ImagesMagUK_October_2020

www.images-magazine.com OCTOBER 2020 images 25 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT An important point to consider is equipment. Modern smartphones have great cameras, but for a truly immersive experience, and if you are taking videos/streaming seriously, it will pay to invest in good equipment. A high-quality video camera, sound board, microphone and some lighting equipment will help enhance your videos (also, a little make- up never hurts!). Getting into videos and live streaming is simple: take time to consider why you are doing it and what you want to achieve, what platform you are going to use, and what equipment you need. Your video skills could become a USP for your business’s marketing activities and help you to stand out on cluttered social media feeds. A video or a live stream is a great way to showcase you, your passion, your personality and your expertise. Customers always love to put a name to a face! It also represents a great chance to show off your business and its facilities, services, processes, and products. On a practical business level, visual items such as videos and infographics are more eye-catching than plain text posts, and are more likely to gain traction when it comes to your online marketing, which, after all, is the ultimate goal. There are also SEO benefits to creating visual content for your business – gaining extra brownie points with Google is always a big plus for any company. Firstly, you need to decide what type of visual content you would like to put in front of your customer. It could be a review of a product or brand, you discussing print and embroidery, something a bit quirky and creative that showcases your business’s brand, or perhaps an animation promoting the business and why customers use your services. Consider the platform you are going to use. Live streaming is often done through YouTube, but you can also broadcast live on Facebook and Instagram, and of course TikTok is ideal for short videos (look at the September issue of Images for more on using TikTok for marketing purposes: imagesmag.uk/tiktok ). Using videos tomarket your business Andrew Langridge is from ETrader, one of the industry’s leading suppliers of websites to garment decorators across the UK. www.etraderwebsites.co.uk T here is no truer adage than “First impressions are lasting impressions”, and one of the characters in your business that helps contribute to a good first impression is your caretaker (or janitor, as we call them in Canada). In the early days of my business, I visited an ink factory in Toronto for a meeting about the possibility of distributing their product. The conference room resembled a poorly maintained storeroom. The chairs had ink and greasy food stains embedded in the fabric seat. Filing boxes, some spewing their contents onto the floor, appeared to have been carelessly dropped along one wall. Cups containing cold coffee shared the table with a scattering of paperwork, colour charts, a stapler, a hole-punch, and a selection of pens. Only three of the six lights were working. Just months earlier I attended a similar meeting at an ink factory near Atlanta. The contrast couldn’t have been starker. There were no ink stains on the carpet in the reception area, and the brightly lit conference room with its highly polished table and black leather boardroom chairs resembled that of a Fortune 500 head office. Everything about the company spoke of professionalism and quality. And it should come as no surprise that as time went by, I found the quality of their product and business style matched my favourable impression of their premises. Back in Toronto, the meeting did not go well. Their products lacked quality and their business conduct lacked finesse as much as their premises lacked a caretaker. Any possibility of our doing business together perished right there in that caretaker-free zone. In addition to the impact that a clean and orderly small business premises has on outsiders, we can’t lose sight of the impact it has on employees. Few things Caretaker: the importance of first impressions will chip away at staff morale as much as a dirty and disorderly work environment. Depending upon the size of the business, the caretaker could be an individual or service contracted to attend regularly, or it could be a full-time staff member. In many small businesses, particularly in small start-ups, the owner is quite often the caretaker (among a number of other roles) until circumstances permit otherwise. Regardless of who fills the caretaking role, cleanliness must be everyone’s obsession, most particularly the owner’s, since they set the standards for the rest of the organisation. The role of assistant caretaker should be an assumed part of every employee’s job description. Michael Best is a print industry veteran, accountant and author of Characters Who Can Make Or Break Your Small Business . Through 39 characters, Michael covers all aspects most small business owners can expect to encounter in the life of a business from inception to disposition. It is available from Amazon and www.smallbusinesscharacters.com .