Tag: business

How “Reopening” Too Early Could Be Worse for Small Businesses

While nearly 80% of the country supports ongoing shutdown measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing minority of U.S. citizens and small business owners that want to open up shop. No one will say that this process has been well-managed or easy. Every business is facing significant difficulties as a result of the pandemic. However, reopening your business too early could be worse for small businesses and employees.

Just because the government says it’s time to reopen, it doesn’t mean that you’ll have customers running through your door. The threat is still real, even if people choose to downplay it. Customers may have lost their own jobs and tighten their purse strings as a result. You cannot force customers to come to visit your restaurant or shop no matter how many air purifiers and hand sanitizer stations you invest in. If you don’t have customers, you don’t make money.

Businesses have costs, regardless of whether there are sales. Rent, electricity, water, internet, employees, supply costs, food costs, and more. Some of these expenses business owners have to pay regardless of being open, while others you can avoid.

Let’s say a restaurant decides to reopen its dine-in service, re-hire its furloughed employees, and take some precautions, such as operating at 50% capacity and wearing surgical masks (that do not stop the spread of COVID-19).

The restaurant has to buy food and pay employees, even if there aren’t any customers. There needs to be a certain amount of perishable inventory purchased, even if restaurants choose to only offer limited menus to mitigate some of this. Food will need to be thrown away and replaced if customers don’t order it. Staying shut while there isn’t demand reduces these costs.

Most restaurants operate at narrow margins, like other types of businesses. In some restaurants, this is only 10% to 30%, depending on food costs. Could a restaurant survive financially operating at  50% capacity and be profitable or pay staff and vendors? (Filling 50% of seats isn’t likely, anyway).

Employees in the restaurant industry largely earn money on tips. If they don’t receive tips because there aren’t customers, owners must pay them the difference up until their pay equals the minimum wage. This means that the wait staff is putting their own life at risk for very little money. In many cases, they will no longer receive unemployment if their employer opens up again. While this is great for the government paying these benefits, it isn’t best for employees or employers, who will use up more of their cash reserves and potentially go out of business as a result.

Also, what legal problems might your company face if someone actually catches COVID-19 at your business? A customer who believed in your marketed safety measures gets sick and dies, with your business being the only one they visited. Or a cluster appears from dozens of customers who visited the same day.

What happens if an employee you force to work gets sick and dies? What kind of legal action might their family take against your company? Could you survive that?

There’s this way people choose to cope by dismissing their own risk level. “I’m healthy,” they say, “so I won’t die.” Some healthy people die, too. The cases aren’t (yet) as high as were possible because more than 90% of the U.S. populace was ordered to stay home. Another problem is the instant gratification. People don’t see the immediate result of their actions, as you may not show symptoms until 2 weeks later.

No one is expecting you to stay alone, closed for business for 18 months until researchers develop and manufacture an effective vaccine for mass-distribution or enough people to survive the disease to develop herd immunity.  However, we don’t have the infrastructure in place yet for testing and mitigation yet (led by a poor government response, in part).

It will take time for businesses to get back to “normal.” The concept of normal may never be the same again. Yet, businesses will survive.

We are not the first to go through a pandemic and we will not be the last. Hopefully, we can learn what we can from this situation to protect our businesses and lives during the next one.

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P.S. All hope isn’t lost. There are still things that companies can do to survive this period. Some ideas:

  • Update your website
  • Invest in SEO
  • Schedule an obscene amount of social media posts
  • Invest in marketing
  • Pivot to new and/or digital offerings

If your company needs help updating website content, writing blog posts or press releases, or other forms of content marketing, email us at info@triassicmedia.com. We would love to help you.

Business Content

Why Content Marketing Is A Must

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Content marketing is one of the big buzz words in business right now, but if you’re company already has a blog, sizable email subscription, and active social media marketing plan you may be wondering why you need to bother with anything more. Content marketing works hand in hand with your company’s current online marketing plan to in a way that helps you to more effectively turn prospective customers into repeat clients.

What Exactly is Content Marketing?

While similar to the content writing you’re already using, content marketing is focused solely on providing valuable content for value’s sake. There’s no call to action, no trying to persuade the reader, just information that is interesting and useful. It’s simple, yet amazingly powerful. And your business can’t afford to not take advantage of it. Here are a couple of reasons why your business should use content marketing.

Target Prospective Customers

Content marketing is almost counter-intuitive because it focuses on providing high value information that your prospective customers would find interesting. Naturally, this translates into content that your current customers find informative, too. But in focusing on your would-be customers, your company continues to draw a greater audience, increasing your social media followers, your newsletter subscription, and your blog readership -all of which translate to increased profits.

Build Trust with your Prospective Customer Base

By focusing on the needs of your would-be customer, you better establish your company as an authority in your industry. In doing so, you also create trust between your company and your potential customers. The more an individual trust your company, the more likely they are to sign up for your newsletter and, more importantly, buy what you’re selling.

Increase Effective Word-of-Mouth Advertising

By providing interesting and informative content related to your industry, you encourage greater sharing of your company’s content and website among potential customers -which increases your marketing reach more than targeting the needs of your current customers could. The more people buzzing about your business the better.

If you are looking for the solution to your content marketing needs contact us today and see what all the buzz around content marketing is about!

web content writers

Why You Should Use a Blog to Promote Your Business

Blogs are something that have powerful online presence. People view them, read them, and listen to what they have to say in detail. Therefore, if there is a blog out there, which features a company as the subject of its posts then it will be seen by countless audiences. This exposure is something that can be extremely effective in all the right ways for businesses that need or want exposure.

Blogs can do many things. In addition promoting your business, they are designed and created with diversity of subject matter in mind. Blogging is the perfect opportunity to grow your company for all businesses in every market — It doesn’t matter if you are new to the scene or a seasoned business professional.

How can a blog help your business grow?

How can it not?  Blogs are a low cost alternative to having a web presence. They are inexpensive and are a means to get a company’s name out there on the internet. Blogs are an easy way to connect with your existing customers and gain new ones. The best way to grow a business is by word of mouth. Blogs are easily accessible and instantly shareable.

What else should you know about blogs?

Blogs are not only are a continued source of updated information, but they are also very easy to update. A quick process that only takes a few clicks here and there make it easy to manage. They don’t require a web designer to get the updating done. This is something that can be done by you or an employee.

 How can you start your blog easily?

You can easily secure the services of a high quality business writing service and content provider to help get you blog up and running. Here at Triassic Media, we know just what blogs can do for a business. We create only the very best blogging and varied content material that a company needs to promote its presence online. Contact us today!

Business Advice

Starting Your First Email Marketing Campaign

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Email marketing is by far one of the easiest and quickest ways to expand your customer base and reach out to prospective buyers. It costs only pennies per message and you can reach mass audiences in one mailing.

What if I Don’t Have A Customer Base?

Start with your social media contacts. If you have a large following, this is a terrific way to spread the word about your product and it allows people to ‘share’ your email with others.

If you don’t have a solid following and you really need to build up from the bottom, invest in a mailing list. You can find lists for sale online at sites like DMDatabases or Experian.com. These sites offer lists of consumers from new homeowners or parents of preschoolers, to people who purchased herbal supplements. Pick one or a few.

How Do I Get People To Respond?

While email is a surefire way to advertise, sending the email is just the first step. The real challenge is to get the recipients to open it. Here are some tips to succeed.

  1. Send your email to those who you think will find your product relevant:  Find your audience and speak to them. If you specialize in baby products, for instance, you’d want to target stay-at-home moms, not retired couples. Soliciting people who have no use for your product is like trying to sell snow to an Eskimo.
  2. Use a hook headline: Make sure the subject line captures their attention. Make it relevant to the content of the email. Use your first name instead of a company name. It feels more personal. Then use a ‘call-to-action’ statement such as “Click Here Now!”
  3. Reward your client for opening the email: Promise something good like useful tips, unbeatable bargains, or a truly unique product…then deliver on that promise. When writing content for your emails, keep the tone personal and engaging, as if you were talking to an old friend.

An email campaign following these guidelines will result in more clients and higher revenue for your business. However, unless you are experienced in web writing and design, you should consider hiring professionals. At Triassic Media, we know just what you need to build your client base and we are ready to help! Contact us to find out how we can help you!

business blog, professional writing service

Why Should You Have A Blog For Your Business?

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So many enterprises are coming up with new ways to market their business online, and starting a blog is one of the most effective methods. So, what do they get by blogging? You’ll be surprised! The fact is, there’re quite a few benefits of starting a business blog, and you’re going to love each and every one of them.

  1. It’s your online voice: Your blog, on behalf of the business, is the enterprise’s voice on social media networks and search engines, and it serves to create a positive public image of the business.
  2. You converse with customers: You write a blog post, and your customers drop some comments. That way, you read into their expectations and come up with better and more effective ways to satisfy them as well as attract more customers.
  3. It’s an effective marketing method: When you share your blogs on social media platforms, people get to know about your business. A well-done blog will attract a larger following and familiarize the visitors with your business.
  4. You keep your customers: A nice blog is fun to write and even read, meaning that your customers will be happy to be associated with your business. More visitors will want to know more about your business, and that’s how you end up with more customers!
  5. It’s cost-effective: As a smart means of getting the word out about your business, a blog is also a cost-effective marketing strategy. You don’t incur much cost in writing a blog.
  6. It’s a less tedious and direct communication channel with customers: If most of your customers love and follow your blog, you can introduce any new products and services and announce it there without having to contact each customer separately.
  7. It makes you think: If you’re running a blog, you’re always thinking about something new to share with your customers, and you might even end up with some good ideas on how to improve your business. In fact, even the customers’ comments might give you some good suggestions!
  8. Your business gets more publicity: You’ll realize that newsrooms, newspapers and journalists are always after business bloggers. Landing an interview about your blogging in relation to your business guarantees you free press and publicity for your business, and that’s a good thing!
  9. Foster good customer relations: By sharing and exchanging ideas with your customers, you create a good relationship with them. You understand their needs and problems and solve them early enough to keep them happy.
  10. Beating the competition: By blogging, you keep your business popular and ahead of the pack, in such a way that the public now thinks of your enterprise as a strong leader in the industry. For that reason, more people want to be associated with your company.

If you are reading this, you are more than likely ready to step up your business profitability with a new business blog. At Triassic Media, we know first hand just how difficult that can be. If you are looking for help in starting a business blog, and you can get more information about Triassic Media Group very easily. Just contact us today!

business website

21 Reasons Why Your Company Needs A Website

The internet is often one of the most effective, efficient and widely used tools to find information about companies and products. If your company does not have a website, then you are missing literally millions of opportunities to sell your products or services.

Still unconvinced as to why you should invest in some online real estate? Here are 21 reasons why your company needs a website:

  1. Your company website will enable you to reach as many people as possible. You tell them what you do, where you are, your working hours, payment methods, and much more through a single source that makes finding information easy for the customer.
  2. Making your business information available online demonstrates the first reliable service your business can provide. People like that!
  3. A business with an online presence is a business that markets to the billions of available customers around the world. Most advertising channels cannot offer results anywhere near those numbers.
  4. You can sell your products and services online, eliminating location restrictions.
  5. Your website does not limit your advertising to a specific target market. Unlike social media channels, anyone can access your website without an account.
  6. Websites facilitate the development of communities and customer engagement through sharing pictures, videos and audio to connect with your business.
  7. FAQ sections enable customers to quickly find answers to questions without delays.
  8. It’s cheaper to market your business online than to create brochures and billboards.
  9. Customers can interact with your company through the website on any device that they are most comfortable using, especially convenient for customers with communication disabilities.
  10. Updating the public on changes to company products and services is faster and more efficient since your website is the central location for company information.
  11. Your business stays operational throughout and capitalizes in serving everyone from different time-zones.
  12. You can get useful feedback from your customers through comments and adapt to what they like most.
  13. You can change the information on your website anytime you want without incurring any extra costs that you would have if you published on papers or other media.
  14. You can use your site to introduce and market new products and services and gauge their impact on the market.
  15. It will attract media. If your site gets more popular, media outlets will talk about it!
  16. You will better serve the local market. There’re some restaurants which take lunch orders from their customers through their website!
  17. Be there for the customers even when they’re not at your premises, you boost the credibility of your business.
  18. It saves you a lot of time and effort to run a website than doing outdoor marketing.
  19. The website is accessible even when your store is closed, and people can “window shop” and review your products online. They might even decide to buy!
  20. Interacting with your customers continuously keeps them happy and improves your customer care system. That way, you keep your customers and even attract more!

At the Triassic Media Group, we’re committed to the long-term success of our clients. We want you to succeed. Please call us directly at 813-58-MEDIA to talk about how our services can help you succeed.

7 tell tale signs your business will fail and what you can do about it

7 Reasons Why Your Small Business Will Fail

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If you’ve been in business for more than 5 years, you may be jaded about the success of the new startup businesses around you. After all, over the past 5 years, almost all of them went out of business. You’ve become a little jaded. You don’t want to get too involved with a company that won’t exist next year, so you don’t bother.

Most blogs and advice givers claim the reason that businesses go under is lack of capital. In our experience, not having capital is a symptom and not a cause. Rather, these businesses would go under anyway because of the way they are run. Here are 7 tell tale signs your business will fail and what you can do about it.

#1: You Don’t Treat it Like a Business

For some strange reason, there seems to be an emerging distorted version of the “American Dream” of business ownership where you’re now the boss and can spend your Friday afternoon drinking pina coladas at the beach. Or maybe that you can always take extended lunches and play video games all day at your desk.

The reality is that you’re not going to make any money playing video games at your desk or drinking pina coladas. There’s a reason your job didn’t allow you to do those things. Instead, set office hours and work toward your business during every minute.

#2: You Don’t Know How to Get Customers

If you build it, your customers may not come. You’ll just go out of business. This is a promise.

You need to find customer acquisition channels and find more of them. You need to keep working until you find the most cost effective way to constantly get customers. At the Triassic Media Group, we maintain 16 active customer acquisition channels that range in cost between $1.25 to $200 per customer acquisition. We’re always looking for ways to get better about this.

We also firmly believe in companies investing in content marketing services and a well-written website. Without the website or content, how are people going to know that you’re legit?

If your company needs help with developing content for marketing or you have other content needs, then Triassic Media Group is the partner that you need. Don’t have a website yet, we can fix that for you too.

#3: You Don’t Spend Enough Hours on Your Business

For some reason, most startup companies I’ve seen go one of two ways:

  1. They’re the cliché company where workers put in 60+ hour weeks for a measly portion of equity.
  2. They spend a few hours a day (or week!) in the office and don’t know how to spend their days. They’re really proud of their new business, but they hardly spend any time on it.

If you’ve started a business, please don’t plan on extended vacations, baby making or leisure time for the next two years. Focus on your business, really dedicate the time and energy on it to make it work. If you’re in the office, even if you don’t have client projects, find work to do. In a business younger than 2 years, there is always work to do. Write enough blog posts for the next 12 months, schedule out social media advertisements for 30 days or develop a comprehensive brochure for your favorite service.

If you need an idea of what your new business should be working on when not working on client projects, check out our post “100 Things You Should Be Doing For Your New Startup Business Now.” That should keep you productive for quite a while.

#4: You Don’t Have Systems in Place

At your last corporate job, there were tons of systems. Think about it! You likely had at least one “system” for payroll. You knew how to request time off. You knew the systems for how you did your job. Maybe you had an email system in place.

Figure out all of your company’s processes from customer acquisition and service delivery to hiring and training staff. Develop the systems and processes behind each aspect of your business and write them down.

One system we think every business needs is a way to track performance. We want to know how many projects we complete, what they cost versus what they earn and what client feedback we got. Without any of this information, we wouldn’t know if we were on target or not.

#5: You Don’t Commit to Learning About Business

Nobody naturally knows how to run a business. This is not an inherited trait. There are reasons why people like Steve Jobs and Abraham Lincoln loved to read.

Find every single free resource that you can find. There are plenty of resources for free business counseling, classes or books. Read all of the blogs. Pay for classes. Whatever it is, make business your craft and always learn how to be better. If you take anything from this post seriously, make it this one.

One easy way you can improve your business is to watch ABC’s Shark Tank. The premise of the show is that businesses meet with investors to fund their businesses. This is interesting, sure, but what’s really going to help you is to listen to the investor questions. Any time that an investor asks a question, ask that question for your business. Some of the questions that you should be asking include:

  • What’s your cost of client acquisition?
  • What’s your profit margin?
  • What’s your cost of service?

If at any time you don’t know the answer to one of these questions about your own business, write the question down and figure it out. Your business will thank you.

#6: You Don’t Meet Client Deadlines or Communicate

As a writing and editing company, we outsource random tasks to other companies all the time. Our management team invested significant time and resources into understanding the unique strengths of our staff. Anything that is time consuming and can be done better by someone outside of the company can immediately be outsourced. For example, we outsource graphic design to extremely talented people all of the time.

However, you’d be shocked how many people don’t meet our established deadlines or communicate with us. We usually stop working with these people. As a business-focused management team, we work very hard to make our business successful. While working with outsourcing teams allows us to improve the quality of our services, there is no reason for use to work with anyone that jeopardizes our relationships with clients. Missing deadlines is the fastest way to ruin a relationship with a client. So, if an outsourced team cannot deliver on time, we cut that risk out of our business immediately.

#7: You Don’t Ask the Right Questions

My wedding florist probably thought I was the most annoying person ever. She ran her business out of her home. I asked her so many questions when I was there, just to know how it functioned. Aim to figure out how other businesses function regularly. Ask the right questions and don’t be scared to offend people. I find the most successful people only want to help.

Also, if your client leaves you, ask them why. For our company, price is sometimes an issue. They’ll opt to try to do it themselves to save money. Usually they come back to us, but price isn’t something we can really change and keep the same level of care. However, if they said something else, that’s really good to know. We might be able to improve upon that in the future.

At the Triassic Media Group, we’re committed to the long-term success of our clients. We want you to succeed. Please call us directly at 813-58-MEDIA to talk about how our services can help you succeed.

3 tips you can use to diversify your business portfolio

Portfolio Diversification

One of the best things any business can do is to diversify its portfolio and its marketing efforts. Portfolio diversification is a great way to increase overall revenue, reduce risk and limit the impacts of a “slow season.”

Here are 3 tips you can use to diversify your business portfolio:

Tip #1: Look for Seasonality

Another business’s seasonality can be your business’s stability. When you’re looking for clients, try to determine when their most busy period would be. Once you’ve secured one, try to find other clients with different busy seasons.

For instance, if you’re a science education company, summer’s probably not the busiest time to attend client schools to give science presentations to kids. Adding a few summer camps to your client roster should help alleviate any downtime.

Tip #2: Get Support You Need Well in Advance

What would happen to your business if you got 1,000 new customers, tomorrow? Do you have the staffing, internal processes and resources to manage that?

Businesses that fail on Groupon, for instance, often don’t have enough of these steps in place before they run a Groupon deal. They fail to make an impact on prospective customers and lose money.

Even if you don’t plan on doing a Groupon, securing reliable subcontractors or employees (even just a concrete plan) is a savvy idea. This  way when a great opportunity comes around, you won’t have to say no.

Tip #3: Never Stop Marketing

You never know when your largest client will move on (or go out of business) or when your product will reach the end of its lifecycle. So for that reason, it’s important to never stop marketing.

To make your marketing successful, you should always be involved in:

  • Trying to get new clients
  • Updating your blog
  • Emailing your list
  • Thanking your customers
  • Getting referrals

Without  these key business marketing and development actions, you’re likely to have lots of slow seasons.

At the Triassic Media Group, we’re committed to the long-term success of our clients. We want you to succeed. Please call us directly at 813-58-MEDIA to talk about how our services can help you succeed.