Your Helping Business

Communicating Your Image

Part of your ‘presence’ is to do with how easy (or difficult) you make it for people to contact you – because that’s what you want.

You don’t want to be cold calling – you want people to call you as a result of your marketing efforts.

Forget about ‘non-geographic numbers’ – ‘0845’ and so on. People don’t trust them, don’t know what they cost to call and hate to be paying a premium rate to call you.

Most people have unlimited free calls on their mobile phone anyway – to mobiles as well as landlines.

You can though, if you wish, use freephone numbers where you pay for the call and this does give people the message that you value them.

But again most aren’t sure about them either.

Mobile or landline for people to call you?

If you have premises or an office which is ‘manned’ it should be a landline, if you don’t, and are often ‘on the move’, show a mobile number.

Unlike a few years ago, people are more comfortable about calling a mobile number – but they do expect you to be at the other end of it!

Contact Details
Your contact details as a personal business owner should be your personal details, at least at the start.

• Phone calls come to you,
• Emails come to you,
• Post comes to you,

All these details should be shown on your business card and must be shown (this is a legal requirement for any company) on your business stationery (letterheads, invoices etc.) AND on your website.

If you see other companies or businesses not showing their company details and are just using a ‘contact form’ then it’s not OK for you to follow suit. They are breaking the law.

For more details on this go to https://www.gov.uk/running-a-limited-company/signs-stationery-and-promotional-material

Be aware that once you become a ‘business’ then the business does not carry the same protection under the Data Protection Act and GDPR as does an individual.

Obviously if you’re not a Limited Company some of these rules don’t apply but we strongly advise you to become ‘Limited’ as there are significant drawbacks to not doing so.

Web Presence

As a business owner in this sector you must, yes must, have a website, and you must have a profile on LinkedIn and Facebook. You should also create a ‘company page’ (as opposed to your personal profile) on each of these platforms and you may want to create a Group page on Facebook as well. (More on Social Media to follow)
I dislike having to recommend Facebook as I regard it as an unethical organisation but for the moment, as Bob Proctor would say, ‘it is what it is – accept it’.

The Personal Business Creation System goes into this in more detail and helps you set it all up, but here are just a few priorities.

Your social media profile and website must have a professionally produced ‘headshot’ of YOU. Regardless of what it offers this is your business and your clients and customers want to know about you.

Good as your smartphone camera might be, it’s not good enough for this, and you should invest in a professional photo session early in the process. It’s not just about the camera, it’s all to do with the lighting and the background

And, on these business social media profiles, please – no dogs, cats, ‘other halves’ (unless you are operating the business together), no casual ‘party’ pictures, no cartoons and definitely no company logos in place of your ‘headshot’.

My immediate reaction to not seeing someone’s picture on LinkedIn or a Facebook business page is “Why are they hiding, what/who are they hiding from?”

Be open and honest. Show your face – it shows your confidence and belief in yourself and your business.
No face – no confidence – next!

If you have academic or other qualifications only show them in the headline if they are relevant to what you do and keep it simple.

I’m sorry but nobody really cares if you got a 1st or 2nd class honours degree or a distinction or whatever. Also, if you have a national honour such as the OBE, only show it in your headline if it’s relevant.

All your hard-earned qualifications and honours have little relevance in the eyes of a potential purchaser. What they want is evidence that you can provide them with the benefits they want, and this comes from elsewhere.

Your hard-earned qualifications can (and should) appear elsewhere on your Profile.

Websites

One thing that many people waste an awful lot of money on is websites. I regularly encounter people who’ve spent thousands of pounds ‘getting their website done’ and waiting for months for something that looks as if it’s taken about 3 hours to put together and should have cost no more than a few hundred pounds if that.

Then there are the ‘free’ websites and tools which have limited, if any, flexibility for you to present yourself and your business the way you want but what’s more they are sometimes not at all ‘search engine friendly’ which means that it’s unlikely that your website will ever show up on Google.

The first thing to decide about your website is its purpose.

What is it for?

Some websites are just brochures – they talk about you and your business but don’t offer much benefit to potential clients

Your website should do three things:

• attract people to you,
• explain what’s in it for them, and
• make it easyfor them to engage with, or purchase from you there and then.

Your website is not about you – it’s about ‘them’, and how you can benefit ‘them’.

When a website is put together there are three skills involved – marketing, design, and engineering.

Marketing is about the content of your website and making it attractive while demonstrating the benefits of engagement with you. It includes the copy, the graphics, the colours and any video or other content together with how your offerings appear if you have a product page that people can buy from or provide an online service.

Design is about making the site work within itself so that it loads quickly and works efficiently. How all the pages are connected together (or not) and things like managing security and password protection if that’s relevant to your business.

Although some people might include it in the design function, engineering is about making the site visible, about getting the site found, optimizing the code within the site so that search engines find it in preference to other sites. It includes things like keywords, links and metadata and is usually called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

Unlike the marketing and design which may need updating from time to time, engineering or SEO is a continuous process and has to be carried out preferably by a specialist provider on a regular and frequent basis.
Some ‘web design’ companies will say that they can do all of this but its best to get a web marketing specialist for the first bit, to specify what should be on the site, a web designer to create it, and a specialist in SEO to make sure it gets found by the right people on a consistent basis.

The first two are likely to be a one-off cost with maybe a monthly fee for the designer to keep it up to date. SEO companies usually charge a monthly fee relating to the number of hours they will need to work to keep your site at the ‘top’ of the rankings – and that depends on the competitiveness of the market you are in.

Web Hosting & Domains

Your website and anything on it has to be ‘hosted’ somewhere and you also need to get a domain name (or names)

There are several companies who provide domain name registry and then usually provide the hosting facility for any website attached to that domain as well.

Hosting may be offered by your web design or SEO provider, but in most cases, hosting is not done ‘locally’ in this way.

You may want to consider where (in the world) your website is hosted – where it ‘lives’ – and you might not want that to be in a country where the State has unlimited access to all the data stored there. I would, because of this, recommend that you find a company based in the UK or EU to host your website.

Personally, I have used IONOS (formerly 1&1) for several years and found their services robust and easy to use. The company itself is based in Germany but there are UK based hosting and domain name providers although they do tend to be more expensive.

The Personal Business Creation System takes you through the whole process of registering your domain and setting up your email and website step by step.

SOCIAL MEDIA

As far as we is concerned the two main social media platforms of relevance are LinkedIn and Facebook although Instagram is sometimes favoured by businesses primarily concerned with graphics.

It’s not true to say that LinkedIn is ‘for business’ and Facebook is not. It is also not true that there is such a thing as the B2B (business to business) market or the B2C (business to consumer) market.

ALL businesses are P2P – person to person.

A business by itself cannot do business with anything or anyone – it’s people that do business in a business framework.

B2B really means people within one business doing business with people within another business, and B2C is people within a business doing business directly with other people as consumers of the benefit that business is offering.

Once you understand this it becomes easier to understand how social media can help with your business efforts.
LinkedIn started life basically as a site where people could advertise jobs and where people looking for jobs could advertise themselves by posting their details, or CV, on the site. That still happens but it has evolved into something much more comprehensive.

LinkedIn is now mostly about finding and making contact with the people you want to connect with – it’s a huge online networking site and the thing to remember is that it’s not, as many people seem to think, about businesses, it’s all about people, mostly people within businesses.

As a personal business owner then, you must have a good profile on LinkedIn.

It’s not entirely straightforward what constitutes a ‘good profile’, and it does depend, like your website, on what you want your LinkedIn presence to do for you.

• You must post a good, professionally taken, ‘headshot’ of yourself (not a ‘selfie)
• No other people in the photo
• No pets or children
• No party or beach scenes
• No company logo or brand images
• No ‘blank’ silhouettes
• Use the name you are known by– the name people are likely to look for
• Don’t post degrees or other qualifications in the headline (after your name) unless they are highly relevant(you can post these credentials elsewhere)
• Be careful what you put in the sub headings unless you specifically want to disqualify people

Your LinkedIn profile is as much about you as it is about your business – it’s where people will go when they want to find out Who You Are before they do business with you.

If you need further advice on how to set up your LinkedIn profile page book a coaching call
Facebook

Just as it’s a myth that LinkedIn is ‘only for business’, it’s also a myth that Facebook is ‘not for business’.

In fact, Facebook can be very good for your business if you use it appropriately and if you remember that whatever business you are in it all depends on relationships between individual people.

Facebook give you a number of business options alongside your ‘personal’ page. It’s probably best to keep your ‘personal’ and ‘business’ lives separate on Facebook and you can do this by setting up a second personal page.

Do this by going to ‘Create Page’ which you’ll find under the small downward arrow to the far right of the search bar ribbon at the top of the page (you probably won’t find this on a phone), select ‘Create Page’ and the select ‘Community or Public Figure’.

Enter your name (not your business name), and it may be a good idea to make this slightly different from the name you use on your personal page, and then a category.

They’ve made this a bit difficult as they don’t give you a list of categories to choose from, you’re supposed to enter something and then they give you a list. How that’s supposed to be ‘easier’ I don’t know, especially as there isn’t much there relating tour sector.

Then you can go on to set up the page.

You can also set up pages for your brand, your product or your service by selecting ‘Business or Brand’ and following the same process.

If you need help in setting up Facebook pages for best effect for your business, then book a coaching call to discuss the matter. We will set up a Zoom session with you to take you through the process of getting it set up.
Lead Generation

Looking at the Buying Process (explained later) from your point of view as a business owner, this is the first step in what is often referred to as the ‘marketing funnel’.

‘Lead Generation’ is intended to create a list of specific people within your target market who are even remotely interested in the benefit you have to offer.

It may seem odd but one of the key functions of lead generation is actually to eliminate or disqualify people who may be on your ‘list’ or in your extended network; because you don’t want to waste time and money trying to convince people who have no interest in or need for the benefit you offer, to engage with you.

Lead generation provides you with what you might call a ‘warm’ list of potential clients and the next step is not to take them straight to a purchase decision, but to actually give them something – usually information of some sort to show what benefits for them can be achieved by engaging with you.

It’s a process of getting them to ‘warm’ to you and, again, disqualifying those who aren’t really interested. This part of the process will also gently describe what you have on offer before you get to the next step of making specific offers.

This is where it all starts to come together – your ‘list’ is now at stage 3 of the buying process – they are making up their mind that they want or don’t want what you offer before their stage 4 decision.

Then you make it really easy for them to buy.

You may have noticed that in this process there are some ‘gates’ where people on your list pass through to the next stage or stop there. Some of your original list stay in square one, others move on to square 2, some on to square 3 and so on.

Now you’ve not ‘lost’ all those in the earlier ‘squares’ – you can always go back to them with the offer of a different benefit. It’s an iterative process and whether you do it on line or offline, there’s no ‘selling’ in it!
To make this work though there are two things that you need to do that are vital. The first is to keep records and the second is to test.

These are closely related and too complex to go into detail here – complex, but not ‘difficult’ by the way.

If you have a large community of potential clients, you will need to have a system such as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in which you can record all the marketing ‘events’ and their result for each person on your list and also a system for testing different marketing approaches to the same ‘group’ of people.