Troy Herbst

What Exactly is Company Culture?

A good bottom line is the byproduct of a good company culture. As much as profit and loss statements have a direct impact on your company’s long term well being, and maintaining a good company culture is every bit as important. Many business leaders are recognizing this fact and are striving to identify and magnify the culture of their company. It can be difficult to know if your company culture is effective, but there’s a few hints that may give you some sort of an idea. Here’s a look at a few of those.

Actions Speak Louder than Words

It’s incredibly easy to verbalize what your company believes in. You can talk about wanting to be a giving partner within your community, but employees, clients, and everyone around you will be able to quickly detect if you’re talking the talk or walking the walk. On an even deeper level, the behavior of the leaders within your company will dictate the culture within the walls. If you’re leaders are constantly late, missing meetings, and seeming uninterested, the culture of the company as a whole will quickly reflect that. Emulate what you want your company to be.

Purpose Driven Business

A strong company culture is deeply rooted on the presence of a company purpose. While business success is ultimately viewed in numbers, charts, and graphs, employee success is found in purpose. Motivating your employees to go above and beyond the minimum and realize that they are more than a means to an end. If employees feel like their well being is part of the company purpose, they will do more than it takes to get a paycheck and go home.

Trust From the Top Down

An excellent culture is built on trust. As the leader of an organization, the trust that needs to permeate every area of your business begins with you. A trusting culture will allow your employees to pursue their professional and personal goals without fear. A culture of trust allows people to collaborate on projects, bringing everything that is done to a higher level. People will trust you as their leader if you establish yourself as trustworthy. Before long, that trust will flow between co-workers and the entire company will be better off.

Establishing an excellent company culture will not only cause your organization to be more highly revered within the community, it will improve productivity within the business.

Marketing Planning 101: How to Get Started

No marketing strategy will be effective without properly planning it out before implementation. Companies who market on the fly or “throw it out there and see what sticks” rarely find marketing success.

They also spend a lot of money with minimal results. Don’t make this mistake.
With a few simple planning strategies, you’ll be on your way to marketing success.

Let’s take a look.

1. Define Your Target Market

Who exactly are you trying to reach? Very few products or services are a good fit for everyone between 13 – 99. Even if you wish that was your target audience, chances are it’s not.

Be realistic about what population segment will actually spend money with you. Then focus your strategy at that segment only.

2. Conduct Product Focus Groups

It’s tempting to ask a few friends and family what they think about your product, then try to build a marketing plan around that. The problem is that you won’t get much genuine feedback from the people closest to you. Although they want you to succeed, they also don’t want to upset you with negative feedback.

Instead, offer a small fee to strangers within your target market to review your product or service and provide genuine feedback.

Ask them what they liked about it, what they disliked, and what would cause them to buy it. You’ll get a wealth of knowledge to use in your marketing campaign.

Then let them keep the product when the study is complete.

3. Start Small, Then Scale Up

Don’t launch into a $10,000 social media ad campaign without running tests first. Budget a couple of hundred dollars and start A/B testing different marketing ads and approaches.

Take your time with this. Sometimes an entire campaign can fail or succeed due to a few minor changes in words or images. When you find the sweet spot, that’s when to start investing real money into the campaign.

It’s a fun and interesting process to see what consumers react to. The results will surprise you. What you think is gold might be a dud and vice versa.

Market like an Expert

Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. But it does take patience and an open eye.

If you’d prefer to trust your marketing campaign to an expert, you can always choose that route as well.

Good luck with your campaign!

My First Blog Post

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.