Utilizing your brands invisible employees
Being a solo-preneur is exhilarating and exhausting! For years Tallent Co. operated as just myself and my husband when we wasn’t working full time as a firefighter which isn’t a typical 40 hour a week position but a 56 hour a week position. During this time, it was imperative for my company and my sanity to find solutions to make processes faster and more efficient and so we started utilizing “invisible employees.”
1. Your Website
This is your biggest invisible employee! Your website should be working for you 24/7. It needs to be user friendly and lead your potential client on a path to action whether its purchasing a product or service or believe in your political campaign. We all know that attention spans are getting smaller and smaller so our advice when building your website is to start with the important items at the front and deliver that content in the quickest, boldest manner. Use graphics and data at the main stage and then utilize three choices underneath that such as products, services, an about page, or an easy to find donate button.
It’s important to watch the analytics of your page to see where people are spending their time. Some websites can even offer a heat map showing where the visitors mouse goes on the page and how long it stays in that area. This leads us to our next invisible employee- data and analytics.
2. Data & Analytics
We cannot stress enough how important data & analytics are to the success of your business especially digitally, however your company should also be using its own data metrics for non-digital methods. Your data tells a story about your business and if you aren’t reading it, then you aren’t making time to understand your customer. Our recommendation is to set up Google Analytics. This is a free tool where you can learn an incredible amount of information about the visitors of your site including where they are from, what source led them to your site, time of day they were on, which pages they visited and much more. Click here to sign up for this free tool.
3. Social Media Scheduler
This is a game changer for businesses! Our firm uses MeetEdgar which is a tool that allows us to schedule our clients social media and it provides a weekly update of your social media accounts. Previously, we used Hootsuite which allowed 3 social media accounts to be managed for free but they have made many changes over the past few years that no longer worked for our firm. For about $50 a month MeetEdgar can schedule as many messages as we’d like and hold all our clients social media accounts. I’ve been incredibly happy with their customer service and highly recommend them. Depending on how many social media accounts you manage, this could save you anywhere from 5-25 hours per month. It also saves your past content which is a great feature!
4. Automation
This goes back to your website a bit where you want to have that funnel of clients. If you offer something free on your website, whether a report, questionnaire, or something of value and people sign up to receive that, you can set up a flow of automated emails starting with their requested download. But then you can send them an email following up to see if they utilized that product, then an email about how that product helped you and so on and so forth. I will warn you though, if your emails are not something of value, or something helpful to the reader, they will opt out as fast as they opted in. I’ve opted out of five this week that I opted into last week because they were sending me 2-3 emails per day. Find the balance of sales and value. Don’t just communicate to communicate.
5. Your Online Listings
Did you know YouTube at one time was actually closing in as one of the top search engines? The reason is that people search on the outlet they are on. We don’t always go to Google anymore. If I’m looking for info on a restaurant, I typically go to Facebook as I want to see pictures of the food and see if my friends have reviewed it. Many times I can also view the menu right from Facebook. And with further questions, the link to their website is right there. Many of my friends don’t go to Facebook but instead go to Instagram to learn more about a store or restaurant. So here is my point on that- while you don’t need to utilize the full benefit of every online listings whether social media sites or other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, you should consider listing your company on as many as you can and monitoring it. Speaking of monitoring- here’s a bonus invisible employee…
6. Google Alerts
is a free online tool that can send you an email when a phrase is used online that would be of value to you. I have all my clients business names, their leaders names, my family and my business (and also their frequent misspellings) and Google sends me an email anytime they find that being used. Why is this valuable? This is free protection of your name and your brand. It doesn’t catch everything like Facebook posts your name is used, but it does catch quite a bit and I highly recommend utilizing this great tool!
That’s it for today!
Make Your Mark!
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