Small Business Design Resources

Wow Your Customers with Website Design Techniques

If you’re in the small business realm, you know just how important having a well-designed, consumer-friendly website can be. The hard part is knowing what small business website design techniques are going to get you the most business. It’s one thing to have a great website, but it’s another to have one that works well for small business sales. Let’s look at a few, good methods you can implement into your business to make sure you’re taking care of the customers.

There is an unusual acronym to remember some great ways to keep your customers in mind while constructing/updating your small business website: CRAP

Consistency: Common flow/feel as visitors browse your website

Repetition: Use appropriate repetition of imagery and text throughout

Alignment: A place for everything, and everything in its place. Don’t stick anything on the website for the reason of just “having it on there.”

Proximity: Make sure you group appropriate parts of your website together. Can your clients find what they need, easily?

Color is an important aspect of your small business design. Although consistency is important, choosing the right colors are a must to help you get the sale. Customers shop with their eyes; use colors that complement each other. You want them to be agreeable with the nature of the website, but not overwhelmingly bright or annoying to look at. You also don’t want a bland color palate. Try to pick one bold color, keeping the contrasting colors more neutral.

Advertising

Many small business websites have advertising space they can control. You really want to make sure that any advertising you have on your website is relevant to your small business. If you sell handbags, your best advertising would also be in accessories, clothing, cosmetics and so on. If you have a family member who has a tree stump removal business, they have no purpose on your website, family or not.

Finally, your patrons want to know what’s in it for them. Save a webpage to talk about you and your business; leave the rest to cater to the shopper. Talk about what they’re going to get when they do business with you. Make sure to mention everything from a detailed description of the product or service, right down to your mission statement, guarantees and return policies.

As much as we may pride ourselves on the time and love we spend on our small businesses, we have to remember that the consumer tends to be a bit more “selfish.” Their concern is a getting a great deal on a product or service on a website that’s easy to use and good-looking. Remember: If you don’t take care of your customers…someone else will.

Small Business Advertising Success with Facebook

There are 500 million people using Facebook. If your small business does not have a company account or Fan Page on Facebook, you are potentially missing out on a considerable amount of revenue. Almost every genre of small business owners, from pet grooming to dry cleaning have a Facebook page to promote their business. Why is taking the time to maintain a Facebook page such a good idea? Great question!

Affordable
Your basic Facebook account is FREE. That makes the price right for small businesses. Not only is it cheap to use, it’s very simple to maintain. You can make a page that simply has a picture, contact information and status updates informing your friends and fans about upcoming specials. Stop by your Page once a week or so to add new friends, answer any messages and handle general Facebook account housekeeping. Take your Facebook account to the next level by incorporating your small business website blog for viewers to read. Update as much or as little as you like. You can allow visitors to post on your Facebook small business website, or turn off the wall function and only post information from the business’s end. You can pay to have your business show up on the side panel of Facebook. The cost varies however, but you can read more here: www.facebook.com/advertising. There is a minimum charge of $5.

Low Maintenance
As mentioned before, using Facebook as an advertising tool for your small business design is great because it takes very little time and money to maintain your page. You could realistically update it once a day or once a month. You’ll get back what you put into it. Another reason Facebook is so great to use to promote small businesses: people will find you! That’s right; you can search for friends and family to add as friends to your page, but others in your area or network will find you on their own. Your time spent on lead generating will be greatly reduced with Facebook.

Remember: Facebook is a great tool to advertise your small business website, but don’t over post. When you’re putting status updates on there more than once a day, people begin to get turned off by over-advertising and will hit the “hide feed” button associated with your content, meaning they will never see updates posted by your business page. You don’t want this, so posting often should mean just a few posts per week. Also, keep your Facebook page dedicated towards your small business, not your personal opinions. A quick way to lose your fans is to post something that has nothing to do with your business. Don’t argue politics or get into debates on your Facebook page, you’ll make yourself and your business look bad; plus you’ll never convince the other party to see your side, so don’t bother.

Use Facebook wisely to promote your small business by incorporating your website blogs, videos and upcoming events related to your business. Enjoy the fruits of this social-networking wonder and benefit from the business a well-maintained Facebook small business Page can bring.

Interacting with Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is a critical element in a small business. By understanding what their needs and wants are, you can improve your service or product. What better way to meet people than to venture out into the world and find them! Do you know where to look?

If you’re selling something that targets women, don’t forget a very important day: International Women’s Day is March 8th and a lot of communities will hold vendor fairs. If you stay current with the event news in your area, you can sign up and be prepared to meet and greet your audience. Of course, you always need to ask yourself when meeting potential clients in this type of atmosphere: what’s in it for them? A colorful banner and a friendly smile is a good start to a vendor fair booth, but we all know the goodies are what get attention.

Try to find something even better than the standard business card to hand out. Find something that you can easily take to the event that not only has your contact info, but people are likely to hang on to it because it serves another purpose. For example: a massage therapist has a booth at a women’s fair to advertise her services. She hands out a stress ball with her name and salon number to her targeted audience; it’s relevant. What are other cheap products? Magnets, key chains, pens, notepads and more. They don’t have to be useful AND related to your business, but useful to the target audience means less likely to be forgotten or pitched.

How much can you prepare ahead of time if you’re going to be at a certain event or function? Well, you can never be too prepared! If you’ve signed up to be a speaker or rent a booth at an event, don’t sit by and let the event organizers do all your advertising for you; take matters into your own hands. Perhaps you’re doing newsletters on a regular basis and have an email list built of both clients and potentials; send an announcement out to let them know when and where. Also, toss in some promotional deal that makes the event stick in their mind. Something like: the first 50 to stop by the booth get a coupon for 25% off. If someone was on the fence about your product, a coupon could sway them into giving it a try.

Remember: it’s an important part of your small business design to know your target audience. When you can’t speak to them in person, be online looking at forums and blogs relevant to your business. Listen to what people say. Take the time to get to know them and you’ll be able to provide a better service or product.

Boost Your Small Business Reputation with Customer Testimonials

If you haven’t set aside some space on your small business website for customer testimonials, now’s the time to consider making room. People feel comfortable when they can read what others feel about your product or service. If you’re ready to incorporate customer testimonials into your small business website design, here are a few easy tips.

Consider sending out surveys via e-mail or snail mail and request that your previous customers write a little bit about their experience with your company. Let them know that their words may be published on your website for others to read. Also, let them chose whether or not to include their name and location. Then, it’s your choice which testimonials to use on your website, but know that both good and bad testimonials can be highly effective marketing tools for your business.

Superb customer testimonials look great on a website, but what happens when you get a response that was less than satisfactory? It’s ok! You can implement the negative feedback onto your website; it will make your business look more realistic. We all know that not every customer can have an exceptional experience, but it’s how your business handles the experience that will prove valuable to potential clients. Go ahead and feel free to post that negative feedback, along with what you did to try and resolve the issue. Then, allow that customer to reply to the resolution. Hopefully, you’ll have solved a problem that will help your business in the future and change an unhappy customer into a potential repeat. No room on your website for customer testimonials? Consider expanding your website, but in the meantime, use social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. Invite friends and fans of your page to comment on their experience with your small business. The great thing is, you can easily reply to their responses.

Customer testimonials are one of the best and easiest marketing strategies’ to implement into your small business design. You’ll learn exactly how clients feel about your services and you may even learn some problem solving techniques in the process.

Affiliate Marketing for Small Business Success

A lot of people have yet to learn what affiliate marketing is, let alone apply it to promoting their product or service on the internet. If you’re not quite sure what affiliate marketing is, a simple way to put it is:

A way for one website to make money online while promoting another. Website or blog owners get money for helping businesses by promoting the products or services they have to sell.

Basically, a person gets a commission when someone follows a link on their website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed…etc. However, that is just one way of many variations people can get paid. They may get compensated if someone signs up for the company’s newsletter or only if they make a purchase. Payments are usually based on a percentage, but fixed rates aren’t out of the question.

When you apply affiliate marketing techniques to your small business website design, and do so correctly, it can produce favorable results for your small business. In fact even when it’s done wrong, it does very little harm to your company.

How Do I Get Started?
You need to gather a collection of people who own websites, blogs or social media pages. You can get as professional as designing and ad that people can see on other websites to encourage them to click, or simply have a link ready to offer for status update feeds and external link pages for other websites. You pay your affiliate website based on a percentage or fixed rate agreed upon at the beginning of the marketing campaign. Look for websites in your community that aren’t direct competitors and ask if they’re interested. You can approach competition if they are located far away and their services or products can’t be obtained online. You should always be looking for affiliates who have something in common with what you have to sell. For instance, if you sell pet leashes, it would be best to try and set up an affiliate marketing program with companies that sell pet food, grooming services or sites where you purchase pet medicines. You want to approach affiliates who already have high traffic to their websites, as this will yield the best results.

As for how to negotiate the compensation for your affiliates, that’s up to you. Though pay per lead campaigns tend to give the affiliate money more often, it is the pay per sale program that offers them more money in general. Affiliate marketing is a strategy that you can easily design and apply to your small business website in a way that works for you. Don’t confuse affiliate marketing with link exchanging, though it’s similar, it’s not the same and does not work as well.