The 4 Key Questions
There’s loads of software for small business. It’s easy to pick up packages in a computer store and find the words written somewhere on the back. So it must be right for every small business – right?
Of course not. Small businesses are as different from one another as they are from big businesses. Some are technically savvy. Others hardly know how to send an email. Some have highly advanced integrated networked systems; others have a singe PC running Windows 98. Here are 4 key questions that should be answered before any software purchase:
Q1– what do they want to do?
It’s the required function that should guide the selection of the software – not the availability of the software. If they want to write a few letters then it’s reasonable to buy a word processor – but it doesn’t have to be the industry standard package (unless files are going to be exchanged).
Q2 – who’s going to use the software?
If the user is already computer literate and the package is reasonably generic than this may not be an issue. However if it’s an unusual package or if the user is not computer literate then problems will arise if there isn’t sufficient support. Even for seemingly generic packages there can be a long transition period. Many small companies have run into difficulty changing from one accounts package to another.
Q3 – how often will it be used?
If a company wanted to calculate a series of (not too difficult) equations then the obvious first choice is a spreadsheet. However, some people would find it much easer to use a calculator and a piece of paper. If the job occurs only infrequent than the calculator may be the better choice. There’s little point is training people to use a complex package if it’s only going to be used a few times a year.
Q4 – is there a specification?
I know this is difficult for a small company but it’s essential if the right choice is going to be made. It doesn’t have to be a long and complex process. The main criteria can be obtained from the role that the software will play within the company.
For example – for an accounts package:
- Will it need to calculate value added tax?
- Will it need to maintain stock levels?
- Will it be used for payroll?
- Will it have to record foreign currency transactions?
- How many users?
- Etc.
Essential Answers
These are essential questions and it’s worthwhile spending the time to get the answers before spending money. The trouble is – if no one in the company has experience of the package then they may not know what questions to ask. That’s why it’s important for owner/managers to read all they can about the possible software choices and their features before they make their final selection.
Create the Perfect Advertising Image
You’ve developed a great advertising idea (see part 1) – now you need to create an image. The big companies can hire in professional photographers and designers to do this job – but that can cost a significant amount of money and there can be issues with royalties and copyright. As the owner/manager of a small company you’ll want to be careful with your advertising budget.
Photoshop
There are several ways to can tackle this problem. For example, you could use Photoshop or another photo editing package to manipulate photographs to get the result you need (but watch out for copyright issues). Or you could go out and take your own photographs. Both of these are good solutions if you have the time and the skills necessary – and I’ll be looking at both options in later articles.
Carrara 7
There is also another solution – it’s a software package called Carrara 7 from Daz. This package will also help you create images that you can use in your advertising – and it has one great advantage. You can actually create original images from scratch and you don’t have to leave your desk to do so.
3-D Worlds
Carrara 7 gives you the capability to build complete 3-D worlds. You can use the package to photograph your product on the moon or circling the rings of Saturn. You can show yourself flying a plane or perched on top of the Empire State building. Anything is possible. And you can use it to produce still photographs or videos of these scenes at any resolution.
Create an Image
I’m going to use Carrara 7 to create an image for an advertisement. In the first part of this article I found an advertisement to use as a template for an ad (http://bit.ly/90BSGJ ). I’ll now use the software to produce a different version of that ad (for an imaginary accountancy firm).
Working Space
When I run the program the first thing I see is the working space:
Carrara work area
Now I’ll start by going to the library and locating a model. I’ve already purchased this model from the Daz store.
Carrara library
If I had the time and patience I could build the model myself but for a complex model it makes more sense to buy rather than create (if it’s available).
I’ll drag this model onto the working space and then use the handles to move its components (the arms and the shovel) until it’s set up properly. It can take a while to get to grips with the navigation system but it’s reasonably intuitive after a bit of practice. By the way, I’ve dirtied this model to make it look more realistic.
Placing the model
Terrain
The next thing I’ll do is set up the ground. I’m going to use a built-in feature of Carrara called “terrain” to do this. I’ll just drag it into position. Now it isn’t the right colour so I’ll use a “shader” to get the colour and texture just right.
Placing the ground
“Shaders” are preset elements that we can drop onto the object when we want them to look a certain way. For example, I could make the terrain look like it’s made from steel or from timber.
Background and sky
Next I’ll install a background. I’m going to take another shortcut here. I have a skydome in my library. This came with another model I bought previously so I’ll use that because it also includes the silhouette of a city.
The skydome in Carrara
If I didn’t have the skydome I could use the built-in sky feature of the program and I could build the city silhouette using the drawing tools. The results would be the same but it would take a little longer.
Books
Now I want put two books into the scene. Again these books are models that I can drag and drop into the picture and then position. Carrara comes with a basic library of models and one of the books is from that library. The other is a model I bought from the Daz store.
Model books
Obviously the books don’t come with the right titles but Carrara has a built-in text generator. All I have to do is type the text and it appears in 3D. It can then be arranged like any of the other models
Replication
Now to add a few touches to the final result. I want some bricks strewn around the ground. I’ve started by making a single brick using the drawing tools. Then I added a shader to give it the right look. Finally I added a control that replicates the brick at random angles and positions.
Replication of models
So now I have scores of bricks that I can drop into the scene – with the minimum amount of work.
Lighting
The entire scene needs to be lit properly. In this case I’ve used four bulbs to get the right effect. Sometimes you can get away with less but it’s usually better to light the scene using several light sources – one primary one and the rest to fill out the shadows.
The Final Result
Here’s the final result.
The final output
I added the text using Photoshop. I could have added the text in Carrara but it’s a bit more difficult to get it looking like the 2D text in the original advertisement. Compare it to the original ad: (http://bit.ly/90BSGJ ).
Video
Carrara will also generate videos of any scene. In this case all I have to do is move the camera and I can get a short move that I can upload to YouTube or insert into a website. It’s even possible to insert the clip in a PowerPoint presentation – the possibilities are endless.
Carrara 7
If you’re interested in finding out more about Carrara you can go to the Daz website by clicking on this image:
You can learn more about Carrara’s capabilities and check out the library of models. We’ve only scratched the surface of its functions in this article.
Disclaimer
I have been using Carrara for several years (from version 3) and have been so impressed with its capabilities that I have recently entered into an affiliate arrangement with Daz. Please make sure you review the program and its capabilities carefully before you purchase the program or any of the models from their website to make sure it’s right for you. If you have any questions I would be delighted to answer them as a user of the package.
Tags: Advertising, Carrara 7, Daz, Images, Photoshop
Developing the Advertisement Idea
How can you make your business stand out from your competitors? One way is to develop an image that’s better than theirs. We’re all familiar with Coca-Cola, Apple, Dell and Nike because of their advertising and promotions. They’ve developed an image so that we’ll be comfortable buying their products.
What you see …
Notice I’ve used the word “image”. The reason is that most of us actually form a unique image of these companies in our minds. It’s the brain’s shorthand way of referring to something. It’s like the icons on a computer screen. When you think of Apple, for example, you might think of their logo or the white shiny surface of their products.
Promote yourself
Of course large companies spend millions developing a brand images but I’m assuming you can’t do that – at least not yet. However, it’s now possible for small business owners –even one-person businesses – to promote themselves and look as professional as the multinationals. It’s all thanks to the Internet and some very clever software.
Example
We’ll use an example to demonstrate what can be done. Let’s say you own a small accounting firm. Your main customers are in the construction industry. However, you’re up against the big accountancy firms – Ernst and Young, KPMG, Deloitte and Touche, etc. They have the money and the advertising budget to blow you out of the water. What do you do?
Step 1
Get on the Internet and search the websites of your main competitors – particularly the international ones. They have the money to buy the top marketing experts and you should learn from them. They know that the landing page on any website is the most important page so that’s where we’ll start.
For our example we’ll examine the websites of the top four accounting firms in the world:
http://www.ey.com (Ernst & Young)
http://www.deloitte.com (Deloitte)
http://www.pwc.com (PricewaterhouseCoopers)
http://www.kpmg.com (KPMG)
Step 2
In each case we’ll make a note of the predominant colour(s) used on each web page (as of Jan 2010):
Ernst & Young - Green (picture)
Deloitte - Blue (Mast & picture)
PricewaterhouseCoopers - Green (picture) – Brown (mast)
KPMG - Blue (Mast & picture)
You can see that there’s a limited selection used – and that’s not surprising. Their marketing people will have carried out surveys to establish what colours works best – and now you have the benefit of that research. If you’re an accounting firm you should be selecting blue or green. In fact you can be more specific – you can find the exact shade they are using. Programs like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro will allow you to import a picture and get a numeric value for the shade.
Step 3
Now you know the colour to use. Next you need to get a clever advertising idea – something that will generate attention. In our example, the big four have nothing to offer on their websites so we’ll have to dig a little deeper.
I spent some time searching the other competitors in the industry but found nothing so I widened the search to include potential customers. After a few false starts I used the search term “advertising examples of accounting firms construction” in Google Images and found (on the second page of results) an ad that looked interesting (http://bit.ly/90BSGJ ). This ad was produced by the James Group for construction company Posillico.
Step 4
Now – of course – you can’t just copy this ad – that would be copyright theft. However, you can use it to generate ideas for your own ad. For example, the main headline reads: “It takes know how to solve complex construction problems.” You might change that to: “It takes a great accountant to solve complex construction problems.”
Step 5
Once you have a powerful headline it’s much easier to write the supporting text. In this example you’d probably include things like raising finance, paying as little tax as possible and keeping a positive cashflow.
Once you are happy with the text it’s time to develop the graphics. The big companies can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing graphics for an advertising campaign. I’ll show you how to do the same thing for a few hundred.
Next Time
In the next article I will show you how to produce the image to go with your headline and text. It’s the image that will draw attention to your message and sell your product or service.
Pay-per-click advertising is a low-cost technique to generating sales that every small business should try. There are several significant advantages. You know that someone is searching for your product on-line. When they visit your site you know they have an interest and if your website is any good you should be able to convert at least 2.5% of those who click on the link. You can also control your spend down to the last cent – and you can increase or decrease your promotion almost instantly.
When do you pay?
With pay per click advertising you only pay if someone clicks on your link. That means your ad could appear a thousand times but you would only pay when someone clicks on it and visits your web page. You can set the maximum amount you want to pay for a click and that means you could limit your spend to (say) $5 / week if you wanted to.
Pay-per-click programs
The best-known pay-per-click program is Google AdWords but it’s not the only one. Here is a list of links to the major pay-per-click programmes:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/europe/search-advertising
http://advertising.yahoo.com/smallbusiness
http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/
There are hundreds of other programmes but it’s usually better to start with one of the major ones to develop some experience. I would suggest starting with Google because it has the largest audience – when you have generated some data you can then test the others.
Here are five tips that will help you get the most of out of Google AdWords in particular and pay-per-click advertising in general:
- Choose keywords carefully
- Optimise your landing page
- Build your keywords into the ad
- Track your results
- Echo the searcher’s search term
1. Choose keywords carefully
The Google uses a “quality score” to determine what you pay. If it thinks your ad will relevant to the searcher’s needs then you will pay a low price. If it thinks it’s not relevant it will charge you more – or your ad may never be shown. You need to select only keywords or phrases that your customers are likely to use when searching for your product or service.
2. Optimise your landing page
For the same reason you should optimise your landing pages. The landing page should contain the keyword or phrase that the searcher has used. To get the best results you should set up different ad groups – each with an optimised landing page – for different groups of keywords.
3. Build your keywords into the ad
You ad should also contain the keyword or phrase that searcher has used to find you. If you want to use a large number of keywords you should set up several ad groups and match the ad with the keywords for that group.
4. Track your results
You need to make sure that the each ad is working – otherwise you’re just throwing money away. Google provides a free tracking tool called Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) that will allow you to monitor your results.
5. Echo the searcher’s search term
If your keywords are set up for broad match then your ads will be triggered for phrases that contain your keyword. For example, if one of your keywords is “clock” then your ad will be triggered when the searcher types “grandfather clock”. You can have this exact phrase appear as the headline to your ad by using the following code: {KeyWord: Need a Clock?}. Of course you should replace the headline: “Need a Clock?” with your own headline – this will appear if the search term is too long.
Pay-per-click advertising software
I hope to be reviewing a piece of software that will help you get even better results in the coming months. Bookmark this page to make sure you get to read it.
Find software that’s right for your small business
There’s tons of software for small business. You may be tempted to splurge but before you buy any software you should establish the business need. Then you can decide what package will satisfy that need more effectively. Let’s take an example. Suppose you want to buy a word processor. Why do you want to do that? Well, obviously, you want to send out professional looking letters.
If that’s your only need then you can pick practically any word processor package on the market. Most of them are quite capable of producing a perfect letter and several of them are free. However, if you’re ever going to send those files to your customers then the situation changes. You’ll have to make sure that your files are compatible with theirs. There ’s nothing worse than sending a file and finding that the person can’t open it.
The industry standard word processor is Microsoft Word – it’s probably what your customers are using and they’ll expect you to use it too. However, it’s expensive. At the time of writing a copy on Amazon.com costs $179.75.
There are other options – you can buy a copy of StarOffice for $34.95 and that includes a spreadsheet and a database program. OpenOffice is almost identical to StarOffice and it’s free. The good news is that both of these programs will open and save Microsoft Word files.
So why waste money on the expensive option? Well, the problem is that the word compatible is used fairly loosely. It doesn’t mean that the files will look identical in all those programmes. It’s usually OK for text but if you embed a graph or try fancy formatting with tables your customers could be looking a right old mess. And you might never know.
And that’s the problem. All the time you are spending getting your documents right could be wasted because your customers are seeing something completely different.
There is another solution. You could send your customer an Adobe Acrobat pdf file. Practical everyone who has a computer has a copy of the free Acrobat reader. Many programs, including Star Office, and OpenOffice can save directly to that format. If you don’t need to send the original files for editing you can save money by selecting one of the cheaper options. However, if there is a possibility that you will need to exchange files don’t take chances – spend the money and get Microsoft Word.
Your business need will dictate the software you should get. If you can afford it you should always get the best – but the best isn’t always the most expensive.
Contact Me: Email Me
Tags: Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Star Office
Why does any small business need CRM software?
Before I answer that let’s look at what you‘re doing at the moment. How do you make sure you don’t drop the ball in the following situations?
- A potential customer asks you to ring her at 4.00 next Thursday week.
- A customer wants the information you sent him April of last year.
- A customer wants to place an order based on a verbal quote from last month
- You need to predict how many new customers you’ll get next month
- You need to call all your key accounts every six weeks
- You need to visit your key accounts every twelve weeks
Do you have a mechanism that will guarantee that all those transactions will be completed successfully? If you’re depending only on memory then you’re definitely dropping the ball from time-to-time and you’re certainly losing customers. If you’re depending on a paper system then you’re probably loosing customers and you’re also wasting time maintaining the system.
Computers are able to do the mundane tasks in life much better than we are. They never forget. If you tell a computer to remind you of an appointment two years from now it will do so. It can sort and filter information thousand of times faster than you can – so why waste your own time? Let the computer do the donkeywork.
The software that turns your computer into a virtual administrator is called “Customer Relationship Management Software” (CRM). Its job is to make sure that all interactions between yourself and your customers run like clockwork.
But what does that mean? Let’s take an example. Lets say the software has prompted you to make a call to an existing customer. In seconds you’ll have the full customer history in front of you. You can quickly review the information and if you made any promises and didn’t deliver the record will be there.
The computer will then prompt you to make the call and it will log exactly when it was made. Why is that important? Because some customers are hard to track down and it’s useful to know when calls were answered (and when they were not).
If the customer asks you to do something in the future you just record it in the system and it will pop up again when it’s needed.
A good small business CRM software package takes the stress and the guesswork out of customer relationships. In the next post in this series I will look at what you need to do to make sure you get the right CRM software package for your business.
Tags: CRM Software
Software for Small Business – Chosing software that will keep you in touch.
What software do you need to send and receive email and browse the web in your small business? Most people use the default packages that are already loaded on the computer but we’re going to look at some alternatives that might make more sense for your business.
The default eMail client for many people is Outlook Express because it comes with the machine. However it’s fairly basic. Outlook (without the express) is a better choice and is the preferred option for most the multinationals. The trouble is, it’s not (usually) free – it’s currently selling for $82.99 on Amazon.com.
Outlook is reasonably powerful and is often used by hardware vendors to synchronize devices like PDAs and smart phones. I bought a Dell Axim many years ago and there was a copy included – so if you’re thinking of buying similar hardware hold off on buying Outlook until you check if you can get it free.
You’re not limited to Microsoft software however. Mozilla Thunderbird is another popular eMail client and it’s free. The great advantage of Thunderbird is that you can add additional modules and these are a wide selection available. I currently have both Outlook and Thunderbird on my machine but I’m using Thunderbird as my main client. At one point I was thinking of getting rid of Outlook completely but it’s far too useful.
It’s also possible to send and receive email without any email client. For example, you could set-up a hotmail or Gmail account. That will allow you to send and receive emails and the only software you need is a web browser. These sites are fine for personal use but I couldn’t recommend them for serious business purposes.
Moving on to web browsers. The standard here is Microsoft Internet Explorer – and again it usually comes with the machine. It’s a solid piece of software but there are several alternatives that should also be considered. For example, Mozilla Firefox is much faster than Explorer on most machines and it’s free. Google Chrome is even faster than Firefox and is also becoming more popular.
There’s nothing wrong with having all these browsers on your machine and selecting the one you like for a particular job. For example, I use Firefox as my default browser but there are certain sites where it won’t work (this is usually caused by some security feature). When that happens I revert to MS Explorer.
There’s lots of software for small business on line and in the shops. However, when it comes to statying in touch it’s better to stick with the popular packages. When you’re trying to communicate with your customers you have to see things through their eyes – and their packages.
Tags: Dell Axim, Explorer, Firefox, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird