Growing Your Business
The Digital Marketing industry is filled with fly by night designers and SEO’ers that promise the world and take a lot of money upfront. We hate to see this happen and we know it takes a lot of trust and respect to earn someones business.
When you’re in business, it is vital to gain the respect of the public, your team, and your potential customers. We at Spade have a few tips to help you earn some well-deserved respect for your business and more importantly, yourself.
When you can earn respect on a personal level, you’ve won.
Be Nice
When you make contact with anyone, be kind to them. It’s so easy to remember the rules we all learned as a child, say please and thank you, smile. When you do those things, be sincere. Sincerely nice people are, as a rule, well-liked, and remembered by the people they come into contact with.It’s easy to be nice when you’re having a great day, but when you’re having the worst day, remember not to take out your frustrations on the people you come into contact with. If you are kind to them, they will most likely be kind in return, which will help your mood.
Respect Others: Listen!
This should probably be the first item on the list. As a rule, business people are always looking for “the in.” The way to make a pitch. Don’t. Truly listen to the person you are speaking to, when you give another the chance to bare their soul, make their needs known, you’ll earn their respect. Rather than listening to respond to how you have experienced something similar, ask questions about their experience to allow them to talk more.
No Excuses.
Being able to admit your shortcomings shows humility, and is a fast way to earn the respect of your contacts. Own your actions and behaviors. If you didn’t complete a task, it’s most likely because you were focused on something else. Admit the fault, learn from it, and look for opportunities to improve in the future. Defensiveness is the fastest way to make a client lose respect for you. We all screw up, what you do when you are at fault is what counts.
Allow Change.
Re-examine how you live from day-to-day. Growth happens when we evaluate our actions, discover things about ourselves, and allow ourselves to evolve to a better place based on the things we’ve learned. An important part of the change is to recognize the progress you’ve made so far and congratulate yourself! If you’re constantly aspiring to the next best thing without remembering where you’ve been come from, you may run the risk for loss of progress, or even the feeling of inadequacy.
Be Useful.
Give your contacts something of value for free, you’ll be glad you did. Numbers don’t lie. 90% of organizations market with content. 86% of B2C marketers and 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing (NewsCred). There’s a reason this is a trend: people respect companies (and people) more when they are willing to share their expertise with no expectation of something in return. Furthermore: there are 27 million pieces of content shared each day (NewsCred). If you think it’s a waste of time to create shareable content that adds value to your customer’s experience, statistics show companies that publish new blog posts 15+ times per month (3-4 posts per week) generate five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all (NewsCred).
Finally, if you feel like you don’t have time to effectively use content marketing, you’re not alone, 62% of all companies with a content marketing strategy outsource their content marketing (Iconsive). Spade Design can help your company do just that.
