How To Create a Business Plan

Starting a business is an exciting thing, and if done right, can be life-changing. But there are key steps that must be taken in order to give your potential business the best chance for success. At the top of this list is having a business plan.

What is a business plan?

Hubspot’s definition of a business plan is as follows: “A business plan is a living document that maps out the details of your business. It covers what your business will sell, how it will be structured, what the market looks like, how you plan to sell your product or service, what funding you’ll need, what your financial projections are, and which permits, leases, and other documentation will be required.”

Essentially, a business plan shows if your idea is worth putting in the continued effort to make it flourish. You are forced to look at the big picture and explain every detail that defines your holistic view.

Making a business plan

Building a  business plan may seem like an unwieldy task, but it doesn’t have to be. Keep it short and simple, as too much information or minute detail could confuse or distract anyone reading the plan such as shareholders, investors or any others involved in the inception of your business. The plan should also have a certain amount of flexibility built into it, and be able to grow and evolve as the vision for your business does. Finally, you’ll want to really dig into what makes your idea for a business unique within your space. Being able to stand out from a crown is a major prerequisite when starting a business.

Now you’re ready to put everything together and write your very own business plan. These templates organized by INC. are a great place to start and will help you organize all of the information you will need to present.

To fill out these templates, you’ll need to be ready with these sections of information:

1. An executive summary
2. A company description and business model
3. A market analysis
4. A description of your products and/or services
5. Outlines of operation and management roles
6. A basic sales and marketing strategy
7. A financial plan that includes costs, funding and profit/revenue projections
8. A summary of the above information

With that, you’re all set to start pitching your business and moving onto other tasks like choosing and registering a name, determining your legal structure and getting ready for a successful launch.

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How To Make Your Content Shareable

Anyone that works in marketing knows that shares on a post are a key component of determining its success;  shares organically generate attention, increase your reach and create an environment that is open for more likes. In a sort of domino effect,  a shared blog or social media post will be shared by one person, then another, and another yet after that continually. This sharing community can help build brand awareness organically, and all you have to do is create content that your audience wants to share.

To do this you must answer these questions: Who is your audience? Who is their audience? What type of content is being shared in this environment? Who do these audiences follow? Once you have the answers, you can begin to generate relevant content that your audience will want to share with theirs. Take some of the following points into consideration when creating content:

TITLE

There are mountains of digital content available. Close to two million blog posts are written every day. Social media user numbers are increasing every day. Writers and social media users are constantly creating, sharing and liking content. It’s a climb to get your content noticed. A key to getting noticed is having an eye-catching title. To do this, start small. Have your general topic flushed out. From that topic, you can come up with a few more specific title options. These titles can also act as a guide so that your blog post can move in a more specific direction.

Now cut apart those titles to build out the title you’ll use. Test titles with bold, strong language against more conservative and direct titles, and compare. Choose a title that works for you, your content and your audience.

SEO

SEO is important to get initial traction. But trying too hard to optimize can make your titles and posts sound awkward and often robotic (also, Google doesn’t reward over optimization, and in some cases punishes it by ranking your posts lower). Remember, many potential readers are scanning titles, so in order to get them to take the next step and click-through to the full article, the title needs to be short, succinct, and specific. Keywords work better in searches when they’re placed at the beginning of a title. To include keywords that will work in your titles and posts, do a little research on your potential customer base: What are they searching for? What problems do they have and how can you solve them? Use keywords that prove your expertise and are relevant to your content.

VISUALS

It takes more than an exciting title and hook for a post to be truly shareable. Images, infographics, videos, charts and block quotes can shake up a text-based post. Deliver content that offers solutions to your readers’ problems in a creative way that can lead to shares and valuable comments.

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How Your Business Can Celebrate Earth Day

Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd, and many cities, companies, and individuals are thinking of ways to be a little more environmentally friendly. You can use these simple ideas to save the planet (and some money) all year, not just on Earth Day, and they are easy to implement at work and at home.

Track your resources

Enroll in a utility management program that will track how much electricity, water, and gas your company uses and suggests ways you can drop your usage. This can help save the planet and your bottom line.

Make the switch from desktops to laptops

If you can, switching to a more energy efficient machine (laptops are generally more efficient) can help you lower your energy bill.

Increase sustainable efforts into your marketing strategies

Only use the paper marketing materials that are necessary to your campaign, printing more than you need increases waste, and takes up extra storage space. You may also consider converting from a traditionally print-based methodology to email, social media, and other digital tools.

Increase incentive to carpool, bike, or use public transportation

Make the jump to carpooling and ridesharing easier by setting up a matching program, this allows employees to find other commuters that share the same schedule and commute they may be unaware of. By offering perks like reduced rate parking, premium parking spots, subsidized metro passes and other incentives, you can garner more interest in the effort.

Adopt a highway or volunteer to clean up at a park

Increase community engagement while taking care of the environment and work to clean up in the neighborhood around your office. Whether you want to do this once as a volunteer opportunity or go the extra mile and committing to adopting a park or highway that you can maintain whenever you like or can.

Recycle

Recycling is easy to implement and takes relatively little effort to adjust to. Make sure that if you are not in charge of your office space custodial services that recycling is an available service. If it is, there is likely a protocol to follow, and if there is not, you can create your own, which may require you to make arrangements for what to do with your recyclable materials.

Go paperless

With all of the tools for communication and organization, it’s easy to cut paper use down to a fraction of where your usage is, if not completely. College paper limits are an example of paper rationing that has seen some success in the last few years, allotting students a certain amount of pages per semester. Cut down your spending, and cut down fewer trees.

Turn off the lights

If your building has good natural light and you can work without overhead lights, consider leaving them off. If more light is necessary, try using smaller lamps for more targeted lighting that cuts back your usage.

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Marketing Trend: Omni-Channel Marketing

Marketing is ever evolving, and consumers’ paths to purchasing are no longer as linear as they once were. Because marketers need to adapt to a changing climate, new techniques are constantly developed. Omni-Channel marketing is one such strategy that businesses are using to keep up with the trend of keeping things as simple as possible.

What is Omni-Channel Marketing?

“Omni-Channel”  is no doubt a marketing buzzword, but the concept adheres to a shift in the needs of both consumer and marketer. Omni-channel marketing is the answer to marketers needing to provide a consistent experience and path to purchase.

Because consumers now can engage with a brand and products on multiple platforms (physical store, app, website, catalog, social media), it is important that each experience with the product and brand complement the others.

Hubspot defines omni-channel marketing as “… a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.” Read about some of their top examples of an Omni-Channel experience here.

How to implement Omni-Channel Marketing into your strategy

• Create a customer profile

Consolidating a customer profile can be a challenge, as customers are constantly interacting with a slew of different channels. By creating a broad and complete picture of your consumers, you can create a better overall customer experience. This can be done using collected data and applying it to your strategy. This article discusses how you can come up ahead of the competition by succeeding at cross-channel marketing.

• Interact on preferred channels

Consumers are moving back and forth on devices and platforms just for a single transaction. Be sure to keep all lines of communication open for a seamless experience. This includes, but is not limited to social media, email support, video chat, web chatbots, texting, and calling.

• Use aggregated data

Compiling data is already important, but in order to use omni-channel marketing, data is everything. From creating your customer profile to understanding how to adapt to market changes and adding platforms, data will help you gain insight into how to make your marketing strategy work for you.

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The Fall of Facebook?: the Aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Facebook has been heavily profiled in the news lately, due to a massive questioning of how users’ data is handled, after political data firm Cambridge Analytica had access to over 50 million Facebook users’ private data, which was, in turn, able to use the data in their work for the Trump campaign in 2016. The backlash against Facebook has been substantial, with companies, celebrities, and everyday users leaving the site and speaking out against misinformation of privacy policies and misuse and mishandling of personal data. But how did we get here? This scandal is years in the making.

Background:

In 2010, Facebook launched the original version of their Open Graph API, allowing third-party app developers access to user data, following this, Facebook signed a decree with the US Federal Trade Commission, consenting that user data will not be shared without the user’s permission. In 2013, Cambridge Analytica is founded by UK strategy company Strategic Communication Laboratories Group as a US branch. The founding was orchestrated by Steve Bannon, and funded in part by the Mercer family, a Republican donor and Breitbart News backer.

How did Cambridge Analytica get the data?

Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created a personality test (for Cambridge Analytica) similar to one created by the University’s Psychometric Quiz that had been gathering Facebook data since 2007, which the University refused to share with Cambridge Analytica. Through the new test created by Kogan, the data firm collected 270,000 people’s data with their knowledge, but against Facebook’s terms, the app also collects the information of those original 270,000 users’ friends without their consent or knowledge.  Cambridge Analytica now has over 50 million profiles in its database.

What is happening now?

Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist for Cambridge Analytica becomes a whistleblower on the company’s activity and triggered the investigations into Cambridge Analytica and Facebook from governments around the world.

There is a movement to delete Facebook, which has been joined by Cher, Will Ferrell, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and Tesla founder/CEO Elon Musk, as well as Musk having the SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages deleted. There are multiple businesses canceling their ads, and removing themselves from the platform, and investors are nervous as stocks fall.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since responded to public outcry, first saying that the main issues have already been resolved, and then in a second statement saying that he takes minimal issue with regulating Facebook more heavily. Zuckerberg has refused to testify about the privacy violation and misuse of content in front of UK MPs but will testify before Congress in the coming months.

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Jaw-dropping Company Headquarters

Company benefits are reaching beyond insurance and vacation time and are moving into a revolution of the actual workspace. Everyone has the image of Google and Amazon’s headquarters in their mind; with dog parks, rainforests and nap pods galore, but that isn’t the only innovative space in the business world. From themed rooms to sustainability, these companies have some of the most exciting office spaces around.

Warby Parker

Glasses brand Warby Parker not only has a love for fashionable glasses but for books as well. Their Manhattan headquarters offers employees access to a library, a reading room, and of course, reading glasses. Read about the space and how employees like it here.

Dropbox

Cloud storage solution company Dropbox has worldwide offices, but their San Francisco headquarters, designed by Rapt Studio is an innovative space that allows for collaboration, quiet individual work, and a “neighborhood” set up to cater to the needs of each team. See a photo compilation of the office here.

Casper

New York City-based mattress company Casper was recently renovated and redesigned by FLOAT Studio, to create a workplace that fit in with the brand identity. The office includes sustainable construction, flexible meeting spaces and even nap pods. See the space here.

Sonos

Sonos’ Seattle headquarters bills itself as the “greenest commercial building in the world”, and based off of this GeekWire feature, it may be the most musical as well.  This modern and sleek office space make using the word headquarters the wrong descriptor though, as the company has a slew of conference rooms to meet with other Sonos “headquarters” around the world.

Squarespace

If you’ve built a website using Squarespace you know that the platform is simple but modern, and the company’s New York City offices follow the same formula. Built to be the most functional space for both collaborative and individual work, all without sacrificing design and comfort. See the office here and here.

Epic Systems Corporation

Medical software company Epic is aptly named, and the word epic can be used to describe almost everything about the company, especially when it comes to their headquarters. The Verona, Wisconsin campus is a grand adventure, with themed rooms, individual offices for every employee, a gorgeous view of the surrounding farmland, and an Indiana Jones styled hallway. See the campus here, and check out this video tour for a more in-depth look.

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Apps to Improve Your Instagram Experience

Instagram has over 500 million daily users, and you can make your profile stand out among the rest with the help of a few apps that can do everything from growing your audience to editing your photos with more than just the 24 standard filters. See how you can change up your Instagram game with a few add-on apps.

Snapseed

This app takes some of the key enhancement tools from Photoshop and allows you to selectively edit the parts of your photos that may need adjustments for color temperature, saturation, and exposure as well as the ability to edit out smaller flaws and unwanted features.

Free for iOS and Android

Followers for Instagram

Understand your Instagram audience with this app designed to show you accounts that have unfollowed you, those that don’t follow you back, and accounts that are recommended based on your following behaviors.

Free for iOS and Android

Crowdfire

Find inactive followers and boost your analytics by only having followers that interact with your page. With account automation tools like finding followers and direct messaging, you can start generating better metrics.

Free for iOS

Priime

Professional photographers have collaborated with Priime to offer more than 100 photo filters, making the editing process even more fine-tuned.  Priime even has a Smart Suggestions feature that can offer recommendations of which filters will look best for your image.

Available on iOS for $2.99

VSCO

VSCO has been around for a while, so many people are already familiar with its capabilities. Apart from offering more filters, VSCO boasts its own editing tools for color correction, cropping and more. Finished images can be shared to Instagram, or even shared in-app on VSCO’s own internal social network.

Free for iOS and Android

Social Rocket

Earn points in a “likes/followers” marketplace on Social Rocket. Though not a sufficient long-term way to keep post engagement up, the points you garner to exchange for likes and followers can help to build an initial following.

Free for iOS

Pixlr

Create your own filters with overlays and effects from Pixlr. Like other editing apps, Pixlr also contains photo-editing tools that can adjust brightness, red-eye, sharpness and an array of other options.

Free for iOS and Android

InstaTag

InstaTag gathers lists of the top trending hashtags, sorted categorically so you can use the most relevant and popular tags for your posts. You can even search across categories for a personalized list of trending tags.

Free for Android

Squarelovin

For gathering analytics including engagement, follower count, popular hashtags, post time efficiency tracking and growth, Squarelovin is a great free app for those looking to test strategies, with reports delivered in various periods; daily, weekly and monthly.

Free for iOS and Android

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