focus red word and conceptual target

FOCUSED THINKING BRINGS ABOUT BREAKTHROUGH

by BlogCommunicationsEdmiston Group

The past few months have been challenging for business owners, yet some are thriving while others have given up.  What takes a business to a new level or a pivot in a business operation?  FOCUS and the ability to PIVOT your thinking to a new way of doing business.

Many businesses and organizations have shifted to virtual meetings, working remotely, and bringing about operational changes.  While one vertical line of business may not be as strong right now, other product lines are flourishing.

Manufacturing companies that have shifted to make protective equipment, are working multiple shifts to meet demand.  Distilleries and breweries that have pivoted their thought process to online sales and curbside pickups are busy.  Construction product suppliers that have picked up a PPE product line have an additional product to sell.  Clothing companies that shifted to making masks and fashion masks have developed new product lines.  The list goes on.

What do these types of businesses have in common?  They are open to new ideas and ways to grow.  By FOCUSING on the assets they have and PIVOTING their operations to utilize those assets to expand their services.   Those business owners are moving forward with renewed energy and resolve.

This challenging time has been compared to the Great Depression.  According to the Advertising Specialty Institute, those companies that continue to advertise when everyone else stops marketing are more likely to be noticed.  WHY?  Because there are fewer ads in the market.  “Firms that advertised during the recession increased in value and got more marketing bang for their buck…in some cases for up to three years after the recession had ended”.

Pulling financial support for your company’s brand can undermine revenue goals.  The better strategy is to go all in to understand customer needs and respond accordingly with tailored messaging across channels.  How do you do that?

Here are 5 tips to keep business growing:

  1. ASK

Layer these insights and information gained with the human element to get a deeper understanding of how target audiences will respond.  What is the value your company brings to the table to alleviate the pain point?  Do you even know where those pain points are?

  1. REDISCOVER YOUR BRAND

How are you different than the competition?  What new services can you offer or how can you shift your message based on the information you learn from your customers?  How can you position your brand to provide a sense of community while offering reassuring messages that demonstrate empathy?

  1. DEVELOP LOYALTY PROGRAMS

Reward consumers who purchase frequently and send targeted messaging to thank them for being a loyal customer.

  1. CONTINUE TO SHIFT AND INNOVATE

Embrace technology and commit to working ON your business instead of IN your business.  At a recent class I took, I was challenged to commit the first 30 minutes to 1 hour a day working on strategies to grow my business instead of working on other people’s businesses in their growth.  By blocking the time, I’m fresh in the morning to focus on how to grow my own business.

  1. MEASURE YOUR OUTCOMES

If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.  Know how people find you.  Advertise and be present where your potential customers are.  Be vigilant in your metrics tracking and reporting. Stay agile so you can adapt plans to reflect what you’re seeing. From there, brands can make messaging personal.

Keep a level head and commit to a long-term marketing strategy can help you flourish in the down cycle and be fully prepared to capitalize on the upswing.  Give people good things to talk about by continuing to have good products and great communication.

To quote Henry Ford…“A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.”

Let the Edmiston Group help you strategize how you can PIVOT and GROW your business.  Call 724-612-0755 or email Autumn Edmiston for a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation.

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior-level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long-term basis. Core areas of service are business development strategies, website creation and management, social media management, marketing, strategic planning, and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business.

Creative power and Powerful ideas business innovation concept with a red glowing boxing glove shaped as a light bulb representing strong innovative new thinking and competitive imagination.

ARE YOU PREPARING FOR A BUSINESS COMEBACK?

by BlogCommunicationsEdmiston Group
Creative power and Powerful ideas – new thinking and competitive imagination.

When there is a business halt, are you preparing for a strong comeback or sitting paralyzed in the silence? Because business owners are fearful of what is to come next, we often will sit back and do nothing. A business may never return to the way it was and just like the businesses that failed to embrace social media, those that choose to stand still and do nothing will lose.

Savvy business owners are taking this time to think of the future and what new lines of business or target clients they want to reach out to. Should their sales pitch change and if so what would that look like? Will the presentation desk, social media channels or website need updating? How will these changes impact their sales staff and will they need retraining? Could staff training be done remotely while the sales force team is working at home?

Try to work down the line deals. Now is the time to negotiate. If your conference has been canceled, negotiate rates on a tentative date to rebook the conference in the future. Pass along the savings to your customers to relaunch a successful event. Instead of doing nothing, you’ve become a problem solver.

If your fundraiser was postponed, can you create a go-fund-me campaign or an online event? There is so much need, you want to be certain your mission stays top of mind.

Meet your customers where they are. Yoga studios and gyms are providing online classes with instructors via Zoom and staying connected to their tribe through private Facebook groups. Chambers of Commerce are offering free classes on how to use Zoom. Restaurants have shifted from dine-in to take out and brick and mortar stores have opened on-line stores. Think about it. They have provided a solution to our present-day situation that could result in an additional revenue stream in the month’s ahead post COVID-19.

Barbara Corcoran, self-made millionaire, real estate mogul, and ‘Shark Tank’ star believes there is great opportunity in every crisis. She has survived 9/11 as well as other critical times in her business. “But here’s what I’ve learned on all these crises through all the years, Corcoran recently shared on her Business Unusual podcast. When things go south, they come back like gangbusters.”

Are you ready to breathe in and move forward to polish up your business? Let’s chat – give me a call at 724-612-0755 or email [email protected].

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior-level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long-term basis. Core areas of service are business development strategies, website creation and management, social media management, marketing, strategic planning, and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business.

Man turning knob with different stages of sales process to convert strangers into promoters. Successful inbound marketing campaign concept.

ARE YOU WINNING THE 4TH QUARTER

by ArticlesCommunications
Winning Customers

The Christmas creep is once again upon us and Pumpkin everything is being taken over by early Black Friday sales. Businesses are keying in on how to drive sales, increase consumer interest and create limited-time offers. Where in the mix is Thanksgiving?

If your company is looking to take advantage of seasonal marketing ideas, it’s best to look at some of the biggest brands in your space to see what they do to drive sales and pique consumer interest in your own business. Small businesses can compete by delivering unique products, outstanding customer service and using hashtags in posts that will pop up in social media when consumers are searching.

1. Look for easy seasonal hype
One of the easiest ways to jump into seasonal sales around the holidays is to prepare for and participate in Black Friday sales and holiday shopping days such as Small Business Saturday, which encourages people to shop locally. These days are already ingrained into people’s minds as shopping events, so it’s an easy way to jump on the bandwagon. When plugging into the seasonal sales events be sure to hashtag your social media postings.

We recently worked with a hair salon to help them plan the remainder of the 4th quarter. This included a food drive collection, special pricing on gift cards, bundling of unique products for sale on Small Business Saturday, and posting holiday hours well in advance to ensure clients were able to get their services done. Branded social media images can help increase awareness days and prescheduling posts can save time and eliminate the pressure of last-minute planning.

2. Develop an annual marketing plan
How are you incorporating monthly awareness events and fun days into your social media plan? For example, we worked with a mobile dog groomer and in her social media plan, incorporated “National Cat Day”. Restaurants have “National Taco Day”, “Chocolate Day”, etc. Think about how you can align your business. Did you know in November that it’s Military Family Appreciation Month, Men’s Health Awareness, National Hospice Month, National Literacy Month to name a few? December brings about Cat lovers month, Write a Business Plan Month.

If you are a B to B or a B to C – aligning with some of these causes and adding hashtags will help to increase your brand awareness.

3. Capture Emails and Go from Seasonal to Subscription or stay in touch with news updates
By increasing your email list, you can touch your “fan base” with news, offers, and discounts. Use the list to create a subscription service. For example, restaurants may have a VIP wine club that members pay a fee to belong. What does that get them?  Perhaps access to specialty wines nonmembers can’t experience, wine pairing events, as well as other perks.

If you are a B to B, we utilize a given process to increase your newsletter subscribers. Why is that important? It keeps your company top of mind to supporters and people who you want to do business with. For our construction clients, we share news on new projects, project updates and community involvement.

4. Plan your own seasonal sale
It’s planning ahead to take advantage of one-off discount days. Where I see businesses fall short is they lack the advanced time to promote and plan. Think about your celebration and consider offering this on an annual or quarterly basis.

We work with an eye doctor and they have an annual back to school sale. Every year in August and September they promote this sale. Their customers know it is coming and they are booked solid. They don’t discount prices throughout the year, only at this event.

The holidays may be right around the corner, but by planning ahead, your business can create its unique holiday promotions that will help you increase sales, grow brand awareness and connect with customers. Need help in pulling a plan together? Email us or call 724-612-0755 and ask about our Business Marketing Planning Package.

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior-level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long-term basis. Core areas of service are business development strategies, website creation and management, social media management, marketing, strategic planning, and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business.

Save time and energy with these productivity strategies

Business Productivity Hacks

by BlogCommunications
Save time and energy with these productivity hacks.

How productive and focused are you in your day-to-day activity – at work and at home? Are you a night owl whose energy kicks in after 9 pm or an early bird who rises at the crack of dawn? Regardless of how your internal clock functions, you can always be busy, but not necessarily productive.

Does being busy equate with being productive? If you ask anyone what is the biggest challenge they face in trying to be productive, a likely response will involve something about a “lack of willpower”, or perhaps a difficulty staying focused.

If you think about it there are so many shiny objects that pop up to distract you throughout the day. Social media, email, phone, and personal issues. Any of these distractions can lead to lost productivity.

Build up good work habits for saving time and effort and alleviate some stress. Here are some productivity hacks to help you understand how to work smarter, improve the quality of your work life, and build habits that will save you time, energy, and mental strain in the long-term.

Productivity Begins With Your Goals…Focus On What’s Important To You
Where do you want to be 3 months from now? What about 1 year, or 5 years out? Not just your business but your personal life too. Aligning your work goals with what’s important to you is crucial in creating the motivation required to stay focused. Writing down your goals on a vision board will keep them top of mind.
It’s not by chance that I’m starting with this one. Understanding what’s important to you, not only in terms of your immediate work goals but also looking at the bigger picture. This can help you to focus and set the stage for how you approach wor

Routines Count – Develop Them
Build out a routine, and stick with it. Get into the habit of working at specific times (this is especially true if you work remotely) and you’ll find yourself wasting less energy on figuring out what to do next. Making a To-Do List for the next day allows you to focus on specific tasks and prioritize your time. There are various apps and scheduling tools for you to utilize. Personally – I use Asana, but some of my colleagues like Monday.com.
Monthly routines and processes can be documented and put into these programs. By creating the process, as your business grows or staffing changes, you can easily transition the steps to another individual.

Engineer Fake Pressure
How often have you told someone they will have a report you haven’t yet started by the end of the day? For some people, pressure can help to kick-start them into work mode and perform to a higher level of productivity. If you’re one of those people who finds that the pressure of a deadline or review helps you get more work done, consider engineering some fake pressure into your routine.

Email Check
Just like notifications, sometimes you can’t just ignore your inbox. This is one I struggle with – especially if I’m waiting for proofs from my graphic design team or feedback from a client. The trick is to set a time every day, where you check-in and clean up to inbox zero. The more consistent you can be with this task, the weaker the urge will become to randomly check your emails, and by sticking to the same time each day, you’re building good habits around self-discipline.

Record Each And Every Task
Following on from the to-do list, you can optimize this kind of task-based productivity approach by making sure you clearly and attentively record each task that is important to you. By keeping an up-to-date list of tasks, you can be sure you’re not overlooking certain factors when deciding on priorities and planning your workload. You could use a good old pen and paper to record your tasks and to-do-lists; many people work like this, and it’s perfectly suitable for personal jotting and keeping track of small-scale projects and priorities. This also allows you to track the amount of time spent on a given task. Having this information helps you price services accordingly.

Set Deadlines
Deadlines help you to get work done. This allows you and your team to measure and stay abreast of milestones needing to be met in completing a complex project.

Eat Your Frogs
We all have unpleasant tasks to deal with daily. “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” – Mark Twain. By completing difficult tasks first thing in the morning, you will feel a sense of accomplishment and other things will feel easy in comparison.

Stop Wasting Time In Meetings
Do you start a meeting with a purpose, goals and an agenda? Often, meetings are scheduled according to some arbitrary value like 30 or 60 minutes, and the structure is an afterthought. Define the purpose and outcomes of the meeting before the meeting. Some managers have a stand-up meeting that doesn’t allow for meaningless time spent. Objectives, assigned tasks, and outcomes are to the point.

Time Blocking – Stop multitasking
Focus on one task at a time and set a block of time to complete the task. This goes back to scheduling, prioritizing your TO DO LIST. Instead of trying to split your brain between multiple tasks, rapidly switching between activities and working on each of them simultaneously, you’re better off committing your focus to a single task at hand. Work for 25 minutes and take a 5-minute break and get up and stretch and you may find your brain remains better focused.

Consider some of these tips as you form new work habits. You may find yourself being more focused, able to better prioritize and execute your tasks at hand. We’d love to hear your success. Share your most successful habit on our Facebook page.

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior-level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long-term basis. Core areas of service are business development strategies, website creation and management, social media management, marketing, strategic planning, and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business.

Edmiston Group

Planning Your Vacation

by BlogCommunications

Edmiston GroupSummer time is quickly approaching, and the kids will soon be done with school. This means that it is time for your family vacation right? As many small business owners know this is easier said than done.

As a business owner myself, I find it challenging to go away on vacation and not be constantly checking my phone, or my email to make sure there are no emergencies. But, I have a good team and I have found with proper planning, you too can learn to enjoy your vacation away from work.

Preparing for your vacation well in advance is one the biggest steps to enjoying your vacation this summer. If you are like many small business owners with less than 10 employees, your absence may feel like an emergency is just around the corner. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Create a set of contingencies and give your staff the power to handle what comes up.

Prepare and train your employees.

One thing is always certain when it comes to emergencies, they will happen at the most inopportune moments, like… when you are away on vacation. These emergencies can be handled by your employees if they are trained and have all the information they need to know on how to handle the situation. The following information will help them to handle the emergency and prevent it from making its way into your vacation.

From A Physical Plant Perspective.
  • List of all contractors you use for plumbing, electrical, computer, internet, or other services that are pertinent to your business.
  • At what level of emergency do you wish to be notified? Simple problems such as a leaky sink are not an issue, however a major fire is something that you should be called over.
  • Name and number of your business insurance provider.

Empowering your employees to make not only simple decisions, but larger ones as well, will better allow them to handle an emergency when it arises.

Client Management.

Another step to being able to enjoy your vacation, is to notify your clients well in advance as to when you will be out of town. If you are your only employee they will need to know that you will be unreachable and how long you will be out of town.

The next part of managing your clients while you are out of town is to work ahead. Complete any work that can be accomplished in advance. This will help to reduce catch up when you get back to the office.

If you have a client that typically works with you over other employees, take time to assign an employee who you feel will work well with them and give the proper introductions to the employee. Also be sure the client knows when you will be gone, and that your employee is more than capable of completing the tasks you normally preform.

Lastly, always give yourself a few extra days after you get back. Having a day or two in the office while everyone still thinks your out will give you time to get caught up without the distraction of the phone ringing or your email pinging.

As a business owner it is important to take your time to recharge your batteries and unwind. Proper planning with not only your employees but also with your clients will help to make this possible.

It’s almost time for me to stick my toes in the sand! But don’t worry, I have things covered.

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long term basis. Core areas of service are business development, marketing, strategic planning and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business growth.

Buying-cycle

The Buyer’s Journey

by Communications

Buying-cycleWhether you are a business to consumer retail store or a business to business professional services company, customers buy from you for a reason. How do you help a potential buyer on their journey from awareness to purchase?

Establishing relationships and rapport to generate trust in a product or service is the first step in the sales cycle. Once that trust is earned, you must work hard to keep that customer. They become your cheerleaders in telling others why to use your services.

How often do you see on Facebook or other social media channels – “hey I need a good _____, can anyone recommend someone?” You want that recommendation to be your business or service. Those recommendations come from not only satisfied customers, but also from loyal customers and there is a difference.

Loyal customers visit your store often or rely on your expertise for professional service delivery and/or advice. Do you offer those loyal customers something special? We see it in restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores and retail chains. VIP status, free beverage with a purchase, special coupons. What are you doing to keep your loyal customers happy? How are you making them feel special?

Buying Cycle Steps

There are three steps to the buying cycle – awareness, consideration and purchase. These are things to keep in mind as you seek new customers. People need to know about your product or service before they can consider purchasing from you. So how are you putting your business out there? Are you advertising in the right place? Do you network with potential clients? Are you hanging out where your customers are? This includes social media. If you want to attract a younger audience, you might consider using Snap Chat. A business service may focus on LinkedIn.

What’s the hold up in your customers’ buying decision? Maybe they need to see your offerings in a different light. Perhaps they need to justify the financial investment you’re asking them to make or better understand how others have benefited from using your offerings.

Here are some things that may help move from new customers through the sales cycle.

  • Send them articles, case studies or interviews with industry experts that are relevant to them. This helps to demonstrate your knowledge in the industry or vertical trends.
  • Offer to provide an assessment or a one hour consultation. This allows for some face-to-face interaction to uncover what the potential customer’s pain points are that exist.
  • Provide them with a payback analysis tool. Show them how to use an ROI calculator to determine the $$ they will make/save using your offering.

Understanding why your business is different that someone down the street offering similar services and creating a brand that conveys that message will be key to leveraging your unique selling proposition and closing the sale.

Sometimes the timing just isn’t quite right in the purchase cycle, but those regular touches with potential customers will help to keep your product or service top of mind when it’s time for the purchase to occur. Patience and persistence with targeted messaging is key to business growth.

About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long term basis. Core areas of service are business development, marketing, strategic planning and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business growth.