So we need to not only recognise the fact but also work out how to deal with the consequences – especially when we worry about things going against us.

The stress created by the multiple challenges of running a business are bound to have an impact on our emotions – which are pretty much an instantaneous response by our bodies to whatever is happening to us.

So they’re going to affect your quality of life – and your decision making. So perhaps we should be making an effort to understand them better.

Business Reality

Business is a pretty regulated place. We work to make it that way by planning for every conceivable outcome – and we usually find ourselves in a business environment as a result of some sort of premeditated thought process:

• A planned purchase or maybe an inherited family business or;
• As the results of a well thought out business plan and start-up launch or;
• But there’s always the spur of the moment decision that seemed like a bright idea at the time!

But planning only goes so far. The military know from long experience that a plan never survives first contact with the enemy.

Because once someone else is involved – together with their ideas of what the world should look like – then there are simply more variables involved to help make things go wrong.

Running a small business is no easy matter

Add multiple business competitors into the mix together with your customers, the government both local and central and you begin to get some idea of the problem.​

​Your spreadsheet doesn’t fight back; your laptop might not argue about quality control. But every item line on your business plan spreadsheet has the potential to cause problems for you.

The minute you launch your grand vision is the moment when things start to go wrong, or as Barry Gibbons puts it in his book with the title: “If You Want To Make God Really Laugh Show Him Your Business Plan”.

The Impact of Emotions

And before we know where we are we are at risk of being overwhelmed by a tide of changes that have to be managed, decisions that have to be made and the famous Donald Rumsfeld conundrum about the things you know you don’t know (which are manageable) and those that you don’t know you don’t know (they’re the hardest ones to deal with).

And you’re going to react to it all. Not just you in your intellectual brain that you have some hope of controlling but also your body – in ways you cannot control. Adrenaline, fear, stress.

No, it won’t just go away!

They will range from good feelings of satisfaction for the problems you have cracked to the fear and stress caused by those that you don’t yet have a solution for.​

Back to Basics

​Suddenly you’re dealing with multiple problems and possibly with a mounting tide of difficulties that threaten to overwhelm you. Your stress levels are rising.

When confronted with a difficult situation it is always a good idea to go back to basics to find a way of dealing with it.  In this case, all the medical specialists tell us that at the most basic, human level we are always driven by the ‘Fight or Flight’ decision.

Choose Your Battles: Fight or Flight?

Is choosing whether we stand our ground and fight when we believe we have a good chance to win and we flee when we decide there is a high probability of failure.

Even lions are known to back away from contact and possible conflict with a bigger pride. Studies show that the dramatic roaring in the night is actually lions counting the size of an opposing pride – not so stupid, huh?

The fight or flight response in humans is now recognised as the first stage of a longer stress response process in our bodies that occurs when we perceive a threat. And the problems that occur in our businesses are threats to the continued survival of our business – which by association are threats to us personally.

Indeed, whether you’re a start-up entrepreneur or a long established family business owner a threat to the business can be a very real threat to your personal life. To your health, your income, your assets, your reputation and even to the security of your partner and family.​

Managing Your Emotions​

So now you’re under pressure – is it to be fight or flight?

You don’t really have a choice in this because to flee, to avoid addressing the problem whatever it might be, is to abandon any hope of running your business successfully.

It was Sir Francis Bacon who was first attributed with saying: “Knowledge is power” – and it is the knowledge that the emotions that emerge from the stress of your business are not some ephemeral thing that cannot be pinned down but actually have a physical origin that gives you the power to manage your response to this situation.

Watch Joshua Freedman of 6Seconds.org explain that your emotions arise physically within the body – and they affect every cell in your body.

Automatically, instantaneously and constantly.

​They affect the way that we think and the way that we act. They also communicate with other people around us – as the emotions of other people do with us. Again; automatically, instantaneously and constantly.

So that flush of embarrassment when we discover we’ve put our foot where it does not belong or that painful rush of pins and needles of adrenaline that floods through us when we have some near brush with danger – they all originate physically within us.

​Yes, it’s these guys:

Long chain amino acids carry emotional messages throughout our bodies

And knowledge is the first step towards understanding that this is something we can manage and understand and by understanding it can even channel – even though we may not be able to control it.

Emotional Intelligence​

​Emotional Intelligence, a term coined by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer in 1990 and popularised by Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book also enables us to understand better what is happening both to ourselves and to our interactions with others.

a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actionEmotional Intelligence

The image below probably explains it better than the description.  

And are you aware of how other people are responding to you?​

Some of us in business get a ‘buzz’ out of the battle, the wins and even the losses. Some manage to tolerate the stress and hold it at bay while others sadly go under.

It’s long been recognised that the ability to influence the actions of others is what marks out the most successful business people. Read Dale Carnegie’s: “How To Make Friends and Influence People” if you doubt this.

But before we can influence others we must be aware of ourselves, the influences acting upon us and how we are reacting to them.

​The social awareness, how we can influence others, is informed by our self awareness, how we are conscious of our own behaviour, which is informed by our own emotions.

Grit​

​And finally, there’s grit, a less well understood personality trait also often described as resilience which appears to be a defining characteristic of successful people.  The most interesting aspect of it as explained by Angela Duckworth in her Ted Talk on Grit is that the definition of grit as being ‘passion and perseverance in pursuit of a long term goal’ appears to be far more important in success than ‘being smart’.

The brain constantly learns – even from failure.​ So failing, with a task, a project, or even a complete business failure is not, in itself, a bad thing.

More importantly, it is knowing this fact, just the same as knowing about the physical origin of your emotions and about the interaction of people depending on your emotional intelligence​ that encourages your brain to learn at every step.

Whether it is success or failure your brain is learning all the time​.  Know this and persevere.  It is the knowing that is the most powerful ingredient.

Taking Control​

Being aware that we are going to react physically, whether we like it or not, to the emotional strains put upon us​ in our business and that our behaviour then follows some well mapped out paths either good, bad or indifferent is the knowledge that we need to be able to cope with the situation.

Knowing that even when we fail we are learning encourages us to continue – even when we think we are struggling.​

Being able to identify the biggest, most dangerous problems.  Working out how to deal with them and both understanding and believing that it is possible is the necessary first step in keeping your business on track when being buffeted by everything the world can throw at you.​

The post Emotions, Are They Running Your Business?: Local Business Owners Can Struggle To Understand How Their Emotions Affect Their Decisions appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

 A short conversation will quickly produce the answer:

"How can I be sure it will work?"

Followed, equally quickly, by:

"But I haven't got time to find out how to do all that stuff!"​

When your day is packed with all the things you wished you'd had time to do yesterday then worrying about whether some new scheme is actually going to work and deliver a result - is high on the agenda.

Especially as everything involves either our time or your money!​

So my first priority is to show business owners the impact that a local marketing strategy can have.  

Helping them to understand that even though they have a bricks and mortar, local business the online world can still be their friend and deliver more prospects and leads to their door to increase the profitability of their business.

To make this as easy as possible I've produced this short video ​about the impact this can have on your local business marketing - as well as a simple Local Marketing Checklist

​

​The Local Marketing Checklist will tell you more about how each aspect of a local marketing strategy is important and how they work with each other to develop a cumulative effect.

Click on: Local Marketing Checklist to collect your copy and discover if you are still missing the foundation stone of local marketing for bricks and mortar businesses - and what you can do about it.

The post Local Business Owners Biggest Fear appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

The reality is that video is the nearest you will come to face to face interaction - and is by far the best way to help your prospects get to know, like and trust you.

The face carries the majority of communication between people, your voice and your appearance can all influence prospects even more than the words that come out of your mouth.

The old, text based internet was a sterile environment and used to be the worst possible way of trying to sell anything. These days things have turned on their head and the ability to use images, audio and videos has turned it into the best method other than having your prospects walk through your door.

Here's a few pointers for making videos that connect with prospects:

• Look appropriate to what you are selling. If you're a professional — wear a suit. If you're a plumber then wear your overalls.
• Pay attention to the background. Does it look professional? Workshops are good for tradesmen - just make sure they look organised.
• Branding, branding, branding! Make sure your brand image, logo and contact details are prominent somewhere!
• Prepare what you are going to say but don’t read from a script.
• Slice and dice. You don't have to pack everything into one video. In fact, short videos of no more than 2 minutes are best. So you want one on your home page with your essential selling offer of who you are and the benefit your provide. Then make lots more on small niche subjects to put wherever appropriate on your website.
• Post your videos on your website and create your own YouTube channel. Make sure you put a link back to your site into the description field on Youtube.

Not convinced? Check out this infographic from HighQ.

The post Video Marketing In 2017 appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

Offline Businesses

That applies to every business. Yet as online marketers we often don’t appreciate the myriad additional time-gobbling tasks that the owner of an offline business is confronted with.

Everything physical, from buildings to furniture and fittings, inventory stock to staff all produce regular, routine problems to be dealt with as well as unexpected crises cropping up every day.

The marketing effort on which the success of the business depends lies somewhere in this maelstrom of daily activity and if the business is still operating when we get to talk to them about their marketing then they usually have to be doing something right to survive from day to day.

However, while they might be doing something right to keep their heads above water offline, yet very often it is precisely because of this lack of time that the business owner ends up neglecting the whole online market sector that could multiply their revenues many times over, be easier to manage and operate 24 hours per day.

Business owners usually understand that marketing is the lifeblood of their business. As Alex Mandossian once remarked; “If you are not spending 95% of your time marketing your business then you are doomed to failure.”

Yet their circumstances don’t allow business owners enough time even to learn what’s involved online – never mind to actually implement the strategies which could release the additional online potential of their business and ultimately make their lives so much easier.

So why do we think that online has so much potential for bricks and mortar businesses?

Online Marketing Potential

Think about it. The average bricks and mortar offline shop has physical premises and, by definition, sells goods and services to customers who visit their shop ~ or they deliver those goods and services to the customer’s home or premises. That means that they have a catchment area of maybe 20-30 miles radius. About as far as you or I (‘cos we are their prospects don’t forget) are prepared to drive to do some shopping.

Their prospects living within that catchment area are aware of their business offer only if they have been exposed to it through conventional, old school methods. The ones that are keeping their business ticking over from day to day.

But the world is moving online.

So if your business does not appear on their mobile screen at that critical moment when they are looking for it – then your business is invisible and somebody else gets the order.

Even for prospects searching from their PC or laptop from home, if you are not top of the pile of their local search results then you don’t exist. And the search engines are increasingly delivering search results that are local to the searcher because these are the results that are most relevant i.e. within that comfortable shopping trip distance.

This is why Google, in particular, is paying so much attention to local businesses. If your business is within the local area of the prospect then you are more relevant to that prospect than another business offering the same products but located several hundred miles away.

So let’s come back to why are offline business owners losing out? Usually, it’s a matter of time. Although the whole process of selling remain the same whether offline or online if they do not have the time to translate their offline method to an online process and then understand how to use the intrinsic advantages of the internet then they are going to lose out.

This leads to a sense of exasperation and frustration and the common plea that ‘I’ve tried online marketing but it doesn't work for my business’.

How wrong can they be? The fact is that:

Just like those sad looking shops that you drive past from time to time that you just know are:

..and eventually the ‘Closing Down, Everything Must Go!’ signs go up as another local shopkeeper bites the dust.

Unfortunately, us ‘marketers’ are too often to blame for this state of affairs. Constantly banging on about the newest, latest fad that we immediately label as a ‘strategy’ it might well achieve a few percentage points improvement in results – but only if the business is doing the basics right in the first place.

We, and our offline business customers, have to achieve the basic 80% fundamentals of the 80/20 rule before we start going for the extra 20%.

The trick for every business owner is to work methodically through the steps necessary to build a solid business. The great thing about the web is that everything is incremental.

Build a good system once and it is there forever. Publish good content once and it will continue to build your reputation forever. Plant your stake in the ground and claim your online space and it can be yours forever.

I’ve put together this graphic to help off-line business owners understand this process better. If you own a bricks and mortar business then just click on the image to take a closer look.  Start with green, move on to the blue and finish with the red where you probably have to start paying people because it starts getting complicated.  But before then it is all manageable in-house with a little common sense.

And give me a call if you would like to discuss this further.  

The post Online Optimisation Of An Offline Business appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

Click on the location below to go to the relevant Eventbrite booking page.

To register for Wakefield on 14th January

To register for Huddersfield on 23rd January (waiting for link)

If you are visiting this page then I’m guessing you’re a business owner or manager here to find out what you might learn at my presentations to the Federation of Small Business meetings in:

• Wakefield on 14 Jan
• Huddersfield on 23rd Jan

So just spare me 2 minutes and I will tell you why you should be one of these FSB events.

Your primary interest is in making profits. And to do that you need sales and to make sales you need leads.

Now, I specialise in online marketing – incidentally, your market is steadily migrating online. Whatever line of business you are in – the world is moving online. So at some stage you need to grasp this particular nettle. And the only way you get leads online is by appearing on Page 1 of Google when your prospect is searching for what they want to buy. And I’m going to tell you exactly that.

How to appear on Page 1 of Google at the very moment when your prospects are searching for what they want to buy – and you want to sell to them.

Not only that, I will show you how you can get multiple entries on Page 1 – which not only promotes your identity – but also pushes your competition down onto Page 2 – where they are virtually invisible..

Now this works for all businesses but is particularly applicable to local businesses. And by local I mean if your customers come to your premises to buy or if you deliver your goods or services to the customers location.

Even if that’s not you – it’s still a great way to ensure that you are building your online presence on solid foundations.

Naturally, if we’re going to be talking about search results then we will be talking about Google. Usually, this is seen as a battle with this online monster in which YOU, as a small business, stand no chance. But give Google what it wants and it will turn into your business partner. As always, win – win is always the best result.

So if making more profits from more leads by turning Google into your online partner is of interest to you then click one of the links below to register for:

• Wakefield on 14th January (lunchtime) or
• Huddersfield on 23rd January in the evening.

​

The post FSB – Local Search Marketing Presentations appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.