Igniting Business Blog

We posted recently about the importance of embracing and upgrading IT in your small business, but how do you find the cash to actually implement those needed upgrades?  Small businesses have tight profit margins. If you're entering periods of new growth, it can be even harder to forecast your future profits and use them as a guideline for internal spending and improvements. But a budget helps regulate IT expenses and helps set your small business goals for the year.

Getting customers is hard, but keeping customers can be harder. Sometimes all it takes is a single bad experience, an off-day with customer service, or just a product defect to make a customer take his or her business elsewhere. For small businesses who want to keep customers coming back time and time again, it's important to consider best practices to keep your customers coming back.

At this point, there is no denying the hold technology has over us - both personally and professionally. Whether we are scrolling through our Facebook in the morning or playing music on Spotify, it has permeated our personal lives. Similarly, technology has also transformed business radically. There is now a myriad of ways through which technology can be utilized to streamline business practices and shape growth.

Facebook is changing their metrics to count viewable-only impressions of posts and ads instead of basing their impression count on when a post or ad is served. They announced the change back in 2016, but the updates to their metrics tools took longer to complete than initially estimated. Facebook should be rolling out the change over the next several months.

In 2016, mobile use moved ahead of desktop browsing and it has increased with every passing year.  Additionally, Google has begun rolling out it’s “Mobile First Index” which ranks each website based on its mobile experience, instead of the desktop experience.  Thus, it should come as no surprise then that the web design trends in 2018 are geared towards creating a better experience for mobile users.  In this post we will outline three emerging trends in web design and how they help improve customer experiences, especially for mobile users.

We often look at businesses that have prospered over the years and learn important lessons from their experience and success. After all, recreating success is often our goal, especially if that success launched a company into the stratosphere in earnings and reputation. Sometimes, though, it pays to look at history's failures to learn what not to do. Understanding what worked is often complicated and requires a nuanced understanding of the moment in time that made a given product or strategy work. When something fails, however, there's often a much clearer lesson left in the financial fossil record. Learn from these four historical marketing missteps:

Last month we discussed the difference between popular and profitable keywords.  Today, we want to propose a general rule of thumb that will help keep your different keyword strategies scalable:

Outsourcing back office duties is a big step for any small business to take, but most find the benefits outweigh the risks and costs. Most small business owners recognize that hiring and training is costly and time-consuming. When you outsource a function, you will not have to hire and train an employee to perform the function. Instead, these problems and costs are borne by your outsourced company.

Growing your audience is one of the main tenets of online businesses. If you're not being seen, you're not getting customers. Most internet users have such a short attention span that you need to be seen by a lot of people to get the customers you need. But if your audience is growing just for the sake of growing, then your audience may be getting too large which can create its own set of inefficiencies.  Ask yourself: Although the number of viewers is getting bigger and bigger, but is my conversion percentage getting smaller and smaller?

One of the keys to running a successful small business is to constantly find ways to integrate more technology that produces more efficiency and may give you a leg up on the competition. If you know you have a solid product or service offering and you want to make your small business grow and be successful, here are three reasons why you should look into technology: