Small Business Brand
Lynette Green

How To Reinforce Your Small Business Brand Without Spending A Penny

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Everyday Ideas To Promote Your Brand Without Spending Money

It’s difficult to measure the value of your company brand, but one thing is for sure if you have succeeded in developing a strong brand it will engender confidence in your business and help you win and secure clients. If you don’t really have a brand to speak of it will require more effort to develop business.

As small business owners, many of us will be convinced of the importance of a strong brand already, yet the challenge is often how to reinforce that brand on a budget.  Here are a handful of small ideas that everyone can do to reinforce their small business brand.

  1. Your brand is about so much more than your logo. If you haven’t already, ask yourself what kind of values your small business brand stands for and then make sure that you reflect that, in your actions, in the way you treat your customers, in the way you dress and present yourself in general.  If you employ staff make sure that you convey your message to them as well so that they emulate you and your business brand.
  2. Tell people. Get out there and network.  There are many low cost or even free networking events happening all over the country.  If you haven’t already attended any then get out there and start spreading the word about your brand.  It’s important to note here that whilst it’s important to get your message across you should always be polite and respectful to the other people you are networking with, listen to what they are saying and take a genuine interest in them.  Talking over other people or hogging the conversation will not do your brand any favours so take turns appropriately, you might also find some other great businesses that can help you out too.
  3. If you’re brave enough to get out there in to the world and network face to face why not also try social media? Promoting your business through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or any of the other vast number of platforms is free and a great way to get your message out to a sizeable audience.  As with face to face networking be friendly and unselfish to be remembered for the right reasons. Post content that is relevant to your audience and true to your brand, reflecting standards appropriate to your business.
  4. Keep everything consistent. Assuming you have a logo, which every business should, make sure you are using it everywhere, not just on your marketing material, but on all your documents, on your email auto signature, your invoices and for any communication you have with anyone outside the company.  Make sure that your website, business cards and other marketing material all use the same version of your logo and that further than that you have a consistent image, for example always using the same font and overall style.
  5. Make sure your name is known. Just as ensuring that the logo and style of the business is across the board so should your name be.   This may sound obvious, however, businesses with long names may sometimes find themselves abbreviating the name, this is fine if that’s what you’re going to go with, but choose one or the other and stick with it and make sure that that name is known.  For example brief everyone who answers the telephone in your business to answer the telephone professionally using the same company name.

Do you have any other ideas to help small businesses, either in terms of branding or helping businesses to work smarter?  We would love to hear if you do.

Virtual Mailing Address
Lynette Green

What is a virtual mailing address?

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As our business is a virtual business we are sometimes asked ‘What is a virtual office and what is a virtual mailing address?  Does it mean that the building doesn’t exist?’

The use of the word virtual is really to indicate that you don’t actually have to be based in the office yourself, but a virtual mailing address, is very much a real physical address, staffed by real people! Virtual office services and providers of virtual mailing address services will be based in real office buildings, somewhere that your business could conceivably be located.  To the outside world it will seem as though your business is based within there.

You and your business can be located in a completely different area, you could be based anywhere in the UK or even overseas.  Mail will be forwarded on, scanned and sent, or if you are local it will be held for you securely until you choose to collect.

Many people wishing to use this service will use a telephone answering service as well in order to have a full virtual office service but it’s equally possible to just have a virtual mailing address if that’s all that is required.

If you’re looking at taking up a virtual mailing address service, it’s worth taking a look around to see if you can find images of the building and the vicinity if you don’t already know it.  You may not be physically sitting in this office every day, but is this an office that you’d like to give the impression of being based in.  Is it going to convey the right impression for your business?

You can usually use a virtual mailing address to receive anything that you would normally expect to receive by post and can normally use as the registered office address for your business as well.

Formatting Documents
Lynette Green

What we’ve been doing this week – Supporting an entrepreneur, completing tenders, formatting documents and reports and much much more

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So here we are at the end of another busy week.  As usual it’s been hectic in the office!

The client I want to talk to you about this week is one that we especially enjoy working with as, not only is he a very inspirational person to work with, but also we really feel that our admin support service makes a massive difference to him.  The gentleman in question is a true entrepreneur, a multiple business owner, who happens to be registered blind.

If you run a business yourself, you’ll know that it is a constant juggling act, there is always something to do, in short, it’s hard work.  Well imagine that how much more difficult that becomes when you are blind.  Yes, there is software that can read out documents, but this doesn’t always work perfectly, particularly if information is contained within tables or graphs, so part of what we do for him is typing out information into paragraph form, formatting documents so that they can then be read out by his software.

We’ve also, this week completed some tendering forms for him.  Again as there are forms within the questionnaires we have been able to read them and take his information to compile his applications.  This further helps him, because not only is he registered blind, but also English is not his first language and so we will often also help by checking the grammar and spelling within documents that he has produced himself to make sure that what he sends out gives a professional image for his company.

The tender applications submitted this week needed to be supported by further documentation including various policies and procedures, so we’ve been through his policies and procedures and updating and formatting the documents.  Previously as they had been compiled at different times by different people so they were all in different styles, he now has a complete set all formatted identically, all with his new corporate branding on so everything is up to date and consistent.

This week we’ve also typed up some massive weighty financial reports for him.  Accuracy is crucial here is one digit wrong on a financial report can have a massive implication so we need to check that the accuracy of the content as well as the formatting of these documents is spot on as we’re trusted to be eyes of this busy entrepreneur.

Somewhere along the way we also managed to squeeze in updating his LinkedIn profile.

It’s all been good fun, if at times, a bit crazy making sure we hit the deadlines, but everything has been done in time so now we can take a breath and look forward to seeing what next week brings!

Lynette Green

What We’ve Been Doing This Week – Business Support For A Driving School

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This is the first in a new series of blog posts talking about what we actually do during the week.  Each week we will pick one client to talk about and we will tell you about the type of work we do for them.

We are starting off with a very busy, Yorkshire based driving school who we have worked with for just over two years now.  We work with the owner of the driving school to coordinate the diaries of the whole team and deal with customer enquiries.  Although we’re not geographically close to this client, working virtually means that our clients can be based anywhere in the UK or even the world.

As the driving instructors are busy and unable to answer their phones throughout the day we provide a telephone answering service for them.  The majority of calls that we take are new business enquiries, people calling to make bookings for driving lessons and to make general enquiries about the price of lessons and availability and so forth.

As we answer the calls we capture the callers’ details, establish the geographic location that they are based in and then book them in with the appropriate driving instructor to a central Google calendar which we share access to with all of the instructors.  Instructors can also add their own appointments in the calendar.  This system allows the owner of the driving school to see at a glance what is happening with all of the driving instructors.  As no calls are missed the diary fills up very quickly, so much so that we also now manage a waiting list for this business.

Callers ring through on a local number, which is then diverted to us, as far as the callers are concerned, it sounds as though they are speaking to someone in the office in Yorkshire, not Bury St Edmunds!

Answering the telephones for a driving school is always busy, often there are urgent messages to get to driving instructors, from students who could need to cancel a lesson, or maybe change the pickup location, so it’s vital that we get messages to instructors quickly so that they don’t waste time and petrol by being in the wrong location.  Having a dedicated team here in the office means that we can continue trying to get hold of instructors, by phone, text and email to ensure they get the messages.

There are also times when instructors may need to liaise between themselves, for example to maybe see if another instructor may be able to take a particular student and often the instructors find that using Virtual Head Office means that they don’t need to have to keep on trying to call as we will do that for them.

This week, the owner of the driving school has been away on holiday, so we have been providing some additional support for her.  We have been dealing with the email enquiries that come through the website and again capturing details of all enquirers.  As the school is currently so busy that they are full we have been responding to enquiries, either by email or phone to see whether they would like to join the waiting list.  Customer service is top priority so it’s important to make everyone who makes an enquiry feel valued, even if they are not able to start driving lessons just yet.

All of this means that the owner of the driving school has been able to relax and take a proper break from the business, knowing that when she returns next week that she will receive a full report of every telephone call and email we have deal with whilst she has been away, the diary is completely full and that had there been any really urgent enquiries that she absolutely had to deal with personally, that we would have contacted her, filtering everything else out.

Enabling people to take proper holidays is probably one of the most satisfying things that we do, so we’ve particularly providing extra help and support to this driving school this week.