The Hottest and Most Brilliant Business Tips for YOU – Start Sparking Business Innovation and More

Our research ninjas at Credit Suite smuggled out ten amazing business tips for you! Be fierce and score in business with the best tips around the web. You can use them today and see fast results. You can take that to the bank – these are foolproof! You can start sparking business innovation right now.

Stop making stupid decisions and start powering up your business. Demolish your business nightmares and start celebrating as your business fulfills its promise.

And these brilliant business tips are all here for free! So settle in and scoop up these tantalizing goodies before your competition does!

#10. Text Your Way to Marketing Success

Our first jaw-dropping tip is all about SMS Marketing. Opt In Monster says getting permission is vital, and so is providing clear instructions for how customers can opt out. This totally works for us. After all, if you can’t easily get rid of texts, they’re going to end up costing you in messaging and/or data.

Plus if you do any business at all in Europe, GDPR may very well require that you do both.

If nothing else, it’s good practice, particularly for avoiding annoying your customers and prospects.

Those are the last people you want to frustrate and annoy.

Do U Hate Slang? So Do I N U Shudnt Do It in SMS Mktg

Oh God, my writer/editor brain can’t take it.

Please don’t do this to your customers and prospects, not even if they’re teens and tweens. For the younger set, you’ll probably look truly inauthentic. For the older (ahem) among us, you’ll look unprofessional.

And so much slang and abbreviating can easily backfire as abbreviations and language evolve over time. You definitely don’t want to look and sound like yesterday’s news.

#9. New Brand, Who Dis?

The next awesome tip is about doing rebranding right. Word Stream notes you’ll even have to change and fix your online advertising campaigns. After all, let’s say Exxon changed its name from Esso this week, rather than in 1972.

They would need to update any ads. After all, it would be kind of embarrassing to have a great advertisement out there which touted the products sold by the old brand.

The article is great – so we suggest reading it in its entirety – and it gives detailed advice on how to fix things.

But then there’s another thing, not in the article.

Records Are Made to be Broken – and Updated

We talk about it all the time here. Congruency.

Your business name needs to be the same everywhere. Yelp, your business licenses, your phone listings, your IRS records – you name it.

Why?

Because lenders are going to hunt for your information online. And if they can’t find something, they’ll assume it doesn’t exist – and are far, far more likely to deny your loan application. And they’re not going to stop to consider the myriad ways your business could be listed online.

So change things in all of those places, too.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! From sparking business innovation to customer retention, this post has it all.

#8. Hello? Is There Anybody Out There? Just Nod If You Can Hear Me

Our following life-changing tip concerns increasing online survey response rates. G² lays it all out for us. We all know that responses to online surveys could be better. Even if yours are bona fide amazing, it never hurts to try to improve things.

So, how do you do that?

Skip Logic is Not Some Guy’s Stage Name (Although Maybe It Should Be)

Our absolute fave tip was using what’s called ‘skip logic’ (no, that’s not some guy’s name).

Skip logic is when an online survey can skip certain questions based upon previous answers.

For example, let’s say your survey is about people’s pets. Maybe you sell pet food or toys or the like. Probably one of your first questions, after demographics, will be which type of animal people have.

Hence, based on learning that a person has a goldfish, you wouldn’t ask them about leashes and walks, because you can’t take a goldfish for a walk. This is a truly terrific concept, because it reduces frustration immediately. How many times have you had to type ‘not applicable’ in the middle of a survey? And how many times have you just abandoned one because it didn’t appeal to you?

With skip logic, those frustrations should diminish if not downright go away entirely.

Branches Aren’t Just For Trees Anymore

A similar technique is branching, and it’s something many of us have seen in websites. That is, if you get a question with two or more answers and then if you click on one or the other, you get a different experience. There’s a similar vibe going on with branching for surveys.

The beauty of branching is you can lead your survey respondents down a progressive set of questions.

So let’s go back to our pets survey example for a moment. If the respondent says they have a dog, then the next logical question might be about the dog’s age or breed or level of training. If they say they have a cat, then questions could be about age or breed or whether this is an indoor or an outdoor cat.

For a big dog, the survey might go onto questions about how much of a chewer the dog is, or whether the dog is left outside for long time periods. For a smaller dog, the next set of questions might ask about how cold the dog gets at various temperatures (Italian greyhounds, for example, are really skinny and get cold a lot faster than Boston terriers generally do).

For an indoor cat, the next set of questions might be about how much scratching the cat does. Maybe for an outdoor cat, the next questions could be about if there are wild animals in the area that might steal cat food left out (raccoons do this a lot).

Either way, your survey respondent is bound to feel you’re asking about what matters the most to them.

#7. We’re Just Trying to Keep Our Customers Satisfied

For our next sensational tip, we looked at customer retention. Small Business Bonfire says that retaining customers is vital for a number of reasons, not the least of which that it costs a lot less than drumming up new business.

Consider this – your current customers already know and trust you. And you already know they love and need your product and service, and they see the need for it. So why wouldn’t you want to make and keep them happy?

Our favorite tip was about responsiveness. Seriously. When a customer has a question for you, do you respond as soon as possible? And if you don’t know the answer, do you at least say you’re working on it? Yes, even with difficult customers.

Neglected customers won’t be your customers for very long.

#6. Put Your Blog to Work

This tip is so cool, and it works! Freelancers Union tells us all about turning your blog into a lead generator. Now, keep in mind, the article is written from the perspective of a freelancer. But the same principles still apply.

There’s great information on both SEO and user experience. We suggest you read the whole thing to get the full experience, as it were.

But the point to highlight is all about the essential pages. They make sense – your home and about pages are vital! Plus your services page, otherwise no one has any idea of what you do and offer. Similar idea for any business, even if your ‘services page’ is several pages, and it’s for sales of goods rather than services.

Make it painfully clear what you do, what it costs, and what it includes. Don’t make prospects hunt for this information. They’ll just go to a competitor who doesn’t make them jump through those sorts of hoops.

Ouch.

#5. Today is the Day to Start Sparking Business Innovation

Grab this mind-blowing tip while it’s hot!

And by hot, we mean you’ve got the tinder and the match – it’s time to start sparking business innovation in your company.

Small Biz Trends says when it comes to sparking business innovation and getting your employees to start creating, it all depends on the stage the business is in.

For Startups, it’s All About the Benjamins

Not surprisingly, startups need cash. Yesterday. And so this tip focuses on getting the funds to light that creativity fire and start sparking business innovation.

Their two ideas where crowdfunding and government funding, like from the Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR). We particularly love the idea of crowdfunding. If Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and other similar campaigns reward anything, it’s usually creativity.

So toss some of your startup’s ideas against GoFundMe’s wall, and see if they stick.

During the Growth Stage, Structure Matters

For companies which are past the startup stage, money is less of an urgent need. Hence for them, the way to be creative is to bake it into the company’s culture and structure. This will help not only now, but for years to come.

Knock wood – your business is around for a super-long time – you’ll need some long-term plans. It can be harder to get unstuck if your company is entrenched and set in its ways. Better to make those set ways into something that pushes creativity.

How? One idea is to empower employees with decision-making capabilities. And another is to reward innovation, maybe through perks or recognition plaques or whatever strikes your fancy.

Engineers get patents. Music makers get gold records. Writers get published works. What do your employees get when they’re creative?

Established Businesses Open Up Labs and Undergo Digital Transformations

Uh, what?

One tip which made a lot of sense was to create what are essentially creativity incubators within a company. These are places (not necessarily physical) where employees are free to express their ideas.

The other bit is actually kind of basic – change your physical assets to digital ones.

True story. Long before joining Credit Suite, your intrepid blog writer audited law firms for a major insurance company. Now, a part of this was to check for billing discrepancies. But another angle was to suggest innovation. And one firm had – no lie – about an entire office floor dedicated to file storage space. This was the late 1990s. Scanners already existed as a thing.

And the head of this firm complained about all of the rent it was costing him to keep all of the documentation that we required. To which I countered – why not buy a scanner or two and have clerical staff scan most of the documents and then shred the physical? You could have a college student do this, or a summer intern.

Oh no, we need to be able to make copies.

Well, but with digital, you can make infinite copies, and it doesn’t cost you a dime.

They had no idea.

But these days, we all know better. And one of the beauties of digital, beyond saving physical space, is it makes it far easier to change, manipulate, add to, and subtract from, your assets.

Talk about sparking business innovation.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! From sparking business innovation to customer retention, this post has it all.

#4. Keep an Eye on Your Cash and Manage it Right

Check out this spectacular tip, all about managing your business finances. Succeed As Your Own Boss notes that the first sensible thing to do is no great shocker – hire an accountant. But we loved some other grand ideas.

Consider the idea of opening a profit account. What’s a profit account? The idea is to skim off some of the payments to your business (say, 1 – 10%) for you. This isn’t an emergency account for the business (which is another excellent idea). It’s to make sure you, the big cheese, are actually getting paid.

And put it in an account that’s hard for you to tap into. Let it be a happy financial surprise, rather than a well you’re constantly dipping into.

#3. Productivity – To The Max!

It’s not your imagination: this winning tip can help you maximize employee productivity. Young Upstarts tells us there are great ways to up your employees’ productivity.

The first tip we really loved was about minimizing distractions. As a writer in particular, this speaks directly to me. Cutting cell phone use is helpful. But it’s also helpful to create what are almost office hours. Giving clear signals about when you’re available for meetings and impromptu discussions – and when you aren’t – can set reasonable expectations. And people will stop bugging you when you’re on a tight deadline.

And that just might start sparking business innovation, too!

Our other fave tip was to offer some incentives. These don’t have to be too costly, either. Consider what we did here at Credit Suite – we had a department video competition. The winners got movie tickets. And, ahem, Marketing won.

Then again, it’s easy (well, easier) when you’ve got so many talented folks who can create pretty graphics, smooth out any sound issues, and write a decent script. So we kinda had a few ringers in our department.

So far, we don’t know if Sales has vowed revenge….

#2. Keep Your Edge

Our second to last unbeatable tip can give you a new perspective on staying competitive. Under 30 CEO reveals all about maintaining your competitive edge.

Turns out it’s a group effort (who knew?).

The best tip (according to us) was the one about maintaining a network of people who will be honest with you and challenge you. That makes a great deal of sense.

Consider this. Let’s say you’re new to the business world. You have a great idea, people support it, and maybe you’re the recipient of enough crowdfunding cash or venture capital money infusions or angel investments.

But you have no idea how to do your books.

Would you wing it, or hire an expert?

Of course, you might not be able to afford an expert. But you’re flush with cash. So add it as a budget line item and hire one. Unless, of course, you think audits and possible lawsuits cost less.

Pro tip: they don’t.

So why should you hesitate in any other area where you aren’t quite sure of how to handle things?

Being the CEO doesn’t mean you also have to be the Lone Ranger.

#1. It’s All About the Search

We saved the best for last. For our favorite remarkable tip, we focused on upping your ecommerce SEO results. Fundera says you can improve your SEO in all aspects of ecommerce.

First off, for SEO in this area, as in every other, research is your first step! Consider every single way your product (or service, for that matter) can be described. Let’s say you’re a long haul trucker. The term ‘long distance trucker’ is the same thing, yes? So when you are putting together your website, you’re going to want to use both phrases throughout your content.

But do your research, and determine which is more popular. Of course, you want to concentrate on that one!

The idea of using keywords in the product pages and their URLs was terrific! Again, this is an article which is best appreciated in its entirety.

So which one of our brilliant business tips was your favorite? And which one will you be implementing now?

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! From sparking business innovation to customer retention, this post has it all.

The post Start Sparking Business Innovation –10 Brilliant Business Tips of the Week appeared first on Credit Suite.