Marketing News

Why Would You Invest in Professional Development Training?

To attract and retain the best team of employees, professional development training must be more than a fringe benefit. Both salaried and hourly employees are seeking to work for the businesses who invest in their team. It is a prerequisite for attracting those top-performers.

Make employee training an ongoing process built into your business growth strategy. As new employees become acclimated to working in your company, they continue developing their skills and grow into larger roles. There are many reasons to provide professional development opportunities to employees that directly benefit your medium or small business.

If You Want the Best Employees, Provide Professional Development 

Expectations of entry-level employees have increased significantly over the past 10-15 years. Employers large and small...

For those of you who know me well, you might easily guess that I’m a big advocate of collaboration in business. Built into Beckmann Collaborative is the understanding that partnerships make us all stronger. When I share resources with my strategic partners, it allows us to improve the quality of each project, increase leads, expand brand awareness, and have a business confidant. These partners are purpose-driven and share some of my values.

What Does Collaboration Mean?

Simply put, collaboration is the act of engaging with someone to cooperatively create something. This definition is broad enough for one to understand, but how collaboration shows up in the workplace can often be unclear. This is especially difficult if you are a business owner and have been trained to focus on competition.

When businesses come together with a common purpose to serve a shared mission...

Written by Randi Zimmermann

Whether in business, relationships, school assignments, or almost any situation you can think of, you can get too close to a situation and the path forward becomes dubious. Everyone experiences this barrier. You don’t have to be scared of evaluating your business. 

Your Relationship with Your Business

For some reason, making decisions gets harder the closer we get to the subject matter. It becomes more difficult to see things impartially and with good judgement. Evaluating your business from an outsider’s perspective is probably one of the hardest things for a business owner to do, but it is a requirement for finding success.

We’ve all been there before – a close friend is in a terrible situation with their significant other and you just want to shake them! We ask, “why can’t you see that this isn’t...

Have an attitude of gratitude.

An “attitude of gratitude” means having the habit of showing your thankfulness and appreciation in all parts of your life – including your business.  This is a powerful tool for any small business owner or leader. Why? Your attitude can transform your life and business, or…  a lack of gratitude can bring everything down.

“Researchers define appreciation as the act of acknowledging the goodness in life—in other words, seeing the positives in events, experiences, or other people (like our colleagues)… It [gratitude] recognizes how the positive things in our lives—like a success at work—are often due to forces outside of ourselves, particularly the efforts of other people.” (Greater Good Magazine)

You might say I’m already in the Thanksgiving spirit by writing...

When you are promoting your business, social media campaigns are important to your brand awareness. Get guidance about how to write and schedule your Social Media Campaigns.  Once you feel confident about your plan, the final step in the process is to review and analyze what’s happened. Time to analyze and adjust.  The steps towards a successful social media campaign:

1. Research Your Social Content
Whether you are new to social media marketing or have existing channels, set aside time to research competitors content as well as your own. You need to take a step back to move forward.

2. Writing and Planning Your Social Content
Social media is not about throwing content out into the world and hoping that someone will read it. You are creating content that expresses your story, your business, and the value you bring to others in a focused way – under the...

Originally published in July 2016. Updated July 2019

Writing and Planning

We aren’t just throwing content out into the social sphere with the hope that someone will read it and be suddenly inspired to buy something, right? I hope that isn’t your perspective, because it’s a great way to fail.  You are creating content that expresses your story, your business, and the value you bring to others.

What is a Social Media Marketing Campaign?

When you have a specific goal for your marketing with a content theme, you are developing a marketing campaign. Consider all of the different ideas you have for your social media content: how-to posts, fun facts, inspirational quotes, FAQs, top 5 lists, etc. What is the purpose of these posts? Are there areas of commonality among those pieces? Those are your overarching themes or campaigns. When you take...

What’s in your marketing message? Does your target audience understand the value you can bring to them? Are you using a consistent message about your business throughout your digital marketing footprint - from website to social media presence and beyond?

All of your content—for marketing, sales, customer service, and anything else publicly available—is a reflection of your brand message. It should be clearly understood and provide value to your audience.  If you feel unsure about this, you are not alone. Branding and content strategy are not usually part of “how to start a business” education.

Your Social Media Footprint

Since social media began as “social” endeavor, as the name references, most of us have used it to connect with friends, family, and new people. However, using it for business is a different story. When you log in...

Since today is my birthday (Candice Beckmann), I wanted to share some personal insights from my experiences of growing up with incredible mentoring programs for developing my professional skills.

And I’d like to also express my gratitude for those individuals and employers who saw the importance of investing in me and others.

Mentors Make a Huge Difference

Mentoring programs help to build skills, not only in daily work duties, but also in the less tangible areas such as leadership, teamwork, confidence, and self-awareness. A great mentor provides priceless advice and guidance, which an employee or mentee will take on throughout her career. Thank you to those who have taken the time and patience to coach and support me over the years.

My life and the lives of those I work with are better because of the opportunities I had to learn and grow with past companies through...

Have you ever exported your Facebook Analytics to take a closer look? It’s overwhelming. In fact, it seems like the designers wanted to inundate you with information so that you wouldn’t look at it. Really though, Facebook collects so much data per post that they want you to have everything available to you.

This post looks at some of the key sections in the excel spreadsheet export from Facebook analytics so that the next time you look at it, you won’t feel so overwhelmed.

Step 1: Exporting Facebook Analytics

Go to your Facebook Page (not personal account) and click on Export Data in the top right corner

You’ll see a pop-up box with a few options. Today, we’re looking at your posts so choose the the Post Data option. I recommend looking at a minimum of 3 months of data, so adjust the Date Range to reflect that amount...

This is the third part of the 3-part series about email list building strategies. Check out the first post about designing a powerful sign-up or opt-in form and the second post about 5 ways to get content clarity. The point of this series is to share some best practices. Rather than offering specific tools, I’ll let you decide how you’d like to implement these email strategies. If you know what you need from a software tool, then you don’t need me to tell you which one to choose.

Before jumping into the core focus of this post, I’d like to share a quick tip with you…

TIP: Try this promotion for a unique one-to-one targeted outreach

• Web search for competitors who rank well.
• Thoroughly read & learn from the sign-up experiences of the first 10 pages (do it incognito mode)
• Look closely at the people who made comments on those competitor’s...