The Ohio Small Business Development Center offers great advice and solutions for those entrepreneurs wanting to start a business in the state of Ohio. From the planning stage to filing legal forms and permits the center offer steps, forms, phone numbers and links to the web sites you may need to begin your journey. For the marketing and other tools you may need to compete with the big guys, here we offer you articles that can offer you solutions to some of your business decisions for now and in the future.
6 Marketing Ideas Small Businesses Can Learn From Big Brands
Marketing veteran Rob Schuham spends a lot of time encouraging big brands to act like small companies. Be nimble, he advises, be creative, be agile. Take a risk, he tells them, and act like a startup.
And when major clients on his roster at Denver-based Match Action Marketing have listened to his counsel, they’ve backed some groundbreaking campaigns that are instructive not only for their Fortune 100 brethren, but to the little guys, as well.
“If you get a marketing program right, you can set a category on its head,” said Schuham, CEO of Match Action. “The big guys have scale, so they can be kind of a beta test for innovative marketing. Small companies can find useful data points and adapt some of those tactics for their own purposes.”
Three tools every small business can’t do without
Technology can make or break a small business, both at launch and when success has it scaling up. Here are three-must haves to ensure professionalism, maximize productivity, build market share and save money for businesses with 1-10 employees.
Telephony
The phone is still the most common way that your customers, partners and suppliers will communicate with you, so don’t cut corners. But don’t spend more than you have to, either.
For starters, get a dedicated business number. There are services that offer a free basic phone number, or, based on your business needs, you can get a low-cost monthly subscription virtual PBX service, like Cloud Phone, that allows you to get a toll-free or local number with more advanced business features, such as ability to add employee extensions.
Next, decide whether your employees really need deskphones or whether tablets and smartphones are a better fit for their work styles. If it’s the latter, eliminating deskphones can easily save a couple hundred bucks up front in hardware, plus $30 or more per month per employee in service fees. Those savings are a major reason why so many businesses are ditching deskphones in favor of VoIP softphones on tablets, smartphones and laptops.
Why Your Content Isn’t Going Viral (Infographic)
You wrote a kick-butt blog post.
You worked for days on that video.
You stretched all of your graphic design muscles to make an infographic.
And no one shared any of it.
Ouch. You have good content, but it just can’t seem to get any shares.
It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Who Is Hosting This has an infographic that explains why your content won’t go viral, and how you can make it do so next time. Here are a couple of the infographic’s tips:
1. Appeal to emotions.
