Monthly Archives: June 2020

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Jump Start Revenue Right Now

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State governments are slowly allowing more businesses to open after what has been about a four month shutdown for something like half of U.S. businesses. It’s been rough slogging for many citizens, but for a chosen few, the shutdown has been a money-making bonanza.

A handful of Freelancers were gifted with a new way to rake in billable hours like my friend Matt, a techie who is now earning a small fortune running virtual meetings and webinars on platforms like Go-to-Meeting and Zoom for colleges and big companies.

Most Freelancers have faced a business slowdown but have managed to crawl along, sometimes by shifting their focus to services that can be sold during the pandemic, such as teaching virtual classes or writing. Some of us will be able to recover relatively quickly from the shutdown but others, in particular those in the weddings and special events sector, unfortunately must grapple with a steep uphill climb this year.

One thing for certain is that nearly every Freelancer and business owner needs a jump start right now to first, entice current customers to return and second, to recruit new customers. Nothing that I recommend here is new or earth-shattering. The main thing to remember about business strategy—- and the Harvard Business School will back me up on this—-is that one must execute.

The most revolutionary strategy to rock the planet will be useless unless you get busy and put it in motion. Taking action on even one or two items can positively impact your business within six months.

Keep marketing

Especially when billable hours become sparse, it is so tempting to pull back and succumb to the fetal position. A short- lived pity party won’t hurt you and it may be just what you need in the moment. Sometimes one has to lick the wounds. Ice cream helps. But after 3 – 4 weeks, it will be time to regroup and snap out of it.

Shake up your marketing activities by trying something that’s low or no- cost, or double down on your usual tactics, as you first reality test by making sure that the target audience has found you and what you’re putting out there resonates.

Might you know a colleague who hosts a podcast? Have you ever done a 30 minute guest spot? Do you have 2 – 3 topics that seem like a good fit for the listening audience? Even if you have just one potentially interesting podcast topic, make contact and pitch it. If you host a podcast, raise the bar on who you invite as guests as a way to increase your reach and build your brand. Who do you know with big social media followings and/or extensive newsletter or blog lists? Reach out and touch. This strategy also is effective for webinars.

Are you a writer? Thank goodness I was invited to submit a few more articles to Lioness Magazine, the digital magazine targeted for female entrepreneurs that I’ve written for since 2014. There are many digital magazines in the business theme space and all are hungry for good content. The pay may be low to nonexistent, but being a published author has always been smart marketing. http://LionessMagazine.com

Assess social media

In last week’s post we examined the best days & times to publish on a few popular platforms. This week, you can think about how to implement what you learned.

My guess is that you’re already using the platforms you intend to use. Still, rethinking where you’ve chosen to have a presence and an assessment of the ROI derived—-credibility?brand awareness? lead gen?—-is an essential exercise as you look for ways to push your organization out of the doldrums. Have you chosen the right platform for what you’d like to achieve? For that matter, have you chosen the right goals?

Education

Whether you receive the education or deliver it, you and your business stand to benefit. Search for free classes on LinkedIn. Lots of them are worthwhile and all of them provide a certificate that can be uploaded to your profile to make you look smart and ambitious. In the Fall when schools reopen you can explore semester long (online) classes that will enhance your credibility to clients.

As well, take advantage of the COVID-19 attendance limits that are still widely enforced and compel networking organizations to go all-virtual and inquire as to who might invite you to present a short skills building workshop or give your expert opinion on some aspect of doing business.

These organizations are under significant pressure to remain relevant to their members and if you are a member, the organization managers will probably invite you in. It’s more than likely that you won’t get paid, but you’ll have an announcement that will be oh so perfect for your blog, newsletter and social media accounts and that is just the kind of business jump starting strategy that we’re talking about here!

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Kim Clark. The twice weekly farmer’s market at Copley Square reopened last Friday, with strict anti-coronavirus measures.

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Social Media —-Best Time to Post

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You already know that timing is everything in business and life and that calculation also applies to when one should ideally post content on the social media platforms of choice. According to social media content marketing experts, there are days and times when your audience will either be more likely to login and read posts on a particular platform or will be in a receptive frame of mind when they do check in.

Social media management sites, including Buffer, Hootsuite, Hubspot and SproutSocial, have studied the potential best timing for publishing and sharing posts and published those results, but the most exhaustive research seems to have been done by the Bismarck, ND digital marketing management company CoSchedule. Highlights of the company’s research are cited in this post and in its entirety at this link. https://coschedule.com/blog/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/

Still, I suggest that you experiment with your own study and look for indications that your posts perform better or worse on certain days and times. Because I had a long career in B2B face2face sales, I knew to avoid posting on Monday (too busy) or Friday (livin’ for the weekend). Tuesday seemed like a good day to publish, so I went with it. LinkedIn is my social media platform and I’ve shared my posts there each week for the 11 years that I’ve published.

Here’s a rundown of platforms that appeal most to B2B marketers and the suggested prime times to publish content, according to a review of 20 studies that was conducted by CoSchedule. To dig more deeply into this topic, click the link to the study. B2B, B2C and age will potentially impact your prime publishing times.

Facebook

The evaluation of 20 studies revealed that the overall best time frame to post on Facebook is Thursday to Sunday from 1:00 – 3:00 PM. However, users can quickly and accurately identify their individual prime posting times by opening the Insight tab at the top of the page and inspecting the tracking graph.

Google Plus

What users really want to do to find out what’s going on is to use the Steady Demand tool, that reports out not only what your business, but also competitive businesses, are doing. You’ll have to pay, though. Otherwise, Wednesday mornings at 9:00-ish reportedly yields the best results when publishing. https://www.steadydemand.com/services.php

Instagram

Users who have a business account with the platform should head straight to Instagram Analytics to receive customized performance results. Those who do not have a business account are recommended to investigate a free tool that is known to provide reliable data, such as Union Metrics. https://unionmetrics.com/free-tools/instagram-account-checkup/

LinkedIn

The platform is all business and users are in a business frame of mind when they check in, but according to statistics, Tuesday through Thursday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM wins by a nose (hey, that’s when I publish!). My LinkedIn connections will know that I’ve shared a blog post via a message that appears at their Notifications tab.

TikTok

These 500 million active monthly users, heavily represented by the highly coveted Generation Z demographic, continue to fascinate nearly every marketer, especially in the B2C space. Business owners and leaders want to recruit them as customers now and work on cultivating a longstanding relationship that will yield millions of dollars in sales.

Marketers dream of their company’s videos being seen by a large segment of a GenZ audience that will become loyal to their company and who will comment on and give likes and shares to company posts. Some clever and lucky posters, they imagine, will attract devoted followers who like their videos enough to click the icon that includes the video creator’s profile to find the heart ♥️ and ask to be a follower.

What may not have been considered is that this group is not known for long term loyalty. They are known for skepticism and changing their minds. The best posting times have been difficult to pin down, but morning and evening commute, plus lunchtime, seem the best for publishing new content.

Twitter

Wednesdays and Thursdays have emerged as the preferred days for tweeting, but users can verify their power hours by way of Twitter Analytics. Click “tweets” Overall, the best time frame for publishing is 7:00 AM – 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM- ish.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Kim Clark

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Trending: Remote Work

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A recent survey of 500 + venture capital backed tech company founders conducted by the Kung Group, a San Francisco Bay Area organizational development consulting firm, revealed that the most prominent response employers have had to the coronavirus pandemic has been the launch of the work from home culture.

70% of Kung Group survey responders said they planned to allow some or all of their employees to continue to work from home when their office reopens.

76% of responders reported that their employees had either maintained or increased business productivity while working from home.

66% of responders plan to reassess their company’s future use of and need for office space, as a result of their company’s success with the work from home strategy.

The predictive value of the survey results has been confirmed by prominent technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Square and Twitter, indicating that a significant portion of employees will continue to work from home when the shutdown ends. Facebook projects that in 5 – 10 years, 50% of its employees will work from home.

Remote work is poised to become a defining feature of the early 21st century work place—-work from home, work from anywhere. The new normal for millions of Americans will not include returning to the office. Some employees are already considering a change in their living arrangements, as they contemplate trading cramped and expensive city apartments for houses in the suburbs, or even rural locales, where a home office (single or his & hers) can easily coexist with their personal lives.

Amid the enthusiasm for the shrinking of the corporate office, business owners and leaders would be wise to give serious thought to the practical functionality of the company. In particular, how to build cohesive and productive teams that theoretically might stretch from Ghana to Georgia to Goa?

Needless to say, exceptional communication and collaboration proficiency will be needed. For certain projects, companies may learn that face2face interaction produces the best results.

In support of that approach Apple has decided to continue the company culture of in-house collaboration and is in the process of moving 12,000 employees back into the Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, CA. Even Facebook is hedging its bets on remote work; it’s been reported that the company plans to create hub offices in the (moderately priced) cites of Atlanta, Dallas and Denver.

But the question for readers of this column is, what will happen to Freelancers in the office space shake-up? It remains to be seen, of course, but there may be reasons for cautious optimism.

If so many team members are working remotely, we Freelancers may have a better chance of inspiring the trust and confidence of decision-makers because to a certain extent, a significant percentage of the workforce will operate in a similar fashion to Freelancers, with the exception of submitting a monthly invoice. Freelancers can much more easily position ourselves as another remote team member.

Furthermore, the shutdown encouraged businesses to re-evaluate many jobs and discover that an unexpectedly wide range of tasks can be performed remotely. The consensus is that most tasks relegated to employees working remotely have yielded satisfactory results. The expectations of their customers have been met.

So the outcomes of remote work have been demonstrated and it bodes well for Freelancers. As businesses recover from the shutdown and need more hands on deck to get things done, decision-makers will feel more comfortable about bringing us on board. Ka-ching.

Harshvendra Soin, Chief People Officer at Tech Mahindra, a multinational technology company headquartered in Pune, India, recently said, “We hire gig workers for niche or scarce legacy skills which are not immediately available internally.” Tech Mahindra has an AI based talent marketplace called Talex that identifies gig workers internally. Soin elaborated, “ We have built an external marketplace called Flex.ai, that allows employers to seamlessly tap into the Freelance workplace.”

Top Freelance skills in demand include business planning, brand strategy, cloud computing, data analytics, digital marketing and SAP implementation. Now you’re smiling.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: A traveler passing through South Station in Boston, MA gets some work done remotely.

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Moving Past Panic

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Slowly, tentatively, businesses around the country are being allowed to reopen and at least partially end the COVID-19 shutdown that began in the U.S. in mid-March. Last week, houses of worship were allowed to hold services in some localities, with plenty of social distancing mandated by state legislatures. Restaurants in many cities and towns are now able to seat patrons for outside dining only, with tables spaced wide.

A theater company in the Berkshire Mountains of western MA, an area that for 100 years has featured high quality plays, music and dance performances during the summer months, is negotiating with Actor’s Equity, the powerful union, to get permission to hire actors and stage a production or two in July and August.

So we can finally shift gears from park to drive and the forward motion is a relief after 10 weeks of a mandated standstill. But do we know where we’re going now and how to get the show back on the road?

Businesses large and small are in agreement on at least one thing and that is, we cannot go back and pick up where we left off. It has been said that one never steps into the same river twice because it keeps flowing and changing before our eyes. In the post- shutdown world, those who lead a business must make some adjustments.

Reframe capabilities

Quite simply, business owners and leaders are now tasked with discovering and responding to how customers and prospects feel about and are inclined to use products or services in the reopening. How might your organization address the now reframed experiences and expectations of customers and prospects as they, too, emerge from the shutdown? How can you repackage what you sell? What should your marketing message be now? How can content marketing and social media tell your story in a way that resonates with today’s redefined customer experiences?

Reframe operations

It’s almost a given that you’ll have to retool. Must you change how you deliver services because so many of your clients’ employees now work from home? Are client meetings now videoconferences? Have you been invited to deliver a workshop virtually?

Communication with clients will be key as you learn how your organization can most effectively deliver the value of your products and services to the end user.

Reimagining how to deliver your services online is an operational paradigm shift that your company must make immediately. You must also make the delivery of your services frictionless and engaging, for maximum perceived effectiveness.

Reframe relationships

Relationships may be the most important segment of your organizational response to the new and evolving business environment. Without appearing to violate boundaries, position yourself to clients as a partner. Encourage honest communication and share information that could be helpful to clients. Be generous in your pricing and payment structures when necessary and possible for your cash-flow and revenue needs. Make referrals.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Kim Clark. The former Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston has been reframed as The Quin, a private club set to open in Spring 2021.

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Defensive Marketing

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In sports and in business, well-planned and executed strategies and tactics are necessary to win the day. Some sports or business plays or strategies come from the Offensive side. Those strategies are proactive—-the opening salvo, aggressive and attacking, putting out a direct challenge to the competition.

Introducing a new product and all the activities related to the launch are an example of Offensive Marketing. One might also think of push marketing tactics, e.g., email marketing that announces a new product or service.

Your company is in expansion mode, perhaps entering a new market or geography and battling for the attention and support of new customers.

In contrast, Defensive Marketing strategies and tactics, on the playing field or in the board room, are designed and utilized to protect your turf. Tactics and strategies are reactive. When responding to an attack, whether it’s the other team positioning itself to chip away at your lead or a competitor cutting into your market share, assume a Defensive stance and take steps to protect what has been achieved. Position your entity to maintain or reestablish dominance.

When a Defensive Marketing strategy is required, the company objective is to retain clients and market share, to refine product positioning messages, strengthen customer relationships, or enact other reparative therapy. Crisis communications, i.e., the response to a public set-back or scandal, is a classic Defensive Marketing move.

Depending on what a business needs to achieve, marketing strategies that work from an Offensive or Defensive stance can be employed separately or simultaneously. In the coronavirus business climate, that our politicians seem inclined to prolong, Defensive Marketing rules the day.

Everyone is hunkered down, if not outright shut down. Nevertheless, those businesses allowed to operate are doing just that, even if employees are working from home. The companies have budgets. Some are hiring Freelancers.

Just because many companies have curbed their spending doesn’t mean that they don’t have a modest budget available for certain types of high-value projects, as owners and leaders define it.

Put on your thinking cap—-What might motivate your clients to spend money these days? Chances are they’re working hard to protect what they’ve built up over the months that preceded the shutdown. It’s likely that your clients are shoring up systems and resources and reaffirming relationships with their customers. Your clients are probably positioning their organization for long-term success.

The question is, how can we Freelancers package, describe and promote our organization to effectively communicate to current and prospective clients that we can assist their Defensive Marketing campaigns?

To predict how your services might fit into the picture, take time to think objectively about the client’s business and what could be considered logical long-term objectives that could reap benefits over the next 5 or so years.

Nurturing and promoting their most important, biggest selling products or services is a safe bet, as is protecting and/ or upgrading business continuity processes and also insurance, disaster recovery systems in nearly every stripe, from hardware and software to the physical plant. However, some organizations might go on the Offensive and begin making some surprisingly aggressive moves as they pursue customer acquisition.

Keep in mind that scaling back on what is considered spending on nonessentials should not be mistaken for the cessation of spending. The organizations could be merely reflecting the economic or political climate and allowing their expenditures to reflect the new normal.

Good customer knowledge and relationships, along with agility and adaptability, will support proprietors of Freelance consultancies as we respond to yet another set of difficult business conditions. Our clients are either thinking of what must be done today to get their business back in motion, or looking at how the distant future might look and how they can engineer safe passage. Defensive Marketing strategies will predominate.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Kim Clark. The Boston Common tennis court.