How Offline Marketing Can (Still) Help Small Businesses

Despite the rise of the digital world and the tech sphere, businesses should not discount offline marketing as a great way to get themselves noticed. According to ecoconsultancy.com, 40% of consumers make buying decisions after being influenced offline.

If you’re a growing business, you can’t afford to miss out. However, offline marketing can be more expensive than online methods like social media – so how can a small business make maximum gains without a costly budget?

Be careful with ads

One of the first things people think of when it comes to offline marketing are advertisements. Whether they’re in print publications or broadcast, you need to be careful with ads.…

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Q&A with Chad Constant, Director of Business Client Marketing at Intel on the Launch of Intel Small Business Advantage (Intel SBA)

Small business owners need all the resources they need so that they can have a sustainable business growth.  One of the latest ones is Intel Small Business Advantage (Intel SBA).

What does the solution entail, and how does it help small business owners in keeping their IT secure – and more? Chad Constant, Intel’s Director of Business Client Marketing explains it all in an exclusive SMB CEO interview.

Chad Constant, Director of Business Client Marketing at Intel

Ivan Widjaya (Q): Hi, Chad. Please kindly introduce yourself to our reader.

Chad Constant (A): Thank you Ivan, my name is Chad Constant, and I am the director of Business Client Marketing at Intel.…

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Ways to Keep Your Momentum Going as an Entrepreneur

The life of an entrepreneur can be very arduous, but also thrilling. An entrepreneur sees everything as an opportunity to create capital. Not every idea an entrepreneur has will be the motherload of ideas, but the defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is tenacity and the utter resistance to give up.

Determined entrepreneur on the phone

You must try, try again, and work through those one thousand ways how not to make a lightbulb as Thomas Edison did. It only takes one bright idea to illuminate the world and change it for the better, forever. It can be a challenge to keep going, however. Life is full of rejection and it’s not always easy to push through a wall of endless no’s.…

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4 Advantages of Getting a Secured Personal Loan to Fund Business

Thinking about starting a business? Making the shift from being just an employee to an employer requires a lot of guts, dedication, and most of all money. Few can afford starting a business from their own savings, as starting one requires lots of cash to buy properties, equipment, supplies, and to hire employees.

Secured personal loan

But with the wide availability of loans, starting your dream business is made easier today. Unfortunately, with loans comes the expense of paying an interest. Now, no one would offer you loans without giving it an interest, but you may be able to get the lowest rate with the help of secured personal loans.…

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Identifying and Removing Major Roadblocks in SMB Growth

Thousands of small business enterprises are being founded and closed every day in this modern era of startup. This makes almost every niche highly competitive and company growth needs to be fast and continuous, since even the smallest oscillations and breakdowns can cause major loss of customer trust.

Business growth

In this article I’ve reviewed some of the most common problems small business entrepreneurs face during their road to success.

1. Problem: Not having enough funds

This is a very common problem that affects many small businesses. In most cases good idea and hard work are not enough to turn innovative startup into a multi-million dollar business.…

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Small to Medium Sized Enterprises need Culture

Small to medium sized enterprises (SME) have long been noted as important economic engines of many countries and account for approximately half of GDP in the United States, yet this sector has continued to have mixed success and failure with such businesses having less than 50% chance of surviving five years! Despite this challenge most efforts to identify what leads to small firm success has been personal opinions or conjecture.

Great company culture

To gain a deeper real world understanding of what successful small businesses do to succeed I interviewed 29 owners and senior leaders of profitable and growing small firms that had been in business at least five years.…

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The 3 KPIs Every Successful Digital Marketer is Tracking in 2016

If we were to take a poll in small business marketing departments throughout the country, we’d likely discover that very few are effectively and accurately tracking success. Would you count yourself among this cohort? If you aren’t using the right KPIs, then the answer is yes.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Why KPIs Matter

How do you really know if your business is performing well in terms of marketing success? If you’re like many business owners, you probably don’t. Most have very little insight into how different marketing strategies and efforts are doing and whether or not they’re producing positive results.

This is where KPIs – or key performance indicators – come into play.…

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Reminder: Make Sure That You’ve Got the Right Insurance

When you’re the owner of a small business, often there’s so much going on that important things can get overlooked. One of the most essential things to get right is to make sure you have the right insurance on all of your vehicles and to check your employees are insured correctly.

Business auto insurance

From business insurance policies to needing different driving licenses it can all get a little complicated. Not only in understanding policies, choosing the insurances that offer the best value for your business is a headache. But fear not, we’ve got your back; here’s our guide to make sure that all your vehicles are insured correctly:

Work-related insurance

If you have employees at your workplace who are going to be making journeys on behalf of the company, it’s important to make sure they take out work-related insurance on their own policy.…

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How to Make your LinkedIn Profile More Appealing

There’s a small section of your LinkedIn profile that follows you everywhere you go on the platform.

Along with your photo, it’s the instant calling card people use to size up who you are and what (if any) interest they should have in your profile, profession and content.

LinkedIn profile blueprint

Get this piece of your profile right, and it lays the foundation for short-term and long-term lead generation and sales.

Get it wrong, and you might as well not even use LinkedIn … it’s that important.

It’s your professional headline, which appears right below your name at the top of your LinkedIn profile.…

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Tips to Nurture a Growth-Oriented Startup Culture

“A company’s culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneur’s job is to build the foundation”

– Brian Chesky, Airbnb.

Startup culture

(Source)

For MNCs and other big players, having a great culture is just an additional feature, but for startups, having a great work culture – strong and growth-oriented, is a necessary element of success, be it for employee retention or for innovation.

Nurturing a growth-oriented culture is mainly dependant on the core values of the startup and the work force.

It is crucial to work on building your startup DNA early on. Here are some tips to build a strong work culture:

1.

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