Preparing for a Recession: How to Survive a Recession

Here are a few things that you can do to stay ahead during a recession and maintain the success of your small business. 

Improve Customer Service

Make sure that each and every customer gets special treatment and leaves your store or office satisfied that you have delivered much more than what was expected.

Your employees should also understand that tough times require a gentler touch and your customers need to be treated as VIPs now more than ever.

Since all your competitors may be selling the same products that you are, it will be your satisfied customers who will not only bring in repeat business, but also new customers.

Improve Your Knowledge and Skills

Now would be a good time to build on your knowledge and learn new skills regarding the technical and financial aspects of your business. Your customers should be impressed with your product knowledge.

This not only will enhance your reputation as an expert, but will also ensure that they come to you if they run into difficulties.

Control Your Expenses

Now is the time for you to tighten up the controls on all your expenses, especially those that are not crucial to keeping your business going. It certainly is not a good time to indulge in luxury items; that can wait until the situation improves.

You should also split large expenses into smaller ones so that they become more manageable. Even when purchasing inventory, try to get longer credit periods or better rates by comparing prices offered by different suppliers.

Start Accepting Payments by Credit Card

If you are dealing in consumer goods, then you probably already have a credit card machine; but if you are dealing in industrial items and do not have the ability to process credit card date, then now would be a good time to make that change.

Many of your smaller customers might need to pay you by credit card if they are experiencing a cash flow problem. Recent surveys have shown that more people are using credit cards as a way to deal with the financial downturn.

Lower Your Profit Margins

Keeping in mind that it will only be temporary, this is a good time to lower your profit margins. Notify your existing and potential customers that you are making this move.

You’re going to need more sales to make up the difference, and their goodwill is more important than ever. You can always raise your prices once the recession shows signs of easing.

Use the Power of the Internet

Use the Internet to advertise your products. In comparison to traditional media such as newspapers and television, the cost is very reasonable.

Hire experts who can ensure that your firm is always on top in product searches, and make your website attractive and interactive.

Motivate Your Staff

Your staff should be made aware of your business’ situation in the current recessionary market. They will be motivated to work extra hard to achieve the desired results, if they are convinced that their participation can save the business – and their jobs.

You should also put in extra effort and hours, so your staff will know that you are going the extra mile yourself.

Use these ideas and seek others on your own so your small business will survive the downturn. Only businesses with a solid foundation and foresight survive the inevitable bad times that go along with managing a business. You want to be one of them.

Source: http://www.morebusiness.com/survive-economic-recession

Business Recession: What a Recession Means for Your Small Business

Here is what a recession could mean for your small business – and the measures that you could take to remain least affected by an economic downturn.

Sales and Profits Could Be Down

The first casualty during any recession is usually sales. Once sales are down, then it usually isn’t long before profits could follow the southward trend.

If in the past your sales have been excellent, and if you can afford to take a little downward trend in sales in stride then don’t worry; but if you really need to increase sales even at the cost of incurring additional expenses, then there are two ways to achieve this.

One is to lower profits in an attempt to achieve higher sales figures. The other way would be to spend more on marketing and advertising while keeping your profit margins unchanged.

This will still lower your profit figures due to an increase in your marketing expenses. However, this move would not only increase your presence in the market but you could be the first to reap the benefits as soon as the economy emerges from the recession.

Your Expenses Could Increase

A recession accompanied by high inflation will mean that your monthly expenses could increase, even as you face the daunting task of maintaining your profits. This could eat into your savings and pose financial problems as the days go by.

You can reduce your expenses by cutting down or splitting them. Unnecessary expenses should be totally avoided – and only those expenses related to your business should be attended to on a priority basis.

Your Inventory Could Drag You Down

Maintaining a large inventory during normal times is difficult, but during a recession, it could prove to be a ball and chain dragging you down. You should learn to rotate your inventory faster so that your profits can increase.

Use the latest technology available to keep track of your inventory. These are not very expensive and are usually very easy to learn and use. Dispose of all your slow moving products through fire sales if necessary.

Make sure you get familiar with ‘Just in Time’ methods to maintain your stock and delivery schedules.

Your Employees Could Become Disheartened

The effects of the recession could affect the morale of your staff as they battle to pay rising expenses on a limited income.

You can try rewarding your most deserving employees or help them out by providing them soft loans to tide over the crisis. However, you will also need to remove deadwood from your payroll, and let go of any employees who are not up to the task.

This will result in a leaner but fitter staff for your business.

People can debate on forever as to whether there is a recession going on at present, but whatever title is given to this economic downturn, it will nevertheless affect your business. The above methods might just help you to survive to fight another day.

Source: http://www.morebusiness.com/recession-small-business

How to…go mobile marketing

How to…go mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is calling for your attention and, with click-through rates to rival e-mail, it’s too compelling for any marketer to ignore for several years now, mobile marketing has been a quiet but insistent buzzing in your pocket – vaguely aware of its cry for attention, marketers have been too distracted by other media to answer mobile’s call. A few brave brands have embraced mobile marketing, often with great success, but it still has not caught the attention or the imagination of the vast majority of brands. One reason is a lack of awareness as to exactly what the channel offers. It’s time, then, to get back to the basics of mobile marketing and how to do it properly.

Where do I start?

Russell Buckley, vice president, global alliances at mobile advertising network AdMob, says: “There’s a fast disappearing myth that the only thing you should advertise on a mobile phone is something related to the phone itself. This is complete nonsense. Any type of ad can run on a digital channel, so there is no reason why it could not work as well on the mobile channel.”

Brands have been advertising on mobile phones for many years but, until recently, the only brands that used the medium were those selling content for all things mobile; ringtones, wallpapers and mobile games. While these brands still dominate, mainstream brands have now jumped aboard.

Brands seeking to advertise via mobile have two routes to choose from: on-portal and off-portal. On-portal means the mobile operators’ mobile internet sites; off-portal is everything else. Many TV stations, newspapers and other publishers now have mobile sites, so if your target audience tends to read the Daily Telegraph or Marie Clare, those sites could be a good place to start advertising.

Networks and media planners such as AdMob, Ring-Ring Media and Yodel Digital, can help draw up a mobile media plan. As for the advert itself, says Buckley, you need to think about the medium. “Most online environments are built in Flash, which does not work on mobile,” he explains. And there’s the size issue, too: “On a desktop computer or laptop you can ask people to fill in lots of questions when they’re looking for something like an insurance quote. On mobile you have to keep things much shorter and simpler.”

Another major consideration is exactly where a click on a mobile advert will take a customer. At the very least your website should have a landing page that is optimised for viewing on a mobile phone and, in an ideal world, you should offer a full mobile website. Jonathan Bass, managing director of mobile agency Incentivated, concedes that mobile is still a niche advertising medium, but points out: “On mobile, you get a self-selecting audience that is consuming mobile media, that is on the mobile web, and that will click on ads.”

Mick Rigby, chairman of mobile media agency Yodel Digital, notes that now is a good time to try out mobile advertising. “Demand for mobile advertising inventory is creeping up, but costs are still low, and clickthrough rates as high as 7 or 8 per cent compare very favourably with online display,” he says.

“Mobile websites”

Like mobile advertising, mobile websites have traditionally been the preserve of mobile content companies. That’s changing. Smartphones aside, even basic phones now come with decent web browsers, and with mobile operators offering flat-rate data packages for as little as £5 a month consumers can access mobile websites without fear of running up a huge bill. As a result, more brands are launching permanent, dedicated mobile websites.

Many of these are newspaper or magazine publishers, trying to make their content available through as many channels as possible. But if your target audience is made up of plumbers or heating engineers – or any group of people who are out and about all day and not in front of a computer – it makes perfect sense to have information, wiring diagrams or replacement part numbers, available to them on their mobile phone.

Tim Green, managing director of Mobile Interactive Group, believes that not having a mobile site soon won’t be an option for many brands. “Mobile search is growing by about 34 per cent every year and, among the younger demographic, there is a growing proportion who are not using the fixed web at all, because mobile caters for their needs. Therefore, anyone not optimising their web presence for mobile will disappear off the radar.”

Incentivated’s Bass urges brands to look at their web logs and see how many people are visiting their sites via their mobile phone. Most of these potential customers will be getting a poor experience. “If it is more than 1 per cent, you have to ask yourself whether, in the physical world, you would be happy with that percentage of your goods having to be recalled or returned,” he says.

Finally, if you do build a mobile site, you have to get people to it. This is a matter of common sense. Promote the URL on your marketing collateral in the same way that you would promote your website, and use mobile advertising and mobile search to drive traffic, just as you do with your standard website.

Apps schmapps

A couple of years ago, few people had heard of mobile applications. Then along came Apple, the iPhone and the App Store, and two billion downloads later, it seems your mobile is not a mobile until you’ve put some apps on it, whether it’s an iPhone or not.

There has been a rush among brands to tap into app-mania, with many seduced by the allure of the iPhone, irrespective of whether the typical iPhone user fits the profile of their target customer.

“Usability is critical to success, and not enough thought is put into how real customers use real phones,” says Helen Keegan, a specialist in mobile marketing, advertising and media. “The tendency is to go for an iPhone app, which is only a small subset of both our national and global marketplace.”

Adhish Kulkarni, managing director of mobile marketing firm Buongiorno Marketing Services, says that in deciding whether it needs an app, a brand needs to look at its customers and their habits, and then at what the brand can offer to improve their lives. “Mobile embraces everything from a low-level SMS interaction at one extreme to a very rich media experience through an app at the other, so you have to look at what works best for your target audience on the sort of mobile phone they are likely to have.”

Kulkarni cites the example of airline bookings. While the phone is not a great tool for researching flights and making the booking initially, it becomes extremely useful when the customer is making his or her way to the airport. At this point, an application enabling the customer to check in remotely, check for delays, and receive news of any special offers in airport shops, could be extremely useful, Kulkarni argues.

Beyond SMS

For a technology that was never even designed for consumers, SMS has proved remarkably resilient and successful. “The crucial factor is ubiquity,” says Jeremy Copp, CEO of mobile advertising firm Rapid Mobile Media. “There are some exciting new technologies being touted, but they are only on a tiny proportion of phones. Every phone supports SMS, so you can use it to reach everyone.”
Copp’s company provides Ad2Txt, which tags text adverts carrying a clickable link onto text messages sent to the consumer as part of an opt-in service, such as directory enquiries. In response to a consumer request the directory enquiry service sends the number information by return text with a brief text advert appended.

The revenue generated from the sale of this advertising space is shared with the service provider and might be used to subsidise the cost of the enquiry. “You are not buying wasted ad impressions, because you know that every text sent out will be read,” says Copp.

SMS is also popular as a way to provide an easy response mechanism to adverts appearing in other media, such as TV, print or outdoor: “Using an SMS shortcode (a five-digit number) you can make static media, such as posters or TV, interactive,” says Yodel Digital’s Rigby. Shortcodes cost marketers around £100-£200 per month per network to buy in the UK, or around £50-£100 a month for a shared shortcode.

The power of SMS to act as a response channel has been harnessed to great effect by brands for sales promotion purposes. In 2007, Birds Eye ran a promotion on 50m packs of food, offering consumers the chance to have their mortgage paid off by the brand. Three people won the top prize, with a further 106 winning a daily prize of £1,000. The promotion attracted 1.8m entries, and even though consumers could enter via either the web, SMS or post, it was SMS that attracted the most entries (52 per cent), with the web trailing behind at 43 per cent.

The Bird’s Eye promotion was devised and executed by agency The Big Kick and mobile marketing firm Sponge, which has run similarly successful “text and win” campaigns for Walkers Crisps and Cadbury. Sponge chairman Alex Meisl says mobile works well in these types of promotion because of the ease of response.
“Mobile encourages impulsive response, because typically, when you see a promotion like this, you’re in a shop or a bar, and you’re unlikely to have a computer or an envelope or a stamp with you, but you’re likely to have your phone,” he says.

As Meisl points out, campaigns like this also encourage interaction between the brand and the consumer. When the consumer texts in, even if they don’t win, the return text telling them they haven’t can be used to encourage them to try something new from the brand.

Made for each other

Mobile customer relationship management (CRM) is arguably one of the most powerful uses of the mobile channel, and one of the most cost‑effective.
Mobile‑savvy brands are asking customers to give them their mobile number, not so they can sell to them, but so that they can provide them with timely, useful information, such as their bank balance, or news about their flight or hotel room booking.

And it’s not restricted to big brands. Thanks to low-cost SMS messaging platforms accessed via the web, dentists, hairdressers, garages and other local businesses are using the mobile channel to send appointment reminders to their customers and engender customer loyalty.

“Mobile phones were primarily designed as communication devices, and marketing is actually marketing communications,” says Helen Keegan. “At the very least, companies should be sending out thank-you texts on receipt of online orders and to confirm delivery, or to garner feedback.”

To use mobile effectively for CRM, Buongiorno’s Kulkarni advises marketers: “There are specific things that mobile does better than any other channel. You need to make the most of it.”

Case study: Puma

Puma accelerated consumer brand engagement via mobile with a competition awarding branded prizes to winners of an F1 racing game downloaded from the Puma mobile site.

Mobile marketing agency Phonevalley ran a campaign for sports brand Puma capitalising on the 2008 Shanghai Grand Prix in China. The campaign focused on a Puma global mobile internet site featuring its “F Wan” operation (wan translates from Chinese as “play”).

Puma offered mobile users the chance to play an F1 motor racing game that could be downloaded from the mobile site. Players drove cars around a track in the shape of the Puma logo. Phonevalley created a points system to encourage gameplay and viral activity: players who submitted their scores by SMS or who forwarded the games to friends earned extra points, with the top three players each week rewarded with prizes of Puma F1 branded merchandise.

To encourage discovery of the mobile site, banners and text links were displayed on the top three Chinese mobile portals QQ, 3g.cn and Kong.net. Cross-channel integration was also used, with relevant SMS shortcode numbers displayed in all Puma print and out‑of‑home adverts, including magazines, billboards and underground stations.

Anyone who texted the words “Puma F Wan” to the advertised shortcode instantly received a clickable SMS message with a link to the mobile site.

The Puma F1 mobile campaign generated 195,000 unique visitors to the mobile site, with 185,000 new, qualified contacts for Puma’s database. There were 85m page impressions and 150,000 downloads of the game, themes and wallpapers.

Network Security Tactics

According to a recent survey of IT executives and network administrators by VanDyke Software Inc., 46% of companies that undertake internal security audits find that the tests result in the identification of significant security problems. That’s close to half, and the number rises to 54% for external network security audits conducted by outside companies.

Think of it like this: There’s at least a 50/50 chance you have one or more significant network security problems, and an audit is good way to find them. However, it’s a good bet that some people reading this article work for companies where network security is still not audited on a regular basis, probably because such audits are seen as an unwelcome interference with day-to-day network administration. But an audit should not be seen as a chore.

Think of it as a process that others have found useful for ensuring their organization is adequately protecting itself from data loss and related complications, such as litigation, which may ensue. In this tip, let’s review what is required to conduct a systematic examination and verification of network security, which can serve as a potent control while also providing vital feedback on the state of an organization’s security strategy.

Setting the network security baseline
To be effective, an audit must be performed against a defined set of standards: an organization’s data security, integrity and availability policies and procedures, applicable regulatory requirements, and industry best practices. Data gathered during the audit is compared against these to check “what is” against “what should be.”

It may sound like a daunting process, but if some baseline network audit processes are conducted on a regular basis, you can make any major audit less onerous. The first step? Establish a baseline of the network. A good tool for this is Nmap, the free open source utility for network inventory and security auditing. Nmap can inventory network devices and reveal what services they run, as well as what OS and application versions are installed.

Once the network has been mapped, future scan results can be compared against this known and accepted baseline. Any scan results including, for instance, unauthorized applications or never-before-seen devices should serve as red flags. Of course, any such changes should be investigated and resolved, i.e. either remediated or added to your baseline. Prohibited applications discovered by a scan may include peer-to-peer networking, instant messaging, Skype or social media file sharing.

Because network threats constantly evolve, certain baseline checks should be carried out on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Intruders always look to exploit open ports because they are an easy gateway to your systems. Therefore, port scans that identify open ports and the services running on them should be among the most frequently conducted scans. An Nmap scan can also check trust relationships that exist on a network and find connections that violate security policy.

Regular reviews
Another network element in constant flux is the user base. Regular reviews of network accounts and privileges against HR records are essential to ensure unused accounts are terminated and rights are appropriately assigned. You can combine this with other employee-related checks, such as ensuring separation of duties and compliance with password policies like aging and complexity.

Not every network security control needs checking with equal frequency, but all controls should be reviewed on a regular basis, including basics like physical security, document backup and destruction, and patching. Are backups being performed according to policy and regulatory requirements? Is data destroyed in accordance with its classification? Have backup and restore processes been tested recently to make sure they’re working? Are automated patching processes functioning correctly and deploying updates within an acceptable timeframe?

If you’re in charge of network security, then making these checks part of the regular work cycle will make life much easier when the time comes for a major network audit. The internal assessments you perform to prepare for a big audit only need to cover areas outside your regular monitoring routine.

These include evaluating patch processes, validating that backups perform per policy, assessing the effectiveness of physical security controls, and ensuring compliance with the requirements of relevant regulatory standards.

For some companies, auditing is not always optional. If your systems need to be compliant with a particular standard — such as the PCI Data Security Standard — then an audit by external auditors will be necessary. Even without such requirements, an external network security audit may be the best, or only option if there is suspicion of an internal threat, such as a malicious administrator, or if an organization has too many remote offices for qualified internal staff to ensure policies have been implemented at all sites.

Finally, a few words of caution about one oft-cited reason for security auditing. No audit, internal, external or compliance-related, can by itself ensure a network is secure. Just because a network has been audited does not mean it is, or will remain, secure. The real benefit of an audit comes from implementing its recommendations on how security controls can be improved, dealing with any concerns reported, and more closely aligning information security needs and risk mitigation with business goals. All of which makes the network security audit a worthwhile undertaking.

Gratitude goes to the author: Stephen Cobb.