Blog
Social Media planning is important for any entrepreneur or small business trying to build a following for their products and services. If you know how and where to spend your time and create a social media strategy around your business, you can leverage your social media presence to increase your brand awareness and grow your audience. If you operate without a strategy, you can waste valuable time and resources on a platform that does nothing for your business.
Rose Valley Textiles is an art & design studio offering decorative fabric designs for interiors and home decor. My name is Brittany and I am the Creative Director. As a textile designer, I have an affinity for exceptional quality textile materials and sustainable manufacturing practices. My color palettes are refined; my patterning references traditional textiles with a modern twist.
The idea to create a minimum viable product comes from the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. We covered the book in my entrepreneurship course in graduate school (one of my favorite courses) and I do recommend reading The Lean Startup if you plan to launch your product to the market using a test-and-learn or agile methodology.
The concept behind developing a minimum viable product is fairly simple. Develop a pared-down version of your offering and launch it to the market before you are ready so that you can solicit feedback from your audience about how to improve your offering, while also making some money to reinvest into your business.
Choosing a name for your business can seem like a daunting task. However, if you plan ahead and choose a name for the future of your business, you can save yourself time and effort. One of the most difficult decisions that creative entrepreneurs struggle with when choosing a name is whether to name their company or brand after themselves. Before you name your company, think about your long-term goals for the business. Your long-term goals should help you determine how you name your brand. Do you want to be a small one-man shop? Do you want to be a multi-national corporation? Most business owners want to be somewhere in the middle.
Tell me a little about you and your company.
Tumbleweed Apothecary started on a walk—we were discussing the various plants around us and how we would use them to improve our lives and the lives of our families, however, this gave us pause. We are both herbalists, we know about plant medicine and how to combine it with nutrition to enrich our personal lives (and those of our loved ones), but not everyone knows how easy, accessible, and life changing plant medicine can be. So we set out to create a business that could not just support our health, but the health of our various communities.
Tracking your marketing campaigns while they run is always a good idea. Tracking campaigns allows you to make changes midstream, especially for social media and other digital campaigns. It is also a good idea to compare all of your campaigns at the end of the year to measure the results against one another and determine what you want to run again v. what was not beneficial. December is a great time to review what worked and didn’t work in your marketing for the current year and to create a plan for the year ahead. If you do the comparison review first, you can use the things you learned this year to make next year even better for your business.
If you have an idea for a product that you would like to take to market, you can get started by creating a prototype and testing it with your potential customers. Showing the product to friends and family might be fun, but in the end, your customers will be the ones to make a purchase and will offer the best feedback to optimize your products for sale. Once you have created a prototype and adjusted it for feedback, test it again. You do not necessarily need to test your product for years, but you might go through three or four iterations of your product before you launch it to the market.
Tell me a little about you and your company.
I am a mom of two little kids, a wife, surfer and designer. My company is Three Feathers Design and I help creative entrepreneurs build kick ass brands.
How long have you owned your own business?
It is coming on 2 years, but I just recently started working full-time for myself, up until recently I had a part-time job - to pay the bills and provide a little security while I built my business.
Creating content for your business on a regular basis is incredibly important for SEO and provides more choices for you marketing messages. Google and other search engines reward businesses that publish content on a consistent basis. Consistency helps these search engines understand that your business is an authority on your subject matter. Creating content on a regular basis also helps to establish your reliability as a content creator and as a business in general. If you begin publishing a newsletter every Thursday, your clients and customers will come to expect your newsletters on Thursdays.
If you sell a product or service with a long buying process, your business may greatly benefit by creating a customer or user journey map. Your map can be used to create messages that resonate with your customers at the right time in their purchasing process.
A user journey map can essentially be broken into two parts: Who are your customers? In what stage of the buying process are those customers?
Tell me a little about you and your company
Daniella Shapiro is a Disruptive Entrepreneur, Marketing & Branding Strategist, Social Media & PR Specialist and Speaker.
Daniella Shapiro is the Founder and CEO of DaniellaShapiro.com, a Premier Marketing, Branding, Social Media Management, PR and Event Planning company dedicated to building products, services & brands for the future.
Daniella has a BA Marketing Communication degree from the University of Johannesburg and an honours degree in brand leadership from Vega College.
When you are launching a new business, or even a new product, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the details involved with a marketing launch. If you create and follow a launch plan, you will be able to record your internal goals, requirements, and accomplishments. You will also ensure that you reach your potential customers with the right media placement and in other locations where they are active. I use the same marketing launch plan for nearly every project, and create separate plans for other aspects of the business, such as production and logistics.
Whether you're aiming for paid or earned media, you need to do your homework to determine whether a partner is the right fit for you and your company. When you choose a media outlet to pitch as part of your marketing efforts, do the research upfront to ensure they are the right fit for your products and services. When you research the publications or even blogs where you might want your portfolio to be featured, you can create a priority list of partners, and weed out those that are not a great fit for your brand.
When you start doing your research, determine who the readers are. If you have a strong, well-defined customer profile for your core customers, you can easily match up your customer profile to the reader profile of the media outlet that you want to target.
Tell me a little about you and your company.
My Sex & Intimacy Coaching business was created as a storehouse of all the wisdom and experience I’ve gathered throughout my life becoming an empowered woman and guiding women to love and trust themselves. My company values women and their partners. I’m committed to helping women and couples experience genuine intimacy in order to feel connected and close. I’ve always been fascinated with relationships - how they are formed and maintained throughout life - and was naturally drawn to the workings of the human mind. I’m eternally curious about how we think and feel and how that affects behavior and beliefs.
Planning content for your entire website during a launch or re-launch can seem daunting, but you can plan ahead to create great content that brings the right customers to your site and looks great in your social media, email marketing, and PR campaigns.
The first step to create quality content for your site is to research the keywords that are relevant for your business. You can research keywords in Google Adwords by searching for your business or product.
As you roll out your new products and services to the market, it will be helpful to set goals and create business projections (also called forecasts) your business. Setting achievable, research-based goals and forecasts will help you to project your business growth and determine your business needs over time. I like to create annual and 3-year forecasts. Many companies find value in 5-year forecasts, and that may be a good idea for you as well. I believe that with a small business things can change very quickly, so if you do plan to create 5-year, and often even 3-year forecasts, you should also be prepared to adjust them up or down as your business evolves. When you set your goals and create your forecast, you can either use a top-down approach where you forecast total sales and then assign percentages to each element of your marketing mix, or you can use a bottom-up approach where you forecast each individual element and add up those numbers to get your total. Either method works well, but if you want to dig into the details of your marketing, bottom-up forecasting is great for that.
Tell me a little about you and your company.
Vickie and I actually have several current ventures, all under our limited liability company, Two Southpaws Enterprises (est. 2005).
We created Vegetarian Zen in March of 2013, shortly after we became vegetarians. Our mission and vision:
Vegetarian Zen is committed to providing informative and entertaining content, including recipes, tips, products, and services, to both current and aspiring vegetarians and vegans in an open and non-judgmental manner.
Search engine optimization means helping search engines direct visitors to your site by using words that are relevant for your business and the search terms that users type into a search engine, like Bing or Google. These search terms are also called keywords.
Optimizing your site for search helps the search engines determine which keywords are most relevant for your website and your business. Search engines use many factors to help them return the best results for their customers.
Throughout the course of doing business, you'll be faced with many difficult decisions and sometimes have to turn down opportunities, marketing, and even potential clients because they do not align with your business or your goals for your company. It's important that you learn how to say 'no' when it's appropriate for your business. It's also important to be gracious when making a rejection of any kind.
