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Working with an assistant can provide many benefits for you and your business. You will have more time to work on projects, yet the day-to-day activities of your business will still get done. A good assistant can also provide great feedback and help you brainstorm new ways of managing your business activities.
When you find an assistant that you enjoy working with, it is important to keep them happy, productive and motivated. If they feel bored or taken for granted, they may look elsewhere for employment. The following are some tips to help you keep your dream assistant.
Keeping your lines of communication open will definitely help your assistant do her job. When you want her to complete a job, explain exactly what you want. Keep track of the progress of long projects to make sure things are moving along smoothly. This will prevent any bad feelings if your assistant hands you a project that wasnít completed exactly as you had envisioned.
Coaching your assistant will help both you and your assistant. Teaching your assistant to set goals will empower your assistant in their personal and professional life. When your assistant feels empowered professionally, they will feel more confident and will be motivated to take on new challenges.
Keeping your assistant stimulated and helping them learn new skills will keep your assistant motivated and productive. You can offer to teach them a new skill, such as blog customization or help them learn a new software program. As your assistant learns new skills they can help you with more of your business tasks. This can help you grow your business to new heights.
Give your assistant feedback on the work they have completed and praise your assistant when they have done a great job. When assistants are not told if they are doing good work, they may assume that they have done badly or even failed. This may cause them to suffer a lack of confidence and eventually, they may not try as hard as they could to do a good job. When they are praised and given encouragement, your assistant will work harder to do a good job.
Most importantly, telling an assistant thank you will make them feel appreciated and worthwhile. Being an assistant is hard work, and a little praise can go a long way. These tips can help you keep your assistant motivated and productive. If you ever feel that your assistant isn’t working as hard as they could be, don’t hesitate to ask them if there is anything you could do to help. You and your assistant can work together to form a great working relationship.
If you are looking for a fun, new way to market your business, why not try promotional products? Many traditional businesses use them, and for good reason: they work. As a online marketer, you may not have thought of using them.
Promotional products are everyday items, such as t-shirts, pens, magnets, USB drives, water bottles, etc that have been personalized with your business name, logo, website address, or any other message you want to send.
Most people love to receive free things. People will go out of their way to be one of the first in line if a store is giving something away to their first 100 customers or they will enter a crazy contest for a chance to win a prize.
When they get something for free, many people will keep the item for a long time. Every time they look at your promotional item, they are receiving an advertising message about your business. This is why promotional items are so cost effective. You only have to pay for the item once, but the advertising message is always there.
To be effective, try to find a promotional item that ties in closely with your business. What kind of item would your target market find helpful and what would they be likely to use on a regular basis? Many popular items are pens, t-shirts, umbrellas, key-chains, magnets and coffee mugs.
The owner of a website filled with content related to babies may want to give away a bib with their logo and URL printed on it. An event planner may choose to give away a calendar with various holidays or reasons to have a party imprinted on it.
You can distribute your promotional ideas in a variety of ways. You can include them in your orders, reserve them for your best customers, send them to the media, or use them as contest prizes.
You can even give promotional items to perfect strangers. For example, a personalized ink pen is relatively inexpensive and can be given out in lieu of a business card. You can even leave them behind at the bank, grocery store, or laundry mat. People are always looking for pens and will happily scoop yours up. Once they get home, they may decide to look up your URL.
Promotional items can serve as great marketing tools. There are many types of items to choose from, and they can be worked into any budget. You can perform a Google search to find items that relate to your business and target market. It is okay to start out slow and order what is within your budget. When you run out of items, you can always go back and order more.
Recently this weekend my family and I took a trip to the Mall of America, and we had a fantastic time. We did come across something very funny that I truly didn’t expect to see.
Have you seen this before ? You sure have !
I am a Mac person. I have been for over 13 years. I simply love their products, the user-friendly capabilities and of course the customer service. All of our computers at BrandReady Media are Mac products! So of course , when we saw that there was a Mac Store at the Mall we made our way over to check it out.
What we saw next was quite unbelievable.
We saw two identical Mac stores across from each other. We thought it was a bit weird. Upon getting closer to the stores, we noticed one store was a Microsoft Windows store and the other one was the actual Mac store.
The Microsoft store was filled with Windows products , a really cool scrolling video screen that ran completely around the store and of course Xbox related items. Outside of that, it felt like being in a Mac store. The store employees wore brightly colored tshirts with the same type of id lanyard Mac store employees wore. It was well lit and lots of white around the store. They even had something similiar to Mac’s “Genius Bar”. I have to admit having an actual Kinect you could play in the store was awesome!
I walked out of Microsoft’s store feeling rather sad for the Microsoft Corporation. They don’t have any original ideas of their own for their retail stores. It’s one thing to create a product similiar to a very successful product… but it is something completely different to copy their marketing plan as well.
A couple of weeks ago , I wrote about Setting yourself apart from the competition. Maybe the marketing experts at Microsoft need to read that post because all they did in their stores was to copy it completely from Mac’s version. Somebody truly dropped the ball on this one!
Moral of the story – making yourself look exactly like another company and/or organization will not bring you the success that you are looking for. Be unique — set your business apart from the competition.
Are you maximizing your opportunities to truly engage with your customers online?
As recently as a few years ago, companies that dipped their toes in the waters of social media were the exception rather than the rule. Now the converse is true — it is rare to find a company that has not established at least some media presence online beyond their website – whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, or some other social media platform, business owners are finally starting to realize that it’s important to have an online presence.
However, just having an online presence isn’t enough. When a brand establishes itself on Facebook or Twitter, it would be well-served to realize that true successes abound for companies who do more than shout into the ether. A customer’s perception of YOUR BRAND may at one point hinge on their experience with you online.
- Are you responsive to questions?
- Do you engage in conversation?
- Are you open to constructive criticism?
- Are you hearing their feedback and then seeking to improve your product or service based on the response you get?
The world’s eye was recently turned to the very subject of social media and customer service recently when writer/director Kevin Smith was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for being “too fat to fly”. Immediately, Smith took to Twitter with tweets (most expletive-laden) about his experience. Quite understandably, he was frustrated, embarrassed and angry. It was clear that fans were sending tweets on Smith’s behalf when the Southwest Airline’s agent sent a general tweet on the Southwest account assuring Smith’s fans that she had seen Kevin Smith’s tweets and was working on it.
Southwest had a real opportunity to step up to the plate and fix this situation – but somehow stumbled initially, posting a somewhat snarky post that wasn’t quite an apology, as well as divulging Kevin Smith’s purchasing patterns – information that one would think would be considered private. They later wrote a second post in which the writer stated that she’d “learned a lot” and that they were working to make the situation right.
If you take a look at Kevin Smith’s tweet (pictured above), you’ll also see that it was retweeted by over 100 people. That is over one hundred negative impressions of a company based on the tweets of one man (who happens to have over a million followers). That’s one tough stumbling block to overcome.
In your organization, the person responding to comments and tweets has an opportunity to change a negative experience into a positive. Twitter offers you the opportunity to speak not only TO your audience, but WITH them. Engage in discussions, seek feedback, find out what people really LOVE about your product and service, and when they’ve had a negative experience find out why.
The time you spend in your online tasks are not just so people can hear YOU, but so you can hear them.
Want to learn about how you can start this conversation with your target market? Contact Brand Ready Media to determine the best marketing strategy for your company.
