that you shouldn’t have to ask them to “buy” in to safety, right? But, because they’ve never been asked, they treat safety as rules they are forced to follow.
So ask. Show them how safety makes their lives better. Your people may have plans for when they retire but how many have a plan to make it safely to retirement age? I mean, a real plan that they execute each day? The safety plan, when worked properly, will get your people successfully to retirement age.
If your people want to enjoy their golden years healthy and happy, then they are going to need a plan to safely get there. Ask them to buy-in to the safety plan.
7 Nuts n Bolts Strategies for Safety Communications:
- Inspire your people and value them.
- Trust them, involve them and engage them in all aspects of safety.
- Allow them to buy-in to safety for the long-term.
- Don’t forget to ask them though.
- Show them that safety is enjoyable.
- Keep it positive.
- Once you get buy-in, it lasts a lifetime.
- Kevin Burns is a management consultant, safety speaker and author. He believes that the best place to work is always the safest place to work. Kevin helps organizations integrate caring for and valuing employees through their safety programs. For more info and to reach Kevin, www.KevBurns.com. -reprinted with permission.
The Law of Futurity - Don't outsmart yourself
The Law of Futurity says: The purpose of a negotiation is to enter into an agreement such that both parties have their needs satisfied and are motivated to fulfill their agreements and enter into further negotiations with the same party in the future.
Let’s break this law down into its parts. First, “The purpose of a negotiation is to enter into an agreement….” It is assumed that both parties want to do business together. If one does not and is negotiating for some other purpose, the other party can be at a considerable disadvantage.
The second part says, “…such that both parties have their needs satisfied.” An agreement where one party feels that he or she has lost is not a successful negotiation. Both must feel that they have come out ahead.
This law then says, “…and are motivated to fulfill their agreements and enter into further negotiations with the same party in the future.” It’s your job in every negotiation to assure that the other party will want to continue doing business with you in the future.
- "THE 100 ABSOLUTELY UNBREAKABLE LAWS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS" – Brian Tracy
How to Test Market Your Product or Service the Smart Way
How do you test market a product or service? How do you find out if people are actually going to buy it? Try these strategies.
First, make or get a prototype. Create or get a sample so that you can show it, demonstrate it, photograph it.
Determine the Correct Prices. Get prices and delivery dates from your suppliers so you have accurate answers when asked.
Ask a Buyer. Get a buyer's personal opinion. Go to somebody who you will want to buy the product or service and get their personal opinion.
Compare Your Product to Others on the Market. Be sure to ask this question, "Why would someone buy from you instead of from someone else?"
Try a 1-store test. Go and see if you can find a store that will carry the product on a limited basis. If it's a product or service, try to find one customer who will use the product or service.
Take It to a Trade Show. There are 15,000 trade shows each year. Sophisticated buyers there will tell you if you have a winner.