3 Reasons Automated Hiring Will Rock Your World – And Your Bottom Line

A lot is at stake when small businesses make new hires. The costs associated with assessing candidates, onboarding, and training a new employee have a noteworthy bottom line impact, which is why it’s so crucial to hire the right person – the first time.

3 Reasons Automated Hiring Will Rock Your World - and Your Bottom Line

Automated pre-hire assessments have made the hiring process less complicated and more efficient for both human resources and applicants. By leveraging structured, job-relevant questionnaires, hiring managers drastically increase the likelihood of finding a top performer the first time.

In doing so, firms are able to make better use of their resources and minimize risk associated with making a bad hire.…

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How SMBs Can Profile Their Typical Customer

How SMBs Can Profile Their Typical Customer

Many marketing plans fail because they try to attract everyone and don’t focus on anyone. These faulty plans result in companies selling products that customers don’t want. Thing is, most customers aren’t even at the center of the feedback loop. Even worse, most customers will tell you what they want, if you would just ask.

Making the sketch

Start by surveying your existing client base (no matter how small) to understand future buyers better. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t have to be a costly process. There are free tools such as Google Docs and MailChimp that let you create a survey and distribute it easily and affordably.…

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Saving Money – and Space – with Smarter Storage

Saving Money - and Space - with Smarter Storage

Space is vital when growing a small business – too little room can suffocate growth, while too much space can put major financial pressures on a young business. Keeping overheads down, while maintaining the flexibility to expand your company is paramount, but what are the options and how do we put them into practise?

Rent out unused office space

In the current economic climate, shared offices are becoming much more popular. To take advantage of the ‘rent a desk’ movement, look at unused or poorly used space in your business premises and remove the extra furniture, re-structure, and lease out the space to a small company or freelancer to keep your overheads down (this is an especially good solution if your business goes through a short-term downsize).…

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What SMBs Need To Know About CRM

CRM helps in establishing the most crucial link between the organization and its customers. In the evolving economic condition it has become most important for small businesses to implement customer management system to effectively manage their customer relations. The use of Salesforce’s CRM tools are just one example of how businesses can enhance their customer relations.

When a startup is small it is relatively easy to manage relationships with clients but as the volume of transaction increases it becomes difficult to manage all the links with customers at different levels. Customer relationship management software for small business targets the crucial relationship management aspect of SMBs.…

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How Small Businesses Should Make The Most Of Their Social Media Presence

There is no doubt that social media is an integral part of online marketing for small businesses. Unfortunately the social media landscape is very fragmented and it is difficult to know what conversations to join and more importantly how to explore these opportunities in the best way. There are many opportunities for small businesses to really get the best out of their social media campaigns simply by looking how the big brands use social media.

How Small Businesses Should Make The Most Of Their Social Media Presence

Find The Most Suitable Social Media Platforms

It can be quite easy to set up social media profiles on many different platforms. The problem is that each account needs a lot of time and effort to be really successful.…

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What Small Businesses Need To Know About Rolling Forecasting

Budgets are no longer unchanging entities. In the midst of the information age, with transactions moving faster, business spanning the globe, and technology providing helpful tools to re-plan and re-think budgets, many small businesses are adopting a new way of thinking about their financials.

What Small Businesses Need To Know About Rolling Forecasting

Conventional budgeting wisdom offered this guidance to small business owners: create a budget and don’t stray from it. An article from CFO Magazine points out that traditional budgeting is expensive, time-consuming, and quickly becomes out-of-date within a few months.

The benefits of rolling forecasting are vast, but overall, the methodology allows small (and large) businesses greater ability to adapt to what many people say is a volatile financial environment.…

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Top 5 Online Marketing Techniques For Small Business Growth

For small businesses, deciding which online marketing techniques to use is a daunting task. With many online tools at your disposal, which ones really perform? To find out, we took a look at 15 online marketing tools and their performance rankings by 500 CEOs and other executives in professional services.

Here are the top 5 most effective online marketing techniques:

the top 5 most effective online marketing techniques

  1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – While “tagging” a website with the right keywords so that it appears in top Google spots is the broad goal, the key is to focus on crafting informative content.Including keywords in the title of your page and two to three times in the page’s text will help your page rank in Google – but it just doesn’t work unless your content is also useful to your audience.
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Too Much On Your Plate? Here Are Some Tips To Clear Your Desk Of Tasks

We’ve all been there, in today’s world, it’s hard to keep everything going at once. You have tasks from your job, home, kids, personal life, medical appointments, and who knows what else. It can be difficult to manage these tasks, even if you employ an electronic organization system.

Tips To Clear Your Desk Of Tasks

One problem with trying to manage so much from one place, is that often you have different programs for each type of task. Your home stuff is under one place, your work stuff under another, and fun stuff under something else. This makes it difficult to manage, and you probably never feel like you have a moment alone anymore.…

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Small Business Owners Charge Full Steam Ahead

Small business owners are feeling good about 2013 so far and even more optimistic about the year ahead, according to Manta’s Q1 2013 SMB Wellness Index. The survey of over 1,100 small business owners found more than half (56 percent) think the first quarter of 2013 was successful and 79 percent believe the second quarter will be positive for their companies.

While only 17 percent hired new employees in the first quarter of this year, almost one-third (31 percent) plan to do so in Q2. But that’s not where they’re putting most of their money. Thirty-one percent say they plan to invest most of their money on referrals and finding new customers; 26 percent on online advertising and social media; 24 percent on creating new products and services; and 12 percent on traditional advertising and marketing.…

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23 Small Business Social Media Dos and Don’ts

23 Small Business Social Media Dos and Don'ts

For cash strapped small businesses social media can be a cheap and effective way to promote your business/brand and increase revenue. At the same time many SMBs don’t properly utilize social media or ignore it altogether. No matter where you fall on this spectrum keep the following dos and don’ts in mind.

Dos

  1. Do set up social accounts on all the relevant social platforms for your business. If you sell hard to find car parts only known only to gearheads, Pinterest is not for you.
  2. Do use a high quality logo image that is not blurry, stretched nor distorted. Your brand is your livelihood so make it professional regardless of where it appears.
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