Marketing Tips For Your Start-Up Business
Your start-up business is just that, a start-up. This usually means there are very few funds available for marketing, so you have to be creative and use the most effective and affordable tools. Phil Thow offers expert advice on how to market your Scottsdale Arizona business online, not only effectively, but affordably as well.
Large Seattle Washington businesses spend millions on advertisement and brand management each year and for a small business coming into the industry, it may seem as if there is no way to compete. Phillip Thow can show you the fundamentals that are needed to succeed and offer up techniques and strategies that will build your brand, without hurting your budget.
Your website is your priority when creating your online Scottsdale Arizona business and it should reflect your company’s style, and message and offer a solid understanding of your brand to its visitors. Creating a website is affordable and anyone can do it, even without a technical degree. You can use templates to create a basic website or software to create a custom website.
Using SEO tools and techniques you can have your website listed in the search engine rankings and with a little effort, you can get that top position. Keywords are a large part of your website marketing campaign and will be used throughout various campaigns online.
In addition to your website, your Seattle Washington business should have a social network page to interact with customers, entice new customers, and help build your brand and its reputation. With a little effort and maybe some help from the experts you can turn that start-up business into a successful company that has a strong reputation and a well-known brand.
Success Requires Integrity – Especially in Small Business and IT
The word integrity has two primary meanings. The first is having strong moral principles or being honest. The second definition is being whole and undivided. To quote Dave Ramsey, the number one measure of business success is integrity.
Whether your small business is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Austin, Texas, or Seattle, Washington, small businesses must ensure that all employees act ethically and with integrity to succeed in the marketplace. However, for the sake of information technology security, small businesses must maintain high standards on their IT systems to maintain their reputation for integrity with customers.
- You must know what is right and acceptable in your system. What are your access control limits? Do you have a security matrix defining who is allowed to do what is and isn’t allowed in your IT system? There must be rules for the system to have integrity. Who is allowed to debit a customer’s account? Letting the owner’s daughter or an intern make withdrawals from customer accounts opens up the door to mistakes. Each mistake risks financial liability and loss of credibility. Who is allowed to copy information in the customer relations management database? If you do not place limits on information access now, you cannot prevent a disgruntled employee from copying the database and taking it with them when they go to work for the competition. Let a professional like Phil Thow help you define and document your current business processes and decision matrices so that employees know the rules and the responsible parties.
- How it should work and how it does work should be in alignment. You need a method of monitoring the integrity, similar to law enforcement keeping an eye out for crime. Then there must be processes to handle exceptions and violations, akin to courts. Those who do not know the rules should be taught. Those who deliberately break them are dealt with, by company policy if not the law. Whether you are in Scottsdale, Arizona, or Seattle, Washington, you can hire a professional like Phillip Thow for help documenting these system rules.
- There should be an appeals process and periodic reviews of the rules, similar to a democracy. If the IT world has changed, enforcing rules that are no longer practical creates an undue burden on users. The ability to appeal rule violations committed to get around an unwieldy system also requires administrative review – the tool may need to change to fit the user’s application. Ethics also comes into play for deliberate violations of IT policy or access control limits. If someone does something outside of the proper process on a supervisor’s orders, management needs to know this and act appropriately.