Category: Small Business Marketing Training Courses
Online and offline marketing, product mix, pricing packages, call to action, website goals, sales and marketing pipelines. These are all part of the marketing role and they aid the sales people to sell a businesses products.
Creating training materials for cloud-based accounting software is a continuous process of improvement. In fact it is much like the process that the software goes through in their Continuous Innovation & Continuous Delivery process.
Two of Australia’s newest billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar have become wealthy because they created software that enables companies like MYOB manage a team of developers, designers and analysts in the pursuit of continuously adding enhancements, updating the software, fixing bugs and providing support for their MYOB Tax software via their company Atlassian, but I digress.
The reason for this post is because of obscure behaviour by MYOB regarding their essentials software and a recent upgrade they performed on the MYOB Essentials software.
Customer service is an expectation that has changed massively over the last 5 decades and technology is a big influence in how well companies perform AND what customers expect.
My first experiences of customer service involved talking to a person at the counter at the local corner shop. I pointed to what I wanted, knew what the price was and handed over the money. We all smiled and I walked away with a bag of lollies. Things are different these days but customer service is more complex and more important.
Airtasker is an Australian success story in the Gig-economy for individuals who want their own micro business doing odd jobs for other people. Just like Uber, Ebay and other online marketplaces they leverage their digital marketing and brand to help individuals find clients and customers – for a fee.
Airtasker and marketplaces are a great place for people who want to start their own business but these systems fail when a better alternative comes along.
Scroll through the job ads on Seek for accounting and office admin jobs and you’ll see the usual skill requirements. MYOB skills, experience using xero and of course high level Microsoft Office and Excel spreadsheet skills.
I did a search before Christmas and one particular job ad stood out. A Sydney building company needed to fill a job for someone who recently left and it contained a list of digital marketing tasks in the job description!
These skills were a nice to have, not mandatory, but it confirmed something I knew was coming – digital marketing tasks performed by office admin staff!
I hope I didn’t sound rude, but if you’ve read these blog posts you’d know I love playing around with new technology but Telstra Online Essentials is a website builder tool that infuriates me!
I recently had an opportunity to help out Neville with his online marketing and that included exploring his current website on Telstra Online Essentials. We quickly got the EPP code for his domain name and transferred AWAY to Crazy Domains but they had some issues too!
The cost of paying for somebody to click your ad on Google can be anywhere from $1 to $10: that’s for just a click! So what does it end up costing to get somebody to call you or email you? This is a big dilemma for many small business owners looking for new clients. In fact, sometimes it might seem easier to just send a good, old-fashioned letter!
The great thing about WordPress is that you can set up as many user profiles as you want and give your staff the access level they need to create and edit blogs.
They can’t really stuff it up because there’s an audit trail of changes and only someone with publishing rights can make the changes live (such as a WordPress administrator).
You could of course outsource your blog writing to someone on Upwork, Freelancer, or Airtasker, but that has it’s own set of challenges
When I started my first business in Sydney’s Dee Why in the early 1990’s, I was amazed that most restaurants and cafes, as well as other retail shops like dress shops, didn’t even know who their customers were!
Many business owners knew their customers by face, but they missed out on lots of opportunities to market and make contact with these customers when business was slow or they were overstocked. Are you working your database?
Value-based pricing can make your bookkeeping business appear easier
To understand value-based pricing take a look at the fees charged for content marketing (or business blogging) that is offered to small to medium businesses as part of a digital marketing strategy.
Setting goals is not just about earning more money but at this time of year many people spend their time thinking about how much they want to earn and what type of work they want to do.
Although earning money seems like a goal the real goals you should be setting are more practical and relate to what’s currently going on in your life. We’ve been working on some new initiatives and I hope you take advantage of them to have an extra source of income. Continue reading FREE Digital Marketing Seminar Presentation
But what’s the point of that? The last thing you want to do in a busy, information-saturated world is waste people’s time. It’s an insult and you’ll put them off.
After all, these people have given up time in their busy days to read what you have to say. Don’t ruin this special relationship forever by churning out rushed, poor quality content or waffle.
COULD YOU EARN a second income by running a website? Thousands of Australians already are; if you have bookkeeping or creative skills, perhaps it’s suited to you too.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]HE INTERNET HAS democratised many elements of starting your own small business, but, in particular, it has made marketing a small business a whole lot easier.
Another super easy thing to vastly help your business along is getting your own “branded email address”. What do we mean by a branded email address? Simply an email address that carries your branding in the domain name, for example: info@thenameofyourbusiness.com.au versus the far less professional: yourbusinessname@gmail.com.
Don’t miss a golden opportunity to build brand awareness!
I RECENTLY SPOKE WITH a few different Novocastrian real estate agents recently about a property I was renovating. One of them had a billboard near a train station, another paid for bus stop ads, and another created trailer signs that could be towed and parked in strategic places. None of them used Google or Facebook ads. This was a missed opportunity, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.
Outdoor advertising, along with DL flyers and advertising in your local newspaper, are designed to keep your brand in front of mind with people who know you and live in your local area. Brand awareness is an incredibly important marketing strategy for any business. We took a look late last year at how bookkeepers can learn from real estate agents about marketing using Facebook.
We used Facebook ads in our social and digital marketing strategy we used for McGrath real estate agent Derek Farmer. A client list of names based on mobile phone numbers was used to target people in the Northbridge area who already had some past experience with Derek — they’d met at an auction, open home, he’d sold a friend or neighbour’s home, or they’d previously bought one of his listings. We helped Derek achieve Page 1 rankings on Google without using any paid advertising.
Targeted Facebook ads keep you front of mind
This targeted advertising helped build brand awareness with those people in a relatively non-invasive way, so that when Derek did reach out to them by phone, email or in-person, they would already be very aware of who Derek was and the type of property sales he specialised in.
This ensured Derek didn’t lose a listing because someone couldn’t remember who he was, and ended up listing their property with an agent who did take the time to build brand awareness within their local community and with past clients.
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Do you want help growing your online and social media presence?
Are you in business as a bookkeeper, tradesperson, retailer, trainer or real estate agent and want to stand out from the crowd? We can teach you the online marketing techniques to help you do just this! Check out what’s included in our comprehensive Social Media and Digital Marketing online training courses. Alternatively, you can learn more about Facebook targeted advertising in our Facebook training courses.
TSheets is a cost effective way to manage and track your time
TSheets, THE TIME MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE, is a great way for independent and remote contractors to manage their client’s projects. It’s especially useful for contractors who are collaborating remotely with other contractors and businesses on one project.
But back to TSheets. TSheets was recently acquired by Intuit, the parent company of QuickBooks. Both TSheets and QuickBooks shared 12,000 customers in common and the time management system had been developed to work specifically with QuickBooks. Deeper integration with QuickBooks can be expected now, following the acquisition.
If you were to think about the top three cloud accounting apps in terms of the types of businesses they appeal to, QuickBooks would appeal most to micro businesses and independent contractors. Check out an earlier blog post where we assess two main factors: User Experience & Ease of Use, and Reporting Tools in a comparison between MYOB and Quickbooks for small businesses.
It’s not unusual to obtain new work because people in need of your services spot you working on your current job. But chance is one thing – how can you improve the odds of making this happen?
IF YOU’RE A TRADIE, working as a plumber, builder or carpenter, handyman, gardener or electrician, then you probably already know that some of the best jobs come by referral.
Identify “real world” marketing opportunities
During my recent renovation of an investment property in Newcastle, most of the good tradies would tell me, “Someone you’re working on a job with on Monday will ask you to do a job for them somewhere else on Friday, or a neighbour of a client will ask you to do some work for them.” I soon saw from other tradespeople how “work can come to you just because someone happens to be walking by while you’re on the job” — gardeners get a lot of work this way, for example.
The important thing in this scenario is to act efficiently in finding out what the potential client needs, finding out what else is important, and then selling them on your services. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Kristine Seymour, an experienced sales person and business builder, for the Sales Training Course at the Australian Small Business Centre (ASBC). She spoke in detail about how to act when your future income depends on how well you can sell. This Sales Training Course is available on the EzyLearn LMS.
Take advantage of business opportunities
This course is also available to new licencees for the National Bookkeeping Business Opportunity. The key to getting new clients is to be proactive and take advantage of these on-the-spot business opportunities by using some “real world” marketing tactics. These skills can be used even if you are just looking for part-time clients or doing bookkeeping or marketing as a side hustle — more on side hustles in a forthcoming blog.
Some “real-world marketing” examples
Another good example of a real-world marketing tactic is to conduct a letterbox drop in the local area where you’ve just started work. Clearly, this lets residents in the area know you’re working there, what you do, and that you are available.
This alone may lead to thousands of dollars in additional revenue if even just a few people get in touch. But always, it’s vital to keep track of what marketing you do and where leads are coming from. It’s vital to schedule quotes and start dates for work and so forth, and have a handle on Office Productivity Software like Microsoft Office or Google G Suite. These will not only help you organise your workload, but you’ll also appear organised and professional to your clients.
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Learn more about both digital and face-to-face (networking) marketing in our EzyStartup Training Course. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.
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