Spring Cleaning Tips For The Office

When you think about it, you spend more time at your office than in your own home, not counting sleeping hours of course. Consequently, the atmosphere of your office, whether it be neat or disorganized, will greatly affect you and your employees in a myriad of ways. Therefore, learning how to keep your office clean is important. Before getting to the cleaning tips, though, let's look at why a clean office is imperative.

A Disorganized/Dirty Office Is:

• Unprofessional: If your office is cluttered, dusty, or generally disorganized, you will instantly appear less professional to clients/customers. You might say, "I'm too busy working to clean up after myself." Well, consider the appearance of your office as you would your own. Would you come to work in your bathrobe simply because it took more time to get dressed?


• Less Productive: Running a successful business is all about productivity. Getting things accomplished is the end goal. If you spend an hour looking for a particular folder under piles of other files and perhaps old take-out cups, is that a productive way to do business? Of course, it isn't. By not having a place for everything and keeping everything in its place you are actually wasting billable hours.


• Can Make You Sick: A dusty, dirty office can also cause sickness in a person who has a sensitivity to dust or allergens. Therefore, as a business owner, you might lose a part of your team to sickness simply because your work environment isn't healthy. This reduces productivity simply by cutting down manpower.

Spring Cleaning Tips

Benjamin Disraeli, an author who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1800s, said the following about the importance of and commitment to cleanliness in all aspects of life:

"Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them."

This quote exemplifies the importance of cleanliness perfectly. It also reminds us that cleaning isn't always instinctual. That's why a checklist of sorts is as worthwhile as a guide on whipping your office into shape this spring.

Primary Focus Areas

There are three basic areas you should focus on when cleaning your office. These include your workspace, your paperwork, and your technology. There are, of course, more areas to think about, such as the floors, bathrooms, and such, but just getting these three basic areas organized will go a long way towards creating a more productive working environment.

1) Organize Your Workspace

This is relatively easy; it just takes time. Simply go through your desk and throw away the trash. It sounds simple, but it's amazing how many people don't do this basic step. Get rid of/recycle old water bottles, carry-out cartons, and drinks. Also, donate or throw away anything you don't use or that doesn't work. Why keep a calculator that doesn't function properly or hang on to a pencil that's too small to write with? Simply getting rid of all the stuff you don't need or use on and around your desk will help immensely.

2) Reduce Paper Work

As you know, paperwork is never ending, and if you don't have a great file/shred system in place, it can really get out of hand. Part of cleaning off your workspace should include going through and shredding documents you no longer need. If you do need to keep something, create an easy-to-follow filing system to get these files off your desk.

3) Clean Your Technology

This tip should be taken literally, as in taking your computer apart and dusting it with the proper tools, as well as metaphorically. Clean the inside of your computer by deleting old emails and archiving those you need to keep.It's also a great time to back up your server if you have one or update old software.

If you commit to putting things away at the end of every day, your office will never get as unorganized as it was. You might have to allow a few days for cleaning, but the increased production, as well as the creation of a more professional workspace, is well worth the time investment.

What You Need to Know About Facebook's New Mix Modeling Portal

We've written extensively in the past about how when it comes to digital and print marketing, you're not looking at an either/or proposition. Often, businesses of all sizes are finding great success embracing the best of both worlds - reaching out to the customers who are most receptive to print channels via traditional methods and using digital resources when they're most appropriate. We've even written about how you can take the lessons learned online and use them to make your print strategies even stronger.

We're not the only people who share this opinion; it would seem. Facebook has recently launched a mixed marketing portal designed to make it easier than ever for businesses to compare Facebook-based advertisements to television, print, and other types of collateral. While this does mean big things for people using Facebook as an advertising platform, what it means for print marketers is even more interesting.

What Facebook is Doing

The social networking giant's mix modeling portal for marketers is a significant extension of an existing partnership. Over the course of the past few years, Facebook has teamed with Nielsen (the people who tell you how many people watch the Super Bowl each year, among other things), comScore (the people who focus on digital, TV and movie analytics), DoubleVerify (a company that aims to "authenticate the quality of each digital media impression"), and others. This has all been done to provide clear metrics on how far a Facebook ad reaches, how many impressions it gets, its ultimate performance, and more.

For advertisers that rely heavily on Facebook, this means that they now have access to twenty-four different third party measurement partners to track the performance of their ads around the world, see how their ads are comparing against similar ads running in the world of print and more.

For print-based marketers, this also thankfully means that the reverse is true, too.

What This Means For You

Even if you don't heavily advertise on Facebook, this new model is still something to pay close attention to because of the metrics at play. It's another example of the ever-important concept of "pay attention to what is working online and use it to strengthen the foundation of your print campaigns." Thanks to Facebook, this just got a whole lot easier.

By giving advertisers the ability to compare a successful Facebook ad to other elements of their campaign like print, people who DO happen to be heavy print advertisers can essentially come in from the opposite angle and learn just as much. It's all a matter of perspective - the marketing mix modeling portal can be used to look at one of your successful print ads, compare it to ads that are running on Facebook and use that actionable information to feed back into the print campaign to help achieve your desired outcomes.

Print and digital advertising have historically been measured in very different ways, but thanks to Facebook we just took a big leap closer to a uniform standard that can be used in both situations. You can use the Facebook MMM Portal to see how impressions reach and other metrics translate into the real world and back again.

Different By Design: 6 Tips for Adopting The Principles Of Disruption and Improving Your Marketing Strategy

Less than a decade ago, one of the world's largest transport networks was simply an imaginative flicker in the minds of two men trying to hail a taxi on a cold Paris night. After failing to snag a car, the two men came up with an idea of an on-demand taxi service at the touch of a button. What began on a snowy evening in France quickly turned into an app to request luxury sedans in a tiny handful of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. Soon it spread to include different types of rides, package and even food delivery in nearly any city on earth. That app was Uber.

Uber is now one of the world's richest start-ups. Along with other innovative digital companies such as Airbnb, Snapchat, Netflix, and even Buzzfeed, Uber has grasped a powerful disruptive strategy that has brought it financial and scalable success in a short amount of time. Disruptive businesses such as these can pick out and then act on trends before they become a trend, building a niche in a market that many people haven't even discovered yet. Follow these six tips to learn some disruptive strategies that will help to differentiate your business and set it up for future growth.

1) Be technologically savvy
Get to know what is happening in the world of all things digital and tech, even outside of your own industry. Something that can revolutionize your business might come from a spark of something you've noticed in a different market or business type.

2) Be a first adopter
Often successful companies are the first ones to take on changes and innovations and to use them to their advantage. Don't be afraid to step out on your own when trying something new.

3) Rely on sharing
Businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional forms of advertising. Combining your marketing channels to include print, as well as digital sharing and promotion can be the easiest and quickest ways to reach potential customers.

4) Keep up with the competition
Stay aware of what your competitors are doing and be prepared to match their innovations with yours.

5) Interact with customers
Uber and the like are successful for their ability to connect with customers instantly. Listening to your customers helps to gauge demand and enhance the consumer relationship. With the rise of social media, customers are developing increasing expectations for transparency from businesses. Forming a connection with your clients will add to their loyalty and trust of your company. With constant lines of communication open to your customers, you can also respond quicker to real-time changes in the market, safeguarding you from future pitfalls.

6) Track your success
Digital data provides you with the tools and metrics to see how and where your customers are coming to awareness and consideration of your services or products. Understanding and using data effectively can make the difference in building and maintaining new business and answering needs within the market.

Why You Can Never Nurture Your Leads TOO Much

If you think that you can comfortably stop nurturing your leads as soon as they make that ever-important sale, you're only seeing one small part of a much larger and more important picture. The fact of the matter is that you can NEVER nurture your leads too much for a variety of important reasons.

Why Lead Nurturing is So Important

Lead nurturing is an essential part of any business, but judging by some recent studies, it may be more important than you think. According to Gleanster Research, as many as half of all the leads coming into your business may be qualified, but they're not yet ready to buy. Nurturing is perhaps the single best way to make sure you're able to convert as much of that 50% as possible into a sale.

To make things more interesting, research from InsideSales.com shows that between 35% and 50% of all sales go to a brand that responds to a customer FIRST. This means that even if you know you're working with a qualified lead AND you know that they'll eventually be ready to buy, they may not buy with YOU at all if you don't have a timely presence in their life.

That, in a nutshell, is why lead nurturing is so mission critical to your organization. If you're not nurturing properly and using timely marketing collateral to help usher someone down the sales funnel, you may be doing little more than perfectly setting someone up to make a purchase with one of your competitors.

NSN: "Never Stop Nurturing"

Consumers want to be loyal to a brand. However, they're also loyal to themselves and their own situations first and foremost. If you think that just because you've ushered a lead down the sales funnel and convinced them to make a purchase that you'll have them forever, you're sadly mistaken. And, unfortunately, this is one mistake that you're likely to pay dearly for.

Remember that "making a sale" is NOT the only benefit of consistent lead nurturing. According to research, leads that have been nurtured experience a 23% shorter sales cycle than those who have not been. Nurturing over time (as opposed to just in the beginning of your relationship) can even increase your revenue over the next six to nine months by as much as 10% or more.

Remember that a constant and consistent nurturing gives way to perhaps the biggest benefit of all: retention. According to one study, it costs 500% more to bring in a new customer than it does to keep a current one. Likewise, the cost of bringing a new customer up to the same level of profitability as one of your old ones is up to 16% more. All of this is to say that by adopting the mantra of "I can never nurture a lead too much" today, you could be saving yourself a tremendous amount of money tomorrow.

Nurturing a lead to the point where you've made a sale is important, but this is not the point where your story ends. Consistently nurturing your leads even AFTER a sale will continue to pay dividends over the lifetime of your relationship with that person. The benefits of retention versus bringing in new customers alone should be more than worth the effort you'll need to make.

How to Combine Your Passion and Profession to Make Your Life Purposeful

You have likely heard the adage, "Choose a profession you love, and you'll never work a day in your life." Although the thought of this has merit, sometimes, if a person's passion isn't something they can easily transform into a money-making endeavor, it can be a little unrealistic. Thankfully, there is more than one way to combine your passion with your profession to create a purposeful life.

Use Your Passion to Generate Income

We all seem to know at least one person who bought a professional camera and began making money by becoming a photographer. Their profession, of course, was combined with their passion for photography and is now generating income. Another good example of this is someone whose passion is music. They have many options when it comes to transforming that into a career. They can become a music teacher at a school, play an instrument in their local orchestra, give private lessons, or even play at places of worship, parties or weddings as a way to produce an income. These are just a few examples of passions perfectly suited for generating income. There are countless others, and we can all agree that "it's a beautiful thing when a career and passion come together." If you have a passion like this, congrats! Unfortunately, not all passions are equally conducive when it comes to generating income. There isn't an obvious way to create a career out of every passion.

What to Do When Your Passion Doesn't Easily Translate to a Profession

Let's consider an example of a passion that would be less than ideal as a career. This could include being passionate about running, biking, or being focused on giving to the homeless, third world countries, or charities. Often, these are hobbies/passions that are practiced alongside a career and don't ever become the career itself. Of course, there are some ways to use these passions to generate income. However, it's not easy to make money working for a charity or by giving to the homeless. It's also hard to get someone to pay you to cycle or run. That doesn't mean you aren't allowed to live out your passion, though. You just might have to get creative with how you go about doing it.

Companies That Have Successfully Combined Their Passion & Profession:

An excellent example of this principle in action is the TOMS Company, which has been in business for going on eleven years. The concept they came up with was revolutionary at the time. When they began, TOMS was virtually the only company doing something like this. (There are more now.) TOMS started by selling shoes and advertising a one-for-one system. Their customers bought a pair of shoes from them, and then TOMS donated a pair to a needy child. Therefore, every customer got to get in on the giving action. Customers loved the product but liked the fact that their purchase helped a child in need even more. Today, TOMS has branched out to sell coffee, bags, and eyewear along with their shoes. As of January 2016, TOMS has given away more than 60 million pairs of shoes. TOMS is an excellent example of how you can combine your passion, in this case, helping children in need, with a profession that began selling shoes in a unique way.

How to Get Started

TOMS showcases an ideal strategy to combine your passion and profession. Of course, you don't have to sell shoes to give back. You can also use the assets you acquire through doing business to give back. The idea isn't to get this perfect. It's to attempt to combine your passion with your profession in some way so that you will live purposefully. Remember, starting somewhere will get you where you want to go quicker than sitting still!

Making Sense of Paper Coating: How it Affects Your Efforts and What You Need to Know

A lot has been written about the effectiveness of print marketing versus digital marketing - so much so, that we're not going to get into it here. It's safe to say that both have their fair share of advantages and when used effectively, can compliment one another very nicely. There is one major benefit that print marketers have that their digital brethren don't share - the paper itself.

People like to feel something in their fingers when they read it or consume it. One of the biggest contributors of that phenomenon is paper coating. Knowing how it affects what you're trying to accomplish is one of the keys to making the best possible paper decisions moving forward.

The Role of Coating in Marketing

We've already covered paper stock, along with how that stock affects someone's initial impression of a piece of marketing collateral. Making an effort to select the right type of stock can have a significant affect on the way someone experiences your marketing materials for the first time. Another contributing factor, however, is the coating - or the lack thereof.

When paper is coated, it's treated with a compound or polymer to make sure that the finished product has certain qualities that weren't initially present. Paper can be used to give your flyer a subtle sheen or surface gloss, for example, or it can even take a thinner piece of paper and make it feel thicker in someone's hands. It can be used to make a rougher piece of paper feel smooth, or even reduce the way that ink is absorbed when someone runs their fingers across it.

The coating is introduced onto paper stock using an offset press through a process that varies depending on exactly what type of coating you're talking about. Semi-gloss coating, for example, is often called "UV" coating because the paper itself is coated with a high gloss under intense UV lights.

The Many Types of Coatings to Choose From

Just as was true with paper stock, you have a broad range of different options available to you when it comes to coatings depending on what you're trying to accomplish. These include, but are certainly not limited to, ones like:

Matte Paper.
If the coating on paper was like the paint in your home, think of matte like a flat paint. It produces a high-quality result, but the coating itself does little to help those colors pop in the way you might need it to.

Glossy Paper.
To continue with the "house paint" analogy, glossy paper would be like semi-gloss paint. It introduces a beautiful sheen into the finished product, but it isn't necessarily super shiny like a mirror.

Coated paper.
If you've ever seen a piece of paper that was very, very shiny, you were looking at a piece of coated paper. This is commonly referred to as C2S paper, which is short for "coated (on) 2 sides."

In the end, paper coating requires you to add a new dimension to your thinking concerning your print marketing collateral. You can't just think about the impression you make when someone sees your next flyer or brochure - you need to think about the impression you give off when they feel it, too. Do you want something super shiny, or would something with a more traditional sheen do? The answer, as always, will depend on exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish.

The Amazing Power of Peer Pressure in Groups

When Stanley's daughter was about five and a half, it was time for her to pick out her first bike. No surprise, she wanted something with bold colors and controls. The typical child bicycle for girls was frequently some kind of flowery motif, a princess bike, or a fairy theme. However, when Stanley brought his daughter to the store, he made a point to tell her she could pick any bike in the store for her size. And she chose a bold, fire-engine red Transformers bike for her favorite TV robot heroes. Stanley wasn't sure about the pick and asked her again if his daughter was sure. She looked around and within ten seconds was done; it would be the Transformers bike without question. So, that's the bike she got.

A month later Stanley's daughter went with her sister to the local park. They were back within minutes, and the younger one was crying. Stanley asked them what happened and, between sobs and hiccuping, his younger daughter blurted out she had been picked on for riding a boy's bike. The culprit was other neighborhood kids, particularly girls. Stanley's daughter rolled her Transformer's bike into the garage, laid it down, and ran inside sobbing. That was the last time she ever rode that bike again. Stanley tried to see if she would ride it again a month later, but no luck. The bike ended up going to charity.

Every day at work people face decisions that they must then put in front of others, their peers. Like Stanley's daughter, they will meet people who will criticize and oppose actions or directions chosen. Sometimes it's for technical reasons and sometimes they do it just to be a pain. However, those peer pressure decisions can be immense depending where one is in their career. If starting out, and the opinion comes from more experienced peers, the pressure can have a huge effect on how people try to fit in, even causing anxiety in some folks. Everybody at some point wants to be accepted, and at work, it can be a fundamental requirement to gel with the "team."

How one deals with peer pressure and compensates for it will dictate how capable of a decision-maker he or she can be. While it would be easy to assume things are top-down, dictatorial, in reality, our decision-making is often an interactive, communal function, so influence matters tremendously. Realizing this and learning how to control the pressure separates good decision-makers from those who can only operate in a vacuum. Controlling it versus being controlled means one rides their "bike" instead of losing it under pressure.

People are fundamentally social creatures, so those who want to be decision-makers need to understand how to use social influence to their advantage, not disadvantage. The last place a decision-maker wants to be is being second guessed or shamed in public when pushing a proposal. Part of effective leadership is knowing how to influence ahead of time and build decision support before the decision actually has to be made. Some call it being "political," but realistically, effective leadership involves performance with a team, not against it.