This is part five of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three: How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: Utilising Social Media In Marketing

Part Five: Utilising Social Media In Marketing

Social Media enables you to draw out and express the personality and colour of your business. It allows you to show that your brand has a personality of its own and is run by regular humans (just like your target market). This, in turn, allows your customers to perceive your business as one with integrity and trustworthiness.

Here are 3 key approaches to Social Media for marketing and why it can benefit your business in completing your image

Speak! And be heard!

Social Media extends your business’ visible presence. So be visible! Speak!

The most immediate benefit of using Social Media is that it extends the reach of your business. A Social Media profile is like an always-open shop-front, or an automated telephone, or a ubiquitous brochure.

Previously, we have stressed the necessity of listening to your customers and competitors and taking onboard their feedback. Every conversation, however involves both listening and speaking. So make sure you use your Social Media channels to speak.

Speaking is important because it opens the door to a conversation with your customers and potential customers and stimulates them to respond.

There are various ways one can go about using their Social Media platforms to speak. Here are four:

• Write a blog post about a past project, or previous event
• Write a status about a future project, or a new deal or featured product
• Post a picture of a current project
• Share a topical or off-beat news story related to your industry

Respond quickly

How ’bout now? How ’bout now? How ’bout now?

Your customers are a lot like that when they have a problem. The speed with which you respond is a major factor in the perception of your brand (customers and non-customers alike).

Answer quickly and you achieve two things:

• You can publicly fix someone’s problem (or at least let the know you are on the case), which more often than not turns a negative comment into a positive live discussion thread.
• Show people that you are real and attentive to their needs

Here are the highlights of the average time taken to respond on Twitter for your favorite brand names.

Give your brand a personality!

Creating a memorable brand experience through your Social Media platforms helps build a strong relationship between your business and customers.

The tone with which you communicate to your customers is in itself a branding element. It is a point of distinction between you and your competitors and gives customers and potential customers an insight into your business. Exposing your brand personality will predispose your potential customers to your business

Perhaps your business is a young, creative agency and has a hip, fun and not-so-serious vibe. Your social media presence should reflect this. Share a story or upload an image or video of shenanigans that happen in your office.

A good example of this is Connected Ventures, who produced a single-take lip-dub video to promote their young, fun and creative business (see below)

That is it for this month’s posts on Social Media! If you haven’t check out the other posts and have an interest in learning more, just hop onto the blog section of our site and browse through the tags.

Have a great week!

Spicy Team.

This is part four of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three: How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: How to Remain Current

Part Four: Social Media Essentials

With more than half of the Australian population using Social Media on a regular basis, a Social Media strategy is essential to remaining competitive.

Social Media has become a special tool to connect with customers and to network with others. It is important, therefore to strategise the way you undertake your Social Media activities, plan out the actions you intend to take and develop goals and objectives to work towards in order to effectively manage your time and resources to produce the best outcome.

Goals and Objectives

Have you developed a list of goals to accomplish or considered a strategy on how to approach this goal?

The terms of objectives will of course depend on your business, but you need to also make sure these approaches are right for you and your target audience.

There is no one-size-fits-all goal. Your goals should be tailored to your business. However they ought to integrate the following principles:

• Raise brand awareness
• Engage customers
• Build a community

Target Audience

Take some time to research into your target audience. Listen to your customers’ feedback. Take care to develop an understanding of your customers and let them know that your business is engaging with them. Disregarding customer feedback and satisfaction can have significant, often long-term consequences. Thankfully, tools such as social media make it easy to listen to the voice and pain points of your customer and their clients.

Here are some easy social listening tips that you can employ today:

• Twitter: Create a Twitter account. Start following people, organisations and competitors and monitor their interactions. This is a good way to observe your competitors are leveraging Twitter professionally.

• Facebook: Follow a company and listen to the tone of their voice. See how they deploy marketing activities, and what their followers have to say.

• Company Blogs: Search around for blogs published by industry-related businesses. Trends and developments are often mentioned, further strengthening the information you’ve been accumulating.

And never forget: we have two ears, two eyes and one mouth. Look and listen first and foremost, and you will always understand your customers better.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next week for tips on Keeping Current. Have a Spicy day!

This is part three of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three: How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: Developing your Business Personality

Part Three: What is Social Media

Most business owners understand the value of Facebook and its advertising benefits through both expenses and free of charge! Your business will reach a much higher number of prospective customers using this social media platform. The idea is to engage with as large of demographic as you can, Facebook can do just that. Here’s 3 tips on how you can achieve this.

Ads
If your business is considering investing in a Facebook ad, have a look at the data and feedback you get from it, don’t just post it and leave it. Facebook ads are a different form to the original TV or Print forms, with these, you are not able to take action on the feedback through achieving a directed customer list, this is why Facebook is so beneficial, when you know your customers, you can take action and direct your services and products towards them, you will also be able to get the benefits of “word of mouth” or should we say “word of type”! Through this, you will be able to build a community of interested customers through the trends in traffic, demographics, and content creation and consumption, this is where you can build on this and enlist it towards your company’s services.

Personality
Reveal a little personality, show your audience your consumer-friendly side, use it to engage your audience by posting special deals or exciting events that are upcoming or just happened, update them of events your attending too! This is a great key to let your consumers know a little but about you. When you do this, it build on your businesses reputation, the more the consumers know about you the more they’re willing to take chances on your services.

Customer Interaction
Facebook provides customer engagement, feedback and brand development for your products and services.  Yes, this is the best way to interact personally with your prospective customers and current ones, what feedback you get from them make sure you take it on board, if you get a lot of likes for a certain status, take into account, analyse it and see why it is they have done that, then ask yourself if can you possibly implement this incident into your marketing? Build relationships and brand awareness, highlight your business’s achievements too but letting them know through statuses, pictures are a great addition to because they are very engaging.

Work on these 3 points to provide your business with an opportunity to build a strategy and goal before you start using Facebook, this is also a long-term responsibility so take into account that it requires consistency and commitment, and of course a little of spicy fun!

That’s another wrap, tune in next week for more Spicy tips on Social Media.

Catchya’ next week,
Spicy Team.

This is part two of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three:  How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: Developing your Business Personality

Part Two: What is Social Media

Last week we defined Social Media as referring to a group of emerging online tools that enable individuals and businesses to interact, communicate and connect with other individuals and businesses.

Social Media embraces a participatory culture. This means that it is driven by the ongoing exchange of opinions and information between individuals, businesses and society; in the social media sphere everyone has a voice and actively contributes to the conversation.

Social Media enables many previously difficult relationships to be established with relative ease.

• Social Media enables global communities to be formed, spanning across many geographical, political and cultural divides.
• Social Media enables conversations to be established between businesses and individuals, hence the path to the customer more direct.
• Most importantly, Social Media enables businesses to showcase their personalities and be transparent about their practices.

How can your business use Social Media?
Social Media is not a one-way communication front. Social Media is about speaking but perhaps more importantly, listening. Using Social Media to listen to your customers and potential customers is an effective way to obtain knowledge useful for tailoring your business to your target market. It allows you to understand their needs. Showing that you are actively listening and acting upon the input of your customers and potential customers establishes a  trust bond which is essential in a successful business.

Is Social Media relevant to your business?
YES. Although still new, Social Media has cemented its position in Australian culture. According to the Yellow Pages Social Media Report 62% of Australian’s regularly use Social Media.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Introducing Social Media To Your Business, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us, we’ve got plenty of information to share with you. Tune in next week for more spicy knowledge on Social Media.

Catchya’ next week!

Spicy Team.

This is part one of a five part series on Social Media For Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: What is Social Media?
• Part Three: How to Sell Yourself through Facebook
• Part Four: Social Media Essentials
• Part Five: Developing your Business Personality

Part One: Introduction

What is Social Media? Is it over rated? And why should I use it?

Welcome to twenty-thirteen! The Spicy team is all rested and ready to whip some butt and work on some exciting, kickass projects!

The start of a year is a great time to take a fresh new look on your business and a perfect opportunity to invest time into developing your social media strategy.

Social Media refers to a group of emerging online tools that enable individuals to interact, communicate and connect with other individuals and businesses.

Social Media is good for your business because:

• it is driven by user-generated-content and therefore highly engaging for users
• it emphasizes community and connecting with people individually on a large scale
• it enables businesses to interact directly, personally and promptly with their customers and prospective customers.

The popularity of social media amongst Australian consumers is an undisputed fact with a sizable majority of us actively engaging with social media on a regular basis.

However, there still remains a sizeable gap between the social media strategies of Australian businesses and the corresponding behaviour of a large number of their customers with only 27% of small businesses and 34% of medium-sized businesses having a social media presence. (Source: Yellow Pages Social Media Report, June 2012 )

To find what the best path to take for your company is, stay tuned for this month’s blog posts. We will covering:

• A detailed description of what Social Media is

• The essentials of Social Media

• How to sell your business or yourself through Facebook

• Develop your businesses personality

Pop onto our blog for more great tips on Social Media, and remember if you have any questions contact us and we’d more than happy to provide you with information you like.

Catchya’ next week.

Spicy team.

This is part three of a three part series on Rebranding Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: The Process of Designing a Logo
• Part Three: Understanding your Customer Contact Points

Part Three: Understanding your Customer Contact Points

Your points of  contact should maintain a consistent brand across your website, business cards, phone conversations and any other point of customer contact.

First impressions count, so make the most of them. In any given day thousands of customers decide in a snapshot whether they like or dislike a product. This snapshot generally lasts between six and thirty seconds. This is the amount of time, with which, you have to capture the attention of potential consumers, and engage them with your products and services.

In these nano-moments your customers will decide:

• If they like you,
• If they trust you, and
• If they want to do business with you.

Let’s take a look at what elements of your business will encourage a positive response from consumers and the best ways to draw them in.

Brand Image
Let this be the way your consumers perceive your personality as a business. Your brand image consists not only of an inner mental image but an outer image as well.

Suppose you own a shoe brand: your shop should be decorated appropriately and your signage ought to be consistent. Your uniforms should be professional, clean and sharp. Above all, your staff should embody the image of your brand - your staff should act the way your business as a whole does. If your business is fun but classy, make sure that your staff are being respectful to the customers.

If your business deals mostly with referrals, then ideally your business card needs to be in tip-top shape! Since your business card is your number one business strategy in gaining customers, this will be the first piece of information given to them when they request you. If your card is high-quality, unique and attention-grabbing, consumers will be intrigued and motivated to take action in using your services.

Communication
Phone conversations are just as important and need to be given equal attention. They play a key in establishing your customer relationship.

Care should be taken to ensure that tone of conversation is in line with the brand image. From a customer’s perspective, your phone demeanour reveals to the them a part of your brand identity. So the way that you present yourself on the phone should be consistent with your brand image.

Customers value authenticity,  and an tone that is inconsistent with the brand image can send a mixed message. A consistent image breeds trust and helps build your customer relationship. This, in turn, leads to your brand being associated with reliability, trustworthiness and helpfulness. Good customer relationships lead to higher customer satisfaction.

In addition, make sure to always be helpful and polite. This means speaking on the same level as the caller and avoiding jargon.

Online
If recent trends are anything to go by, far more people consult Google than the Yellow pages. Your website and social media profiles will often be the first point of contact for many individuals. So having an online presence is a key step in ensuring your competitiveness.

Your website makes your information readily available on-demand and acts as a 24/7 sales pitch. Make sure the important information is readily available and easily found so as to make it easy for them to take the next step. The next step could be: emailing you, calling you, commenting on a post, liking your Facebook page, or any other social interaction or engagement.

Thanks for tuning in this week, we hope you enjoyed our tips. Keep in touch for lots more helpful tips for your business.

Spicy team.

This is part two of a three part series on Rebranding Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: The Process of Designing a Logo
• Part Three: Your Points of Contact

Part Two: The Process of Designing a Logo

Logos are like good slogans or jingles, they set you apart and create an identification tag or image for your company. These logos can be shapes or just words, let’s get more into this below. First, lets discuss why the process of designing a logo is crucially important, logos are an absolutely important aspect of your company, so don’t take logos lightly Spicy viewers. Now let’s have a look at a step-by-step process of logo design.

•  Step 1: Brief
  A client comes a long whether they already have an existing logo and they want to rebrand or they’re starting from sketch this process of logo design stands is followthe exact same way. The first thing to do is to prepare a brief for your designers,this means you will need to write up a detailed document, this includes things likethe company style, personality and available services and present this to your designer. The best results can be achieved with a well-communicated brief.
• Step 2: Sketching
  The next step is sketching, this is usually best done on paper and pen and best  shown during the brief meeting, this is then passed onto the designers taking onthe job and from there they can make their own observations and design aroundthe chosen sketch.
• Step 3: Type Studies
  Type studies. A logo can either take form as a shape or text, some text examples include Microsoft and IBM. Shape examples include McDonalds, Apple and Nike.Type studies can also conceptualise the final look, whether it is a thick strokedfont or a cursive style it will determine the look and feel of the overall logo.
• Step 4: Colour Studies
  Using colour effectively in logo design will determine the message communicated. It’s best to go for a colour (or multiple) to express the intended aspects of your company for example, blue, green would easily represent an environmental and calm image, but if your company is about racing cars, it would better toimplement striking colours like red. Learn more about colour choices on Spicy’s tips on great logo design
• Step 5: Applications
  What are you applying your logo to? Does it need to adapt with a variety of different things or is the purpose to contrast againsteverything else?
  If your logo is something that is going to be stamped on a variety of things from your company to others, then it’s going to be quite disastrous if your logo is very detailed and cannot be scaled down, why? Because chances are, your logo will be scaled down so it’s not over taking the attention of any other important elements.If your logo, at this stage, looks like a jumbled mess, then you’re going to get a lotof confused potential consumers.
• Step 6: 2 week turn around.
  What’s this you say?  Well, this is really simple, this is used for a chance to have a fresh new look and take on the imposed work and a chance for new inspiration to come along. This time period is used to think about the design work but not  actually develop it any further, once they come back they’ll be able to view the  task and see if any elements do any justice, this is the time to also make final workon the logo before it is sent back to the client for Round 1 revisions.
• Step 7: Feedback
  The client will provide feedback and any changes they want made.
• Step 8: Repeat
  The designs will then be altered to the feedback given by the client, this process will also be repeated until a final logo is chosen.

Brief
The image displayed below is an example of what a brief form should look like, although this is a brief for the website design, the form to be filled for a logo design is exactly the same. The questions asked in this form include things like ” what is the nature of the businesses main goal”, “what are your goals?” and “what image do you want to present? ( conservative, trendy, intellectual, relaxed)” these questions should be thought out carefully to ensure a successful design execution.

Sketching
These examples show the task was thought out carefully, by introducing notes into your sketch it helps keep a reminder of a the elements to implement in the development process and keeps a nice clean look for any new oncoming designers that may unexpectedly take over the job.

This image displays the smallest of design specifics, this border specifies a nice clean white space around the logo.

Applications
When applying your logo to all forms of substrates it’s important and handy to show a variety of scales of the logo.

Below, is the 3rd round of logo design work after implementations from the clientele feedback.

Great logos provide great business success. Put a lot of effort into studying your brief, and work and help the designers understand your goal for your business. Team work will get you far, don’t dump a whole bunch of different things on them, narrow things down and attempt to go down a single path, too many might confuse not only your designs but your consumers too.

That’s a wrap for this week, drop by weekly for more tips on <link>Rebranding Your Business <link>, you can like Spicy Broccoli Media on Facebook to keep yourself updated.

Catchya’ next week,
Spicy team.

This is part one of a three part series on Rebranding Your Business

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: The Process of Designing a Logo
• Part Three: Your Points of Contact

Part One: Introduction

A successful franchise network requires a disciplined innovative business strategy. These aspects may seem like total opposites, when in fact when you work them well together and produce a well thought out strategy that invites a variety of aged consumers, it’ll behold a successful line of trust to both your marketing strategies and consumers.

Here are some handy points to think about for your business.

• Problem Analysis
  Ask yourself, why you are rebranding. Is it because of a downfall in your business income? Or is it just time for a new fun change? Analyse the reason behind your choice to rebrand your business, once you have, construct a question list as to what you think may have happened to cause this. For example, Baker’s Delight found that their TV ads were not as effective because, yes their ads were invigorating and fun but consumers couldn’t what the actual product being marketed or what the key messages were.

• Research
  The first step in undertaking a brand reinvigoration is research. The importance of finding what appeals to your consumers, and what, about your business, they value. This information will be the key to pushing your business to the top; this will inevitably fix your business in the long run as well.

•  Deliver on the brand promise
  Once you’ve found your solutions and are ready to take on the next step of rebranding, make sure what you’re going to promise them you can keep. Some businesses fail to keep up with their promises and thus their customers are not happy with the company. You can create the best brand in the world but if you can’t deliver what you promise then your brand becomes undermined in your consumers’ minds. This all means that you need to only provide what you can, not only that but keep in mind your consumers need re invigoration which can be energy or creativity to keep them appealed.

Always keep questioning: is our brand communication resonating with consumers? Is our marketing strategy translating into positive, and growing sales? Will the strategy produce long-term solutions?  Keep on your toes and try to maintain constant research for what your consumers want will help motivate your consumers to purchase from you because it will portray a sense of loyalty and understanding of your customers.

If you’re interest, tune in next week for our first post on Rebranding Your Business.

See you next week!
Spicy Team.

This is part four in our four part series on Women in Business.

• Part One: How to set yourself apart in a male dominated industry
• Part Two: Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a boss
• Part Three: Supporting Other Women
• Part Four: Use it to your advantage: List of successful women in history

Part Four: Use it to your advantage: List of successful women in history

These women can help you gain the confidence you need to run your business. You are not alone, there are so many other women running or working in businesses. So, how do they do it? Well let’s take a look a look at 3 of the most successful businesswomen, and the attributes they had to deal with it. Compare and contrast with your business and focus on how you can improve things through their processes.

1. Oprah Winfrey. A billionaire, publisher and talk show host extraordinaire. Oprah is a very respected businesswoman; her ability to turn everything she touch her hearts all around the globe created a legendary image for her.How she does it:
   • Passion: Oprah had to go through personal experiences to achieve the path that she wanted. In her case, it was a downfall that brought her back up to the top, she became determined to help others, this passion for determination drove her to become successful in her business.
   • Sense of purpose: It can appear as though there is no point in starting a business if you do not have a strong sense of will. Believe in yourself like Oprah did-she believed she had a purpose in life-, if you believe in yourself that strong sense of purpose will reflect on your business.
2. Estee Lauder. This woman is a Cosmetic creator, whose products are known world wide and supplied in a significant amount of stores to this very day.How she does it:
   • Do it yourself: It seems easier to just hire a team of advertisers, or other’s to take care of production, but Estee took action, and controlled everything including sales and marketing. Now you don’t precisely have to do these things but Estee showed so much love for her company that she volunteered to take on these aspects of her business, you too have to do the same, become involved and hands on towards your business, have a true love for it and it will show through your business.
   • Don’t take ‘No’ for an answer: The best way to work through your business, is to work hard and really stick to it, strive for even more every time you achieve another goal; reward yourself every now and then but still keep working for a better and better image. Self believe is the best sort of support you can get.
3. Anne Sweeney. Anne is Co-Chair of Disney Media Networks and President of Disney-ABC Television Group, she put herself out there and helped not just her company but other media networks hot over $18.7 billion in profits. How she does it:
   • Leadership style: Use careful tactics to work with your team and to also help your teamwork together. It may seem unimportant how your employees should act to one another in a business, but in fact it’s really important. Most businesses require teamwork, where a task cannot be 100% successful without relying on another task being 100% successful. Anne talks about how she tells her employees they need to “wake up in the morning thinking they are stapled to one another, and that neither can be successful without the other”; this is an important factor take onboard when running a successful business, especially if it means a well progressing working environment.  
     
   • Source of Inspiration: Work with your source of inspiration to keep well motivated through the progress of your business. This will help with your business reputation as well because you will often find yourself in a happy place and this will reflect on how you interact with your team and impact it will have on your product and services.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Successful Women In History and our month’s Women In Business as well. However, never fear we have plenty more posts coming for you, next month we’re focusing on Your Customer Database, same place, same time next week. We hope you’ve had a spicy weekend!

This is part three in our four part series on Women in Business.

• Part One: How to set yourself apart in a male dominated industry
• Part Two: Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a boss
• Part Three: Supporting Other Women
• Part Four: Use it to your advantage: List of successful women in history

Part Three: Supporting Other Women

It is important for women to support each other and get the very best for themselves and their clients. Woman running their own businesses often need support around them and will find a great deal out of learning from other women who take the same interests.

There are many women out there running their own businesses, you are not alone! There are also plenty of websites to for you to access for the greater knowledge of other women whether experienced or not. Here’s a list of just a couple of the many governmentally supported networks for you to have a look at -connect with- and gain help from.

• Women’s network Australia
• She Business
• Mumpreneurs
• Inspiring Women

These organisations provide seminars you can attend and online help; the idea is to empower women to reach their full business potential by guiding and educating them on to the right path for success; helping them to evolve their businesses into profitable enterprises.

Women are often open and will happily express and share their knowledge on how they’ve approached the progression of their business; so don’t be afraid, do seek them out, they can also share their problems and solutions with you; it’s always a good idea to look for these women and have a chat to them, even over coffee, about how you can go about starting your business and or developing it for the better.

Socialising with other business women will also help you get the word out about your business, after all, the best sort of marketing for a business is indeed word of mouth.

Get racing girls, attend those seminars and socialise with women online; learn all you can and get those expertise about understanding all there is to running a business. Remember, you’re not alone.

That’s a Spicy wrap up for this week, and thank you for tuning in on our advice for Supporting Other Women, there’s more coming next week so be sure to tune in to our blog for more on Women In Business.