Written by Rhonda Abrams, featured on Costco Connection Magazine

Small businesses have long been the backbone of their communities. Small businesses support local charities, Little League, food drives, school fundraisers and more. Most small-business owners don’t have to be told to be charitable-they already are. But being charitable is just one part of the wave of interest and increasing demand for businesses to be socially responsible.

In addition to focusing on the bottom line, being socially responsible is a smart part of a company’s strategy for success.

Social Steps:

• Create an inclusive workplace with fair pay.
• Donate a portion of profits. Choose an organization and make it clear a small percentage of your pre- or post-profit sales will go to that cause.
• Think and work sustainably. Look for ways your business can reduce waste, consume less energy and lower its carbon footprint.
• Donate time. A good way to build team morale as well as contribute to your community is to have your employees volunteer-on paid company time-for a good cause.
• Donate products or services to causes you believe in.

http://blog.eecincubator.com/social-studies-being-socially-responsible-is-a-key-element-of-running-a-small-business/

Display ads and paid search ads both have their place, but columnist Sonny Ganguly argues that social media advertising is quickly becoming a powerful player in the online advertising game.

Social media advertising has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. When Facebook launched its first advertising option in May 2005, no one could have predicted that social media advertising revenue would be estimated to reach $8.4 billion in 2015, just ten years later.

Online advertising is a natural choice for modern businesses, but after the decline of the banner ad, businesses began searching for alternatives. Paid search is a great online advertising medium for driving visitors to your website based on user intent (i.e. their search query). But what if there are no identifiable (or affordable) keywords you can bid on to drive traffic? And what about those businesses that want to create brand awareness rather than capturing user intent?

Social media advertising helps businesses find new potential clients by using users’ own shared information to identify interest. Rather than reactively targeting users who search a certain term, social media advertising proactively targets relevant users before they even begin their search.

Social networks are a good option for advertisers because of the advanced targeting options, reliable conversion tracking, and prevalence on mobile devices.

Advanced Targeting Options

Because social networks gather such a larger amount of user information, social media advertising is able to target your audience in a wider variety of ways than other online platforms. Stretching beyond general demographic and geographic data, social media advertising has opened the door to deeper interest, behavioral and connection-based targeting methods.

These advanced targeting options increase your ad’s relevance to your users and provide a level of personalization that is not achievable on other advertising channels. Here are four such advanced targeting options:

• Interest targeting: Reach specific audiences by looking at their self-reported interests, activities, skills, pages/users they have engaged with, etc. Interest targeting is often related to keyword targeting, so some platforms will allow you to enter both. Interests can be as general as an industry (e.g. automotive industry) or as specific as a product (e.g. convertibles). Offered by: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (under “Skill”), Pinterest.
• Behavioral/Connection targeting: With behavioral targeting, you can reach people based on purchase behaviors or intents and/or device usage. With connection targeting, you can reach people who have a specific kind of connection to your page, app, group, or event. Both types of targeting take past behavior into account to help you determine intent. Offered by: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
• Custom targeting: Reach audiences by uploading a list of email addresses, phone numbers, users IDs, or usernames. Facebook calls its custom targeting Custom Audiences, while Twitter calls its own Tailored Audiences. They’re largely based on the same concept: if you have a known group of people you’d like to target, you can simply upload them and target them directly (provided that the social network can match the data you’re uploading with real profiles). Offered by: Facebook, Twitter.
• Lookalike targeting: Reach new people who are similar to an audience you care about. Lookalike targeting helps businesses extend their custom audiences to reach new, similar users. For those businesses looking to acquire new customers through social media advertising, lookalike targeting can be a fantastic acquisition tool. Offered by: Facebook, LinkedIn.

Improved Conversion Tracking

With all the new options for targeting users, tracking the performance of your social media advertising campaign is even more important for justifying your spend and requesting a budget. While you can still pay-per-click to your website or choose other metrics to measure the success of your ad, most social networks now offer website conversion tracking.

Social media ads that drive the user to take some measurable action, like buying your product or registering for an event, can actually report on how effective the ad was in driving those conversions — as long as you configure it properly. Conversion tracking requires that you add a snippet of code to the page on your website where the conversion will take place, so it does require a bit of technical ability and extra effort, but you’ll then be able to attribute any conversions on that page to the ads you’re running.

Conversion tracking helps your business be smarter about your ad spend and strategy. If your ad is receiving a lot of clicks (which you are paying for) but no conversions, it’s a wasted investment. This information will allow you to better optimize your ad copy and targeting.

Mobile Dominance

With total activity on smartphones and tablets accounting for 60% of digital media time spent in the U.S., there’s no denying that reaching users while on mobile devices is the next big wave in advertising — and social media advertising is the best native option. Mobile users are already checking Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Pinterest multiple times a day, so advertising to them, while they’re within those apps, is the best way to reach them without being disruptive.

The data back this up: mobile advertising was on course to comprise 68% of Facebook’s revenue and 84% of Twitter’s in 2014, and two-thirds of social media advertising spend is forecasted to go towards mobile ads in 2018, creating a $9.1 billion market on mobile. This, coupled with the fact that over half of mobile phone users globally will have smartphones in 2018, means that social media advertising on mobile is a huge growth market in the next three years.

When deciding which channels to use to grow your business in 2015 and beyond, try social media advertising as a supplement to your existing growth strategies.

Do you know the difference between a sales pipeline and a sales funnel?

• BY BEN GOLDSTEIN
• CRM
• Sell to Win
• sales funnel sales pipeline sales reports sales terms
•  

If you’ve been using “pipeline” and “funnel” to mean the same thing, you might want to pay attention to.

Sales pipeline and sales funnel both describe the flow of prospects through a sale, but there’s an important difference between the two commonly confused terms.

What is a sales pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a specific sequence of actions that a sales rep needs to take in order to move a prospect from a new lead to a customer. Once each stage is completed, the prospect is advanced to the next stage.

Sales pipelines allow sellers to keep track of the status of every deal and understand whether they have an appropriate distribution of deals in order to meet their sales targets.

16 sales process templates for B2B pipelines

Whether you’re building your first sales process or overhauling an existing one, these Nutshell-approved templates will give you a great head-start.

FREE DOWNLOAD

A pipeline report shows the value and quantity of all deals in each stage of the pipeline at the moment when the report is run.

Related: The sales pipeline prescription: how to cure the 10 most common ailments plaguing your pipeline

Though the structure of a sales pipeline can differ from company to company, here are some of the more common stages:

1) Qualification. The rep asks questions to determine if the prospect has the need, budget, and authority to buy in the near future.

2) Meeting. The sales rep and prospect discuss the solution that would best fit the prospect’s needs.

3) Proposal. The rep sends the prospect a detailed quote laying out what will be provided, at what cost, and for how long.

4) Closing. Final negotiations are made and contracts are signed. The prospect is officially a customer.

Hate your current CRM? Still working off spreadsheets? Register for our “Intro to Nutshell” live demo and see why sales teams love us!

What is a sales funnel?

Unlike a sales pipeline, which focuses on the set of actions taken by sellers, a sales funnel visually communicates the conversion rates of prospects through the pipeline stages. It’s called a “funnel” because of its shape: wide at the top as prospects enter, then increasingly narrow as they are disqualified or decide not to buy.

Unlike a pipeline report, which shows the value and quantity of deals at the moment when the report is run, a funnel report is based on a cohort. This means that a funnel report can tell you, for example, of the 100 leads you received last quarter, what percentage of them advanced through each stage of your pipeline.

A sales funnel report is important for sales leaders because it can help them forecast sales based on current lead volume and identify where deals are getting stuck so they can improve their process and better coach their team.

So when you’re thinking about the difference between a pipeline and funnel, remember this: A pipeline reflects what a seller does during the sales process, and a funnel measures conversion rates through the sales process.

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Want to turn your sales pipeline into a conversion machine? Take a tour of Nutshell and learn how our CRM’s sales process tools and insights helps sales reps win more deals. With our Multiple Pipelines feature, Nutshell Pro users can even configure multiple sets of stages for distinctly different sales efforts.

Not a Nutshell customer? Try us free for 14 days!

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Providing entrepreneurs with the access, resources, and connectivity needed to create and innovate.

Following last year’s success, the Emerging Enterprise Center and the Small Business Development Center have joined forces once again for the 2nd Annual Delaware Entrepreneurial Summit. As in 2018, this year’s summit is aimed at bringing together entrepreneurs, mentors, and providers with a goal to supporting entrepreneurs and accelerating their business growth, and will include workshops that focus on the “blocking and tackling” skills needed by entrepreneurs as they take their business to the next level.

LEARN MORE HERE

 

When: April 10, 2019

 

Time: All Day

 

Where: DuPont Country Club, 1001 Rockland Rd, Wilmington, DE 19803

 

Price: $95 (includes lunch, 3 workshops, expo, and a happy hour)

 

$80 Discounted NCC Chamber Member Fee

 

Contact Erica (crelle@ncccc.com) for a discounted student fee (must be able to provide proof)