According to ABS statistics, for businesses established in 2013-14 with fewer than 20 employees, there was a 64% survival rate by 2016 (not a 60% failure rate as is often cited online). This drops to 55% for surviving a fourth year – a select group we intend on joining.

Deciding when our anniversary should be wasn’t as easy a choice as you might think. While a bricks and mortar store might have a more obvious first day in business, we had different anniversaries for:

• Registering our ABN,
• Registering our business name,
• Purchasing our domain and hosting,
• Becoming ‘LinkedIn official’,
• Having our first business meeting,
• Invoicing our first client,
• Our first client paying us (within two days!)

In the end, we’ve gone with registering our business name as our official anniversary, as that’s the day Civic Web Media was truly born. There have been major achievements in that time for us:

• Each year, we’ve had more income (and more tax to pay, including GST),
• Each year, we’ve grown our client numbers (both in Newcastle and overseas),
• We’ve gone from a home office to working in a shared office space of creatives at The Roost,
• We were invited to speak at an industry event,
• At the start of 2018, we invited one of our freelancers to work for us on a more official basis.

We also recently celebrated payment of our 200th invoice. While this isn’t always the best measure of success (for example, our biggest invoice contains 60x as many items and is worth 200x more than our smallest), it feels like an important landmark nonetheless.

When we started in business, we made the decision to make a donation after every 100 invoices – a local business helping the local community. The first time round we donated to the Hunter Wetlands; this time we’ve supported Newcastle Toy Run.

We’ve got a lot to look forward to – a celebration of a fourth anniversary and our 300th invoice among them – and every day in business is another reminder that we’re doing something right.

But before then, let us eat cake.

Why people contact brands on social media

Increasingly, customers prefer to contact brands via social media over traditional methods:

• Nearly 35% of consumers nominate social media as their preferred method of customer care
• Less than 25% prefer website or live web chat customer care
• Less than 20% prefer email-based customer care
• Call centre customer care comes in last place with just over 16% of consumers preferring phone-based customer care.

They may reach out to:

• Request pre-sale information
• Give feedback
• Complain

Customers also post about their customer care experiences on social media, with 47% of consumers aged 18-34 complaining about a brand’s customer support via social media.

Customer expectations online

Customer care is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Quality customer service leads to greater brand loyalty and higher customer spending, while poor customer service may force customers to abandon a brand.

With more than 60% of customers now expecting brands to offer customer support on social media, it has never been more important to provide social media customer care.

Customer expectations on social media response times are high with:

• 42% of customers expecting a response to their social media complaint within one hour
• 32% expecting a response in under 30 minutes
• 11% expecting an immediate response.

Thirty per cent of customers will switch to a competitor if a brand does not respond to their enquiry or complaint.

Benefits of social media customer care

When done well, social media customer care can have huge benefits for your company.

Social media customer care is highly cost-effective. It costs one dollar to resolve an issue on social media, which is one-sixth the price of resolving an issue via a call centre. Social media customer care agents are more than 160% more efficient than voice agents.

Facebook and Twitter are 48% more accurate and 44% faster methods of delivering customer care responses than email.

High quality social media customer care can yield:

• 92% customer retention
• 81% greater annual increase in revenue from customer referrals
• Increased customer spending of 20%-40%
• Annual return on investment increase of 30.7%
• Improved customer satisfaction rates by a margin of 26.6%

Providing good quality timely customer care via social media reduces call centre and other customer care costs and, most importantly, creates happy customers who will stay loyal to your brand.

Stats and images from Websitebuilder.org. See the full infographic here.

As an individual, it’s easy to choose which campaigns to support, but as a company, it becomes slightly more complicated. For example, everyone associated with Civic Web Media is in favour of marriage equality, but does that mean our company is?

Why should your company support a campaign?

Campaigns come and go. Some spread awareness and raise funds like the ALS ice bucket challenge; others arise from tragic events like the 2015 Paris attacks. Others still like the marriage equality postal vote can cause controversy and division.
 

There are plenty of positive reasons to support a campaign as a company:
 

Spread awareness: you can use your company’s profile to spread awareness about an issue that’s important to you such as breast cancer, domestic violence or the plight of refugees.

Portray your company in a positive light: supporting charitable campaigns helps build a positive public image.

Show solidarity: you can stand by survivors of natural disasters or terrorist attacks by getting involved in social media campaigns.

Raise funds: you can help raise money for medical research or other worthy projects.

However, it’s important to remember that bandwagon jumping on popular campaigns can seem exploitative. Campaigns should always be supported in the right spirit and never as a grab for extra exposure.

Who are you representing?

One person’s choice, whether it be the CEO or marketing manager, or even a committee of people, must ultimately represent the company as a whole. When supporting a campaign as a company you are presenting one set of views as that of all your employees: this becomes problematic when not everyone shares the same views.
 

To take the current marriage equality debate as an example, while you and ninety per cent of your workforce may support the ‘yes’ vote, is it okay to represent that ten percent who do not support it as being pro marriage equality?
 

Before throwing your support behind any campaign take a moment to consider whether it accurately represents the views of your staff and even those of your customers.

When is it okay support a campaign?

Choosing which causes to support as a company can be fraught with difficulty.
 

Returning to the marriage equality debate, if you show your support for the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote, you risk raising the ire of a percentage of your customers. However, if you remain neutral you equally run the risk of upsetting customers who may wonder why you are unwilling to show your support for either side.
 

In the case of a universally popular campaign like the ALS ice bucket challenge, there was never a risk of offending anyone – everybody wants to cure Motor Neurone Disease – but even participating in popular campaigns can be interpreted as tokenistic.
 

And when is it appropriate to put a filter on your Facebook profile picture or to add a banner to your website? When the Paris terror attacks occurred, Facebook was awash with French flag filters. When atrocities occurred in Pakistan no such mass support was shown. Is it okay to pick and choose or should you support every campaign equally?
 

Before you support a campaign ask yourself:
 

1. Why am I supporting this campaign?

A good rule of thumb is to support campaigns that you have a connection to as a company. Maybe you have offices in an affected city or work in an industry associated with a cause. If you can come up with no better reason to support a campaign than ‘everyone else was doing it’, then perhaps it’s best to stay out of it.

2. How will my customers or audience react?

You can’t please everyone, but it is important to at least try and please some of them. Will your customers agree with your stance on Cause X? Will you lose customers if they don’t? How will your support be perceived by others?
 

At the end of the day, you will risk criticism whichever campaigns you support. If you firmly believe in a cause and it is something you’re willing to fight for then it is probably worth supporting.

How should you show your support?

Support for a campaign should be more than skin deep and always conducted in a spirit of generosity and community-mindedness.
 

Some positive ways to support a campaign include:
 

• Donating a percentage of takings to a campaign, either anonymously or publicly
• Providing pro-bono work to a cause
• Using tasteful social media to promote or support a campaign

In a world where supporting a campaign is as easy as a few clicks it’s important to look deeper and give real support to the causes you believe in. Remember, actions speak louder than words – or Facebook filters.

Now, small businesses can feature as prominently as multimillion dollar corporations for common search queries (often right at the top), which levels the playing field dramatically. With Google delivering local results for targeted keywords, your competitors online are the same ones you have in real life – businesses in your local area. And, as ever, those with the best SEO wins.

The marketing cliche of being “number one on Google” is now achievable for everyone. You just need to play by Google’s rules, and it doesn’t hurt to use the free tools they provide to help you achieve that goal.

What is Google My Business?

Formerly and more intuitively known as Google+ Local, Google My Business lets you claim and manage your local presence on Google’s search engine and Maps.

This tool is connected to Google+, so you first need to sign up to that network if you haven’t already. When you use Google My Business for free, you can control how your business is presented on Google and optimise your listings to reach more people in your area.

What can it do for you?

Google My Business can help you improve your local SEO and reputation in three areas.

1. Taking control

Verifying your local listing information on Google My Business instantly makes your business appear twice as reputable to searchers.

If you don’t take charge of your local listing, you probably won’t be happy with the result. From spelling mistakes to missing or outdated information and an overall unprofessional look, people wouldn’t be drawn to that listing even if it was ranking in search results.

Tips

Google My Business enables you to include all the information you want your searchers to see at a glance. According to Google’s research into local search behaviour, the most important details searchers want to know are:

• Business hours (54% of smartphone users, 42% of computer/tablet users)
• Directions (53% of smartphone users)
• Address (50% of smartphone users, 38% of computer/tablet users)
• Availability of products (45% of computer/tablet users).

You should also include your contact details – a telephone number and link to your website – and make sure these details are consistent across your Google+ profile and other content.

Adding a photo to your listing increases requests for directions by 42% and click-throughs to your website by 35%. Make sure you include a link in your listing.

2. Managing reviews

Image: Google

Reviews are always potentially a double-edged sword, but if you’re confident in the quality of your business and you love to please your customers, you shouldn’t live in fear of rotten reviews spoiling the barrel.

High star ratings are important for impressing and attracting customers. According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Beyond making an impression, they also improve your SEO. Reviews left on Google+ are one of the factors that influence your ranking in local search results.

Tips

Requesting that satisfied customers leave positive reviews can make a big difference to your local SEO – but only when they do it on Google+. Unfortunately, not many people outside of business use the network.

While Facebook Likes are great for raising your profile and building a following, they don’t make such an impact on your search engine ranking. Asking your customers to leave a Google+ review can make a big difference, keeping in mind that soliciting reviews (such as offering incentives) is against the rules.

Google wants to give searchers the best answer to their queries, so by making sure you offer a five-star experience, you, your customers and Google will all be happy.

3. Getting insights

Google My Business also allows you to see the stats on how people interacted with your listing – how many customers called your phone number directly from search results or Maps, the search terms that brought them to you, their background and other details.

Tips

Find out which search terms were the most popular and make sure these appear prominently in your listing and your Google+ profile, in addition to the other terms you identified in your keyword research.

You should also start to post optimised, shareable content to your Google+ feed, as this helps with SEO and link building. Because Google+ isn’t the most dynamic of social networks, these can be reposted from Facebook and your other networks.

Do I need Google My Business?

If you have a locally-based business, you need to rank for local searches. Searches don’t have to include location terms to be local, as Google automatically delivers local results for any relevant query, even single-word searches.

Why should you care about local search? According to Google:

• 80% of consumers use search engines to find local information.
• 50% of smartphone users who carry out local searches visit the business within a day (34% of desktop/ tablet users).
• Local searches lead to over twice as many purchases as non-local searches (18% vs. 7%).

With so many people looking for local answers to their problems, you should use all the tools at your disposal to make sure yours is the first result they see. Google’s tools don’t even cost you.

With smartphones leading the way in local search, you also need to make sure your websites are mobile-friendly or you could be losing out.

Overview of the course

The NEIS training course is based on preparing you to start a business. Once completed, the course will have guided you through the steps for developing a business plan to submit for further assistance. The course is run full time over a period of six weeks, during this period students develop a basic understanding of managing a small business. Students also have multiple one-on-one meetings with the trainer.

NEIS course structure

The first week of training begins with students learning about techniques for conducting market research, how to set appropriate goals and objectives, defining their advantage against competition and an introduction to the business plan. Students are encouraged to start conducting market research for inclusion in their business plan and also scoping out the competition by researching their prices, products and marketing plans.

The second week moves into taxation, different methods of pricing, marketing and promotion. As each module is completed, the students complete the relevant section of their business plan. The course covers different types of marketing including conventional approaches such as radio and flyers as well as more modern campaigns such as social media and CRMs.

During the second half of the course, students begin developing their financial plan. Financial tables are provided which are prefilled with the required formulae. The rest of the course focuses on completing these tables and prepares students for doing their own bookkeeping. In the final week, students put the finishing touches to their business plans and present their business to the class.

The final steps

Business plans are then submitted and students spend the next few weeks putting their newly acquired knowledge into practice while they await decision on being accepted into the next part of the program.

There are 6300 places available in the NEIS program each year and it is currently being delivered by 21 training providers throughout the country.

Image: “Studying” by Steven S. is licensed under CC BY 2.0