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Starting a business can be both thrilling and intimidating. The good news is that while every business is unique, most must adhere to specific basic guidelines.
While this is not an exhaustive list of everything your new business may need to complete, here is a 10-point business startup checklist of some of the most important steps:
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | December 14, 2022
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
You’ve probably heard that storytelling is essential for business, marketing, and life in general. You may have also heard that it’s a powerful tool with the potential for a tremendous lasting impact.
With that being said, think about what Zig Ziglar said, “Those of you who read the Bible know (and whether you are a believer or not, most people respect the fact) that Christ was a powerful persuader.” He goes on to say, “when people asked Christ a question, He either responded with a question or a parable—both of which are tools for persuasion.” (Source: Selling 101 by Zig Ziglar)
In other words, we love a good story! Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, states, “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
Knowing this, do you not think that telling stories from your school’s rich history will excite, entertain, and encourage your community? Stories can and should be at the heart of effective school marketing and are critical to your school’s long-term success.
In this post, we will cover the following:
Written By: Adam Bennett | December 12, 2022
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
If you are a small business owner or in charge of marketing your small business online, you have likely heard of local SEO and organic SEO. But you may ask yourself what the difference is and why local SEO is essential for your small business.
In this post, I'll explain the difference between local SEO and organic SEO and how they're related.
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | December 07, 2022
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
Employees are the cornerstone of every prosperous company. This is the reason why a corporation must have strong human resources. There are eight essential HR components listed in this post on Grasshopper.com for your company's success.
The ability to recruit and keep talented people depends on a well-organized human resource process. To run your small business, you should prioritize the following main duties.
- Personnel paperwork to protect yourself and the company, you must gather and save three documents for each employee in a safe place.
I-9 File, a general file for the employee that contains the resume, payroll data, and W-4
A personnel medical record, if applicable (Disability and medical info)
- Occupational Handbook This explains your expectations for employees and includes information about your policies, benefits, and firing.
- Required Posters: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) mandates that businesses post posters in the workplace detailing their employment practices, pay obligations, and workplace safety. Employers are accountable for ensuring that remote workers have access to the posters.
- Hiring procedure: Choosing the appropriate people for your company may make or ruin it. Therefore, be careful to design an effective hiring procedure. A thorough job description, an interview, and reference and background checks.
- Performance evaluations: In a start-up or small business environment, investing time in your workers' professional development can keep them interested in and, most importantly, devoted to your company.
- Employee Training & Development: Providing your staff with professional development opportunities can help to keep them interested in working for your business.
- Recognition of Employees: Employee recognition is quite helpful. Without splurging, there are numerous original ways to recognize individuals who go "above and beyond."
Understand that different individuals interpret recognition differently, so steer clear of a one-size-fits-all strategy and try to be as accommodating as you can to everyone.
- Employee Benefits: According to research, employee satisfaction is correlated with the standard of the benefits offered.
- Medical Insurance
- Disability and Life Insurance
- Retirement
- Dental and Vision Insurance
Two additional employee benefits that small business owners are mandated by law to offer are:
- Social Security
- Workers Compensation
Written By: Alexa Wagoner | December 05, 2022
As of 2022, more than 4.7 Billion people all over the world are active on at least one social media platform (Source: Smart Insights). This represents 93.6% of all internet users. Almost all internet users have a social media account - most are active on multiple platforms.
As a small business owner, you cannot afford to ignore these numbers. Social media marketing has to be a key component of your marketing strategy.
But digital marketing can be an overwhelming endeavor for business owners that aren’t tech savvy. No need to worry, though. You don’t need to be a techie or a marketing expert to reap the benefits of social media marketing. Here are some tips that you can use to promote your business on social media.
Written By: Hannah Kilpatrick | November 30, 2022
Hannah Kilpatrick Cube Creative DesignHannah Kilpatrick graduated from Western Carolina University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Communication with a Minor in Marketing and a Concentration in Public Relations. She has been around social media since its creation. (Meaning, she was in the first grade when Facebook became available to the general public.) As our very own professional Gen-Z, Hannah is a whiz when it comes to social media creation and paid advertising.
For ease of scaling, it is important to equip your small firm with appropriate human resource practices. Additionally, it is crucial that you create your HR staff in accordance with the demands of your company and sector. This ensures that your HR staff members are qualified to handle both specific company problems and your workforce. Additionally, you want your HR team to possess outstanding people skills. Sba.thehartford.com provides the following advice.
Written By: Alexa Wagoner | November 28, 2022
Are you finding a way to connect with your customers? Or do you ever have a situation where customers just come and go with your business without any communication trace? Well, you should be thinking twice right now.
Running a successful business requires delivering satisfying customer experiences. Customers now demand the same support from digital customer service channels as your physical store or contact center's top-tier staff.
Today is a digital age. Thus, we should know about the digital channel.
When you think of rural America, you might often think of steep mountains with few people or large farms where your nearest neighbor may be several miles away. It is also easy to assume rural markets are unreachable and disconnected from most traditional and digital marketing forms, but that’s not the case in the modern era.
Take these statistics into consideration:
- 72% of Rural Area U.S. Adults have home broadband access (Source: Pew Research Center)
- 80% of Rural Area U.S. Adults have a smartphone with internet access (Source: Pew Research Center)
- 78% of North Carolina has internet as of November 2021 (Source: Statista)
- States surrounding NC:
- Tennessee: 79.1%
- Virginia: 80.5%
- Georgia: 81.2%
- South Carolina: 81.3%
According to a Gallup poll, at the end of 2020, almost half of Americans said that if they could choose, they would choose a small town (17%) or rural area (31%) rather than a city or suburb.
Given these statistics, it is evident that rural America is seeing a resurgence in the small-town and rural lifestyle. Rural small businesses can capitalize on these new faces by positioning themselves better through their marketing efforts.
Therefore, let’s look at the following tips and tricks to help rural small businesses:
Written By: Chad J. Treadway | November 23, 2022
Chad is our Chief Smarketing Officer. He will help you survey your small business needs, educating you on your options before suggesting any solution. Chad is passionate about rural marketing in the United States and North Carolina. He also has several certifications through HubSpot to better assist you with your internet and inbound marketing.
Suppose you want to improve your private school's blog or increase the frequency with which you blog. You have to produce high-quality content that attracts visitors consistently. Or perhaps you've written a few blog posts and are eager to see how they're being received. You've put your heart and soul into each article, and you're confident that parents will enjoy reading the content you've carefully crafted for them.
You sit back and wait for the likes, shares, and comments to pour in. You look at your blog every day, and nothing.
Is this something that has happened to you? If this is the case, don't be disheartened, as this does not have to be the case. There are strategies you can employ to almost guarantee that your blog posts will drive traffic immediately and continue attracting visitors for months to come.
Here are my top seven quick-win strategies for private school blog posts that will attract visitors from search engines, social media, and other websites.
Written By: Adam Bennett | November 21, 2022
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
As a small business owner or if you are employed in Human Resources, management, etc., you may be asking yourself how I can get and retain employees in today’s market. Since the pandemic, staffing shortages have been impacting almost every industry. In this post, I will cover five tips to help you hire employees in today's market.
Written By: Alexa Wagoner | November 16, 2022
As a private school marketer or administrator, you know the importance of including relevant, high-quality photos on your blog articles, website, and social media posts. Photographs, illustrations, and other visuals can only enhance the appeal of your content.
Regarding content on the web, the general rule is that you should always include at least one image with each post. If your post is longer, you may want to have several.
Images and graphics are not only aesthetically appealing, but they also make your text more interesting to read. They can also assist you with search engine optimization (SEO).
Regarding image optimization for the web, there are three approaches to consider:
- Make your images look good.
- Make your images load quickly.
- Make your images easy for search engines to index.
Most articles on the subject focus on one of these elements or another; however, I will discuss all three in this post.
Written By: Adam Bennett | November 14, 2022
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.
Far too many school marketers fail to implement a plan for finding and using the optimum keywords for their blog articles. It could be a fatal error in the cutthroat world of search engine optimization (SEO), where making it on the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is the holy grail. Similarly, learning how to choose the appropriate keywords could significantly affect the volume of inbound traffic that finds your blog article.
To define the ideal keywords, you must understand the keyword research process, use SEO keyword research tools, and arrange your keywords in the appropriate spots.
Written By: Adam Bennett | November 09, 2022
Adam is the president and founder of Cube Creative Design and specializes in private school marketing. Since starting the business in 2005, he has created individual relationships with clients in Western North Carolina and across the United States. He places great value on the needs, expectations, and goals of the client.