Archives for July 2014
Milestones play a recurring role in your content creation strategy
Not sure what to tweet about day in, day out, year in, year out? You need a content calendar. A content calendar is simply a calendar filled with ideas for content creation. Spend a few hours brainstorming ideas, schedule them in your calendar, and then refer to your calendar before updating your social media profiles and you’ll never face writer’s block again. While there are many approaches to creating content calendars, one of the easiest first steps is to use milestones.
Milestones are important dates that have significant meaning. They are reasons for celebration! Thus, they’re also perfect for sharing on social media. For example, the anniversary of your company’s founding is a milestone that should be celebrated each year. You may even want to create a social media campaign or contest around your company’s anniversary each year. Thus, not only is your content calendar going to be useful in terms of content creation, it could also be instrumental in planning marketing campaigns.
Which milestones matter? Start with your business. Obviously, the company’s launch date is a big one. The same could be said for the introduction of one of its best-selling products. You could also celebrate employee anniversaries if it makes sense. 
Next, think about milestones that affect your industry. For example, if you’re a video game developer, you might celebrate the launch date of Tennis for Two. Likewise, if you run a social media page for a specialty food producer, you might look for food-related milestones such as “Chocolate Day.”
Depending on the nature of your business, sporting events, television shows, and pop culture milestones may make sense. A comic shop, for example, would likely tweet about the opening day of the next Superman or Spiderman movie while a sporting goods store would be all over Superbowl Sunday.
If your company has a long history and interesting historical photos, consider marking some of the company’s milestones on Throwback Thursday (#TBT). Throwback Thursday has become wildly popular, and it’s the perfect opportunity for sharing some of your history.
The first year is the hardest because you have to think about all of these milestones as well as discover upcoming dates that might be interesting to your audience. However, these milestones repeat, making your original content calendar reusable year after year.
As your year progresses, new milestones will happen. You’ll launch new products, bring in new team members, and participate in various events. These are future milestones. Add them to next year’s content calendar.
Milestones play a recurring role in your content creation strategy, and are a fantastic starting point. Once you’ve plotted out a year’s worth of milestones, the next step is to flesh out your content calendar with other topics.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Important People to Have Working for Your Small Business
As your small business starts to grow, you'll have more money available to hire people to head up specific important departments or tasks.What was once your dream, needs to become a vision, because it is the vision you need to lead and hire with. Remember, you need to be able to achieve two things with each great hire. First, hire the talent that has the skill-set that you do not have or are weak at. Then, once you acquire that talent, teach them your vision and let them do the job you hired them for. But what are the most important positions that you should fill? Here are a few of them that you should definitely consider:
- Product manager. The first step to finding success as a small business is to have outstanding products and services. Secondly, is being able to execute a business plan. A product manager can be the person who spends the most time focusing on individual products and doing research among customers about why they like specific products and what they're looking for in potential new products. Excellent product managers help your business stay ahead of innovations and customer trends. They will enable you to work on your business while you work in your business.
- Marketing manager. During the early stages of your company, you're likely going to hold off on your marketing efforts until you're certain you've developed a high-quality product. But once it's time to market, which usually happens as you move beyond a local market or expand your offerings, you need to make sure that you're doing it well. A marketing specialist
will allow you to take your vision that you have for your company and turn it into a brand identity, demonstrated through print, video and more in a wide variety of channels. Initially this hire can be an outside firm. As growth warrants you will want to bring this position in-house.
- Customer service representative. To start with, you only really need to bring in one customer service representative. As your company grows, then you can begin adding more. The person you bring in as your service representative should be friendly and have a thorough understanding of your products so that they can help customers who call in. Never ever forget, this person is not only your greatest cheerleader but also at the forefront of receiving complaints and handling them with ease.
- Sales representative. A sales representative should be a go-getter who can help you to generate new leads. In today's world, sales and marketing have to get along and work together. Again, you only really need one to start out with, but as your company grows, you can bring in more to the team.
- Financial manager. I can't understate the importance of having a qualified financial expert on staff. It's extremely important to keep your finances in order at all times. A financial manager can help you to make a thorough, easy-to-follow budget and prepare your taxes properly at the end of the year. A financial manager is one of the most important positions there is in terms of helping your business stay healthy and on a path for success.
While you're not going to hire all of these people at once, these are all important positions to have on staff as you look to grow your business and increase your quality. Be on the lookout for outstanding applicants who would fit into these positions!
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.