JoomConnect Blog

It’s that time of the year again! Time to plan your company picnic. Of course your company picnic is an excellent opportunity to relax and recharge with family and coworkers- and eat delicious food, but it can also be an excellent opportunity to promote the personality of your company to clients and potential clients. 

In order for your business to be successful, there needs to be an incoming cash flow, and in order to draw in this cash flow, your audience has to be both aware of what you have to offer them, and have communicated their willingness to make an exchange with you. This outcome will be much more likely with help from two key components of any business’ team: sales and marketing.

We’ve spoken at length about the importance of social media as a business marketing tool. We even include it in our other marketing services. Our blog service, for instance, includes the setup of a third-party tool that will automatically post your blogs to your business’ social media pages.

While most might be familiar with the concept of a business’ code of conduct—the rules that their employees have to follow and comply with—fewer are likely aware of the concept of a code of ethics. Let’s go over what this kind of code covers, and how a friendly neighborhood IT team might develop one of their own.

If you were to rank the pages of your website by importance to your clients, your first instinct might be to put your more personal pages--like your About Us and Staff pages--somewhere near the bottom of the list.

That would be a mistake.

Is your marketing in a rut? You’ve shared miles and miles worth of copy, all delivering considerable-to-extraordinary value to your readership. You’ve produced blogs, deliverable brochures and case studies, postcards, yet your marketing seems to have reached its peak, far short of what you know you can achieve somehow. That “somehow” could very likely be through some well-produced video content.

While marketing needs to include the quality of your products and services to an extent, that’s only half the battle. Your marketing also needs to show your audience what your business is about so they can determine if they think your companies will work together well - after all, there are few things worse in business than a relationship with an incompatible company. To avoid this, your marketing should include your company culture.

How much of your marketing focuses around your accomplishments? How great and successful you are? Your accolades? Your achievements? How much skill you’ve crammed into one business, and how great the services that your business provides are? While there’s nothing wrong with talking up your abilities in your marketing, you need to be sure that you don’t cross the line into being egotistical - for quite a few reasons.

Your clients want to learn as much as they can about you before they make the decision to do business with you. This means that they will be scouring your website in an attempt to learn as much about you as possible before they decide to actually reach out to you. One of the places they’re almost guaranteed to visit is your ‘About Us’ page. Are they going to like what they see?

We’ve often talked about how important it is to include visual content in your marketing materials. Of course, when we talk about visual content, we often mean images and photographs. This raises another question--if you plan to create your own images, does it make more sense to invest in an office camera, or to hire a photographer?

There’s this off-handed idea that you only need public relations if you or your company has made some type of mistake. Kind of how no one knows about a celebrity’s PR rep until they’ve done something wrong - like cheated, lied, stolen, etc. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. You don’t only want to be seen when something goes wrong and you have to fix it. The trick with public relations is to put enough flame-resistance out there beforehand to help lessen the intensity when something does go wrong. Your public relations are the only way you can have any control over public opinion, so you need to be sure to implement a strategy along with your marketing.

Why is employee appreciation important? Just as your clients are asking “what is this company going to do for me?”, your employees (and future employees) are wondering the same thing. One of the main reasons people leave their jobs is because they don’t feel appreciated. We here at JoomConnect have come up with key points to help you effectively approach employee recognition and appreciation.

Friday, April 22, 2016 will mark the 46th anniversary of Earth Day. It was started on April 22, 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson to make sure that the media and political leaders were addressing the importance of our environment. We’ve all heard about “Reduce, Reuse & Recycle” for years, but are you implementing these practices in your workplace?  Here at JoomConnect, we’ve developed a list of ways to offset our company’s carbon footprint by using the 4 R’s.

Some business owners might not be aware of just how much their speech can affect the people around them. Words can foster trust between two people, and have the power to end a relationship. Words can inspire people, but also put them down. You might not feel like you take certain people seriously, but psychological research proves otherwise.

Millennials, the employees of the future… ten years ago. Now, they account for around 34 percent of the current workforce. It’s predicted that by 2025, they will total around 75 percent of the workforce. Therefore, it’s crucial for your business to understand what make millennials different than the people that currently make up most of today’s workforce.

Everybody desires a job that can contribute to their happiness. In fact, for many workers, they’ll even forgo a little bit of salary if it means finding happiness at work. As a business owner, the way you run your company has the potential to make a lot of people happy--which can in turn make you happy by increasing profits!

As a decision maker for an IT company, your opinions and ideas affect a lot more than just you. As you and your managers make decisions, those choices and thoughts trickle down through the entire company and, eventually, to your clients. It should come as no surprise that the words you speak, the tone you use and the manner in which you address people can have a huge impact on the quality of your work, productivity of co-workers, and overall, the atmosphere of your business.

Last month, we were approached by David Russell, of Manage2Win, to give a presentation on our company culture and how it influences our marketing efforts. The outcome was a webinar entitled "Turn Your Company Culture into a Marketing Machine". The presentation focused on establishing the identity of each business' company culture and how it can empower their marketing efforts. Presented by our CEO, Chris Chase, the presentation included valuable theory along with supporting examples of personal company stories to support the idea that company leaders shape their company culture, which in turn influences their marketing efforts.

dil-i-gence (diləjəns) - 1. careful and persistent work or effort.

All small business owners can agree that sometimes running their enterprise is just downright difficult. Managing the multitude of variables from payroll to employee morale to procurement to distribution to oversight is more than enough to keep an individual up at night. This is the life of the entrepreneur. For this reason it is crucial to have people on your staff adept at the responsibilities you've delegated to them. If, as the business owner, you are the only person that can properly achieve a successful resolution of these tasks, it may be time for you to stress the importance of operational diligence to your staff. You shouldn't have to, of course. Any employee worth his or her salt doesn't need to be told that the result of each project requires a careful and thorough approach.

For so many of us, daily use of technology has become a major part of our lives. Between computers, smartphones, laptops and other mobile devices, technology is rarely more than an arm's length away.

When we asked our staff what technology they’re the most thankful for, we got some genuinely thoughtful answers, reminding us that technology has changed our lives forever - and it isn’t all text messages and CandyCrush.