Posts Tagged ‘small business’

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Top Laws of Green Marketing

Friday, September 7th, 2012

With the changing times, everyone wants to create and establish sustainable businesses than ever before. Green has become the mainstream as now consumers can comprehend issues that impact their lives and therefore want to take corrective measures to embrace sustainability effectively. Promoting content marketing strategies that focus on green marketing effectiveness can help people choose products and services that are environment friendly. As marketing and consumerism standards become more clear and defined, businesses need to innovate towards sustainable business ideas and concepts that eventually become way of life. Like any marketing rules, green marketing follows some rules and laws that every entrepreneur should be aware of. Here are some top laws listed for you.

1. Transparency and honesty

Honesty is the best policy and one should focus on transparency and lucidity as a thumb rule for green marketing. Do not show your consumers rosy picture or commit something that might not exist in future. Consumers will also respect a businessman who is fair and honest in business dealings. False promises do not take a marketer towards a road to success rather will lead you to a road of defame. Offer the consumer information on the environmental impacts of your service offerings, whether positive or negative.

2. Know your consumer

You should always have a clear picture in your mind of what your selling and who would be your potential audience. Know you customer needs and offer your products and services accordingly rather than promoting your products and services to an unidentified clientele. Understand customer preferences. Try to know the challenges that your clients might face and help your clients overcome them. Do not over sell or hard sell at any stage.

3. Measure your success consistently and focus on two way communication

Devise some practical techniques to measure your success. Know your audience and value your customers. Create metrics that can focus on sustainability indicators. This will help you to forsee your future expected growth and also help you grow towards green certifications and standards. Various certifications like GRI, ISO and more are the ones that you should aim for your organization. Focus on various green initiatives and environment friendly options like reduction in power usage or using recycled printing paper and more. Encourage your employees for greener and environment friendly options. Strive for a two way communication. Always try to foster a two way communication with your clients and encourage them to share their complaints and suggestions.

Conclusion

Content marketing is the key to success for every online business. Green marketing is a marketing strategy that can actually help the budding entrepreneurs to understand the business dynamics via online marketing. Always provide information about the product or service being ‘green’ to give an option to the consumer to buy it or not. However as of now there is no surety that a consumer may pay extra for a green product.

About The Author: Margaret is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and blogging.

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Posted in Guest Post, small business | 2 Comments »

Your Business Mission

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

What is the Mission of your Business?

A Successful entrepreneur won’t have the same answer as you are having in your heart right now. Too many small business owners assume that the mission or goal of their business is to make money. If you set your eyes on making money, be rest assured that your business won’t last for long.

Businesses are practically packaged solution to people’s need. Businesses are meant to satisfy the need of individuals or organization. If that is the case, then making money cannot be the mission of a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that aims at making money will only survive until an entrepreneur that aims at satisfying the need of customer comes around to dislodge him.

Customer Satisfaction Should Be Your Mission

Successful entrepreneurs often encourage their staff to aim for two things. First, attract customers. That is the whole essence of internet marketing and all the gimmicks internet marketers parade online. Everyone is trying to get the attention of customers. The competition for customers attention is very keen. Even though you have the capacity to satisfy the need of a market better than your competitor, your inability to attract the customer will make it impossible for you to prove that you are better!

The second goal is to satisfy the customer. Whatever you do, aim at satisfying your customers. A satisfied customer will safe you thousands of dollar in advertisement. His or her recommendation may earn you better return than you can ever get on paid advertisements. Also, a satisfied customer repeated patronage pays huge dividend which cannot be easily quantified. Instead of attempting to subtly grab a few hundreds of dollar from a prospect work at making the prospect a satisfied customer and watch him spend thousands of dollars in repeated sales while recommending your business to his friends.

Quality Customer Support Service Holds The Key!

Irrespective of how good a product or service is, poor customer support service will run the business down. People love to be treated with love, care and respect. Every human being is craving for attention. You will agree with me that everyone, including yours sincerely will love to be treated as Royalty.  When this fails, customer support service should come to the rescue.

To err is human, so it is not out of place for a business to fail in its bid to satisfy customers. However, whenever such failure occurs, customer support service personnel should spring into action to ensure that the mistake is remedied. Customer support service must ensure that the dissatisfied customer does not leave the business because of such failure. Everything should be done to redress and win back the customer’s confidence.

This is one area that small business owners in Nigeria need to look into. It has been discovered that too many big enterprises dump inexperience and ill-motivated personnel in their customer support service departments. Such personnel when attending to dissatisfied customers are often rude and abusive. Some even act as if they are doing such customers a favor. Instead of treating the customers as royalty, they actually demands subtly that the aggrieved customer be grateful that they are spending their precious time attending to such trivial complains. This is a golden opportunity for small business owners to tap into.

Give The Customer Royal Treatment and Watch Your Business Grow!

Since the market is already full of lots of aggrieved customers, take advantage of this! Build a first class Customer Support Service Department for your business. Ensure that the department is staffed with the best behaved, smooth talking, diplomatic, courteous staff you have. Explain to the personnel that they are the last hope of the company in retaining any aggrieved customer. So, their attitude should be such that a customer having come in contact with them will find it difficult to leave.

Get Feedback About Your Customer Service Department

If you really want to stay and grow in business. You need to get direct feedback from your customer on what your customer support service personnel are doing. You need to know if they are striving to keep customers for you or doing otherwise. Too many businesses have lost valuable customers because an aggrieved customer was not well attended to. Getting feedback from customer is not so difficult. You only need to be creative and you will be surprised that customers are willing to comment on how your staff treat them.

Reward Good Support Staff and Fire Bad Support Staff

It is your business, so be bold enough to reward good support staff and fire without hesitation any support staff that is killing your business. It is foolish to allow an arrogant and uncultured support staff to continue in your employment. Any staff that does not accept the fact that it takes the income from satisfied customer to keep the business running must be fired. Customers pay for satisfaction and it is the responsibility of any business that takes a customers money to provide such satisfaction or refund the money taken. As such, it is compulsory that every staff understand and agree to treat every customer like royalty.

This post was provoked by a recent experience I had with a business organization. Having failed in keeping their promise, their support service staff are acting as if they are doing me a great favor listening to my complain. If I were to have my way, I will recommend that the entire customer support service department of that business be overhauled, because their response to customers sucks!

Your business mission is to attract customers and satisfy them. Never forget that if you truly want to be a successful entrepreneur.

Do you have a story to tell about customer support service? Do you have a tip to share that will empower a small business owner? Please do so in a comment. Cheers 😉

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Posted in Entrepreneur, Nigerian, small business, Tips & Tricks | 20 Comments »

New Minimum Wage For Nigerian Workers

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Should Government Workers Celebrate The New Minimum Wage?

Government workers in Nigeria are getting excited about the newly approved minimum wage of 18,000naira. Does this really call for jubilation? I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but I personally feel that what Nigerian workers need is not a new statutory minimum wage. They will be better off if the government focus her attention on arresting the factors responsible for eroding the purchasing power of the workers income. If the present attitude of our leaders in maintaining the social infrastructures continues, the newly approved statutory minimum wage will have less than the purchasing power of the old 7,500naira minimum wage.

It is not the volume, but the value!

I personally feel that everyone would have been better off, if government has concentrated on improving the supply of electricity and repairing the roads. Those two factors alone cost an average worker thousands of naira per month. so much fund is wasted from each workers income as they struggle to provide energy using petrol generator.  The cost of transportation is also high because commercial vehicle owners pay heavily for maintenance of their vechicle due to bad roads and poor road networks.

Will The State Government Pay?

The state governments are already crying foul over the federal government action. They claim they can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to us, knowing fully well that some are owing their workers more than one month salary (at the old minimum wage rate). How on earth do we think such states will be able to pay their workers the new minimum wage which is more than 100percent increase on the old rate.

Will The Private Sector Pay The New Minimum Wage?

The private sector will now have to contend with disgruntled workers who will be expecting automatic increase in their salary because of the pronouncement of the Federal government. Unfortunately, many workers in private organisation will be dissappointed. Such automatic increase in salary is not realistic. Presently, a lot of private firm are having challenges with running their operations on diesel driven generator, because there is a hike in the price of diesel. Unlike before when a litre of disel sold for 110naira, now it goes for as much as 140naira per liter. That is a sudden increase in overhead expenditure.

Just two months into the new year and there are already many challenges for the Nigerian Entrepreneur to combat with. Unfortunately, our leaders are too pre-occupy with the April election to bother about the state of the economy. They are not helping matters in any way as their reckless spending is putting pressure on the economy. The warning from the Central Bank of Nigeria on the need for the executive to cut down on recurrent spending seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Nigerian entrepreneurs need to re-strategize in order to cope with the unforeseen result of these government policies. Every wise entrepreneur need to watch his/her overhead expenditure this year. It is obvious that there are challenges ahead. What is your opinion about the new minimum wage?

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Posted in Nigerian, small business | 23 Comments »

Why Nigerians Suffer As Unemployed Internet Surfers

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Why do many Nigerian internet users surf the internet endlessly without improving their economic condition. Why are there tales of woes among the Nigerian youth who desire to make money online. This is a guest post from a Nigerian blogger, Micheal Mcneri, who leaves in United States. He started his online adventure right here in Nigeria. I belief you will enjoy this piece – Naijaecash

McNeri

Why We Suffer As Unemployed Surfers

The Internet is for surfing not for suffering. The internet is for information gathering, knowledge building and application of such knowledge for making money! It is not for suffering! So why do Nigerians suffer online. There are numerous sites where you see us (Nigerians) gathered and all we do is complain of our suffering online. I feel there is no need for that. In fact, when you have pain and you gain access to the web, all your sufferings ought to go away as you receive knowledge and help from the online community. Often, such knowledge and help are given free of charge!

I am based in the United States and I have been involved with post-secondary education up to the highest levels since 1988. I have numerous interests even though I have a full time job which pays my bills. It has however fascinated me since my days at Ibadan, UCH to be precise when we first learned of Cybercafés (Internet Cafes). That was in the days of NITEL internet and calling booths. At that time in 2000/2001, I got a glimpse of what the world wide web had in stock for us. Seas of information and oceans of characters. We browsed in a very different way then.

How I discovered the World Wide Web

In those days, I had to apply for a NITEL land line so that I could use NITEL internet. To get the line cost 13,000 naira ($87) to NITEL and another 25,000naira ($167) ‘egunje’ (bribe) to the thugs (staff) of the cursed company. It was like bleeding, but we did it. This afforded me the opportunity to become a web user as I browsed the internet by dialup. I opened “FREE” email accounts and searched with this new search engine called GOOGLE! All was going fine and I was feeling cool but a few months into this new adventure, the line suddenly stopped working!

Then I received a bill of 102,000 naira ($680)! I thought I was dreaming! I contested the bill because the phone was not working and I had not made any international or local call to warrant such a monstrous bill. Well, I was simply told that that is my bill and I have to pay it if I ever want to use the line again! To me that was fraudulent and I was not willing to pay for what I did not use. Well, that was the end of browsing from home, but I had learned that there was a huge world out there and I was going to be part of it.

Journey to Cybercafés

A few cybercafés sprang up in Ibadan at that time, but many of them had lousy speeds. I was already spoiled with my home dialup (NITEL internet) which was so fast at 24kbps! Eventually I found one in Bodija, Ibadan. It cost 500 naira ($3.5) for 5 hours of moderate speed browsing. I was happy. Then I would go and buy a pack of floppy discs (do they still exist?). Each one was 1024kb. Armed with the 10 in a pack I would go to the cybercafe and pay for 5 hours. As I surfed, I downloaded materials, usually articles of interest in the medical field, or web pages. I would just be saving them to the diskettes (for the younger readers, that is what they were called). Then when I got home, in the comfort of my home, I would re-browse them, that is if Nigerian Electric Power Authority, NEPA (another sick company) permitted (the company had the monopoly of supplying electricity, but does a terrible job of servicing the masses, I learned they have been re-branded as Power Holding Company of Nigeria, PHCN. In my humble opinion, Never Expect Power Always is better than Power Holding Company of Nigeria. Well, back to our main gist. It was at the cybercafés that I stumbled on my present career.

It was during my adventure in the cybercafés that I found out about the World Bank Scholarship and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. That was how I ended up having papers in Croatia at the 7th World Congress of Pediatric Surgery. That is how I ended up here in United States, owning a website development company and helping other less advantaged organizations get their feet online.

Why all this personal story?

My story may be a bit long winded, but I want you to take from this a little lesson. It is still challenging to get online in Nigeria 10 years later, I wouldn’t have guessed. I have had some couple of youth send me letters asking me to help their helpless situations in Nigeria relating to unemployment and struggles. One of them named Tunde, does landscaping, but has no official qualification. He has worked in a cybercafe before. I encouraged him to simply put pen to paper in 5-10 short essays of what he does which is landscaping. Then I offered to help him get a website on, optimize it for search engines and even purchase some adverts for him. Then all he has to do is register his business name in Nigeria and we can hunt for business online since he was disadvantaged on the ground in Nigeria. It has been almost one year now and I have not heard from him.

I guess Tunde lacked the motivation to follow through with my proposal because he probably think it is too big a dream. It was a mistake on my part too, because I was dreaming big “for Tunde”. So I have ceased to dream for people. The message here is DREAM BIG AND YOU CAN GET THERE. It does not matter how ridiculous your dream is. What matters is whether you believe you can achieve it or not. There are many roads out here and that is why it is called the WEB. Read, Learn, Dream, Achieve.

After Tunde, I had another cold caller who contacted me through facebook. He had a similar story. Patrick is a teacher, but wants more. He complained that his meager income as a teacher wasn’t sufficient to support his poor family and there are several other financial challenges that he was struggling with. I asked Patrick what he knows and can really write about. He said poverty. I said okay, write five short essays and I will set you up as an online writer. Maybe we can get you something to supplement your poor teacher’s salary.

Two months later, I asked Patrick how far? I am still waiting. Please tell me if it takes Patrick 2 months to write 5 short essays on this first offer, how will anyone be willing to contract him? He will not deliver and in this fast-paced world, nobody has that kind of time. So the second big lesson is “STRIKE YOUR IRON WHILE IT IS HOT“. We are too lukewarm in Nigeria. We feel overwhelmed by the huge problems facing us and the lean resources available to us. However, if you want to make it to Heaven, you have to live like you are in Heaven here on Earth. Righteous, Holy and Worshipping the only true God, like the angels do in Heaven.

My Suggestion to You

I believe you should gear up and face the invisible if you want to rise out of that quagmire limiting you. Hold onto your faith, but also focus on your dreams. Yes, dear to DREAM BIG DREAMS! If you have no dreams, then you are going nowhere. Can a Man make heaven if he has not dreamed of Heaven?  Also, start NOW! People in the developed world have blogged their ways out of poverty. You too can make money online from Nigeria if you take action now. Get a blog, send a guest post to well established bloggers and become the person of your dreams. You’ve got to STRIKE YOUR IRON WHILE IT IS HOT! Stop procrastinating, start acting out your DREAM!

Micheal Mcneri is an Internet Marketer and a blogger. You can visit his website at Finance Is Personal. He also has a new one at I Be Naija.

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Posted in Blogging, Entrepreneur, Nigerian, small business | 45 Comments »

How To Pacify Clients When You Fail To Deliver

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Here is a guest post from a fellow Nigerian Entrepreneur who writes and practices entrepreneurship. He shares a personal experience which illustrates the importance of having a contingency plan for taking care of your clients when you fail to deliver on your promise. Please, do visit his website  Mk Akan to get more business and blogging tips and other resources for free. Enjoy! – NaijaEcash

What Customers Want When You Don’t Deliver

There are situations when the best companies and businesses fail to deliver. It does happen and all the time.

It happens in online businesses and offline businesses. It happens online when you do a launch, offline in customer care, offline in delivery and in any department you can think of.  So when it happens what do you do? What should you do?

Let me tell you a little story.

Sometimes when I am far way from my PC and internet access, I do head to a cyber café to get stuff done online. One day, I dashed into a cyber café. The management had obviously done a great job. They had flat screen monitors, all well arranged with great furniture.

They had functional air conditioner, God, I was so happy. Now I could just cool off and surf the web. I paid for one hour, it was quite costly but, in my mind, it was well worth it.

I sat on the PC close to the air-conditioner and started working. 18 minute later, the unexpected happened. There was a power cut. (Sudden power outage is almost normal so I was not shocked) .

The people in charge scrambled to the back of the building to start the power generator. I was still working thankful that management had thought it good to get UPS (unlimited power supply) and that the power generator would be on in no time.

I was wrong.

10 minutes later, the power generating set wasn’t on and the UPS were not beeping any more. They were screaming, a sign that meant- I gonna go off in seconds”. I was in the middle of something. There was nothing I could do than hope that power would come on.

Then suddenly, it happened, what I feared happened. The UPSes started going off one by one. Mine was the 3rd to go off. Everything I was working on in the last 20 minutes was gone.

All I was doing was gone.

Seconds later, the power came back because they finally put on the generator. One of the workers came in and started putting on the computers. He excused me and put mine on too. After powering up the computers, he left without a word!

I was vexed. I stood up and went to complain at the customer desk.

“I was doing something very important and now I have lost everything” I told the attendant.

“It is not our fault, he replied, there was a power cut and we could not put the power generator in time”. I kept complaining hoping for something to calm me down, they gave me none.

I was very annoyed, it showed on my face.

Even though, I knew about the problem of incessant power cuts, and I knew that mechanical devices like power generator sometimes have problems. Even though I know we are all humans, we sometimes fail in our promise and that things sometimes happen and does not go according to plan. yet I expected a better treatment form that cybercafe than what I got. That brings up the question I want to ask you.

How do you treat your customers when you fail to deliver?

Sometimes the customer just needs you to feel his pain. To sympathize or empathize with him/her.

In the Case above, the attendant or people in charged should have had done any of the following, and I would have been pacified.

Apologize:

He would have apologized after the power cut, apologize when he came to on the PC. Simply saying “please we are sorry for the problem, there was a power out and we could not on the generator in time” would have done the magic. I would have felt better.

Compensate:

I would have been happier if he came  up to say “sorry for the delay…blah, blah, we will add 10 minute to your remaining time”. He didn’t.

My satisfaction wasn’t their concern. They took my money and failed in their service. My money was more important to them than my satisfaction.  They forgot that, “you are not in business to make money, you are in business to serve people and give them satisfaction” after satisfying them, money comes. 

Solve the problem:

Yep, solve it. I may forgive you when you slip once, we may forgive you again if it happens another time, but if keeps happening again, we will just avoid you and your business.

We don’t want to hear your sob stories, we won’t tolerate it.  Just fix the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again. People pay for quality service or product, not sorry tales!

Conclusion

Do you plan for these unexpected occurrences? How do you handle your inability to deliver on your promise?

Do you have a compensation plan for your customer when you fail to deliver? I’ll surely like to hear your views.

Thank you for your comments.

Mk Akan is an entrepreneur, blogger and publisher of the FastClick, a web-centric magazine published in Nigeria. He blogs at www.MkAkan.com

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Posted in Entrepreneur, small business | 11 Comments »

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