Kulture Konnect Blog

In an ideal world, everyone should have access to the internet. In reality however, there are many obstacles one can face when trying to access the internet. It can be slow internet speeds, outdated browsers or ISPs blocking access to certain websites.

One obstacle that website owners need to pay more attention to this year is website accessibility for the disabled. Some companies might not be aware of the new laws and standards surrounding website accessibility until they're hit with a nasty lawsuit. If you want to avoid the hefty fine of $55,000 to $150,000; better read on!

Most of us do it every year. We vow at the beginning of each year to set resolutions or goals. We make promises to ourselves to focus on our personal well-being whether it might be our health, eating healthier, losing weight, lessen stress, travel more and etc. but what about your business?

As a business owner, this is a perfect time to make a list of ways to make positive changes and improvements. Here are 5 important new years resolutions every business owner should make.

Stop Wearing All the Hats 

No matter how hard you try it's nearly impossible to do everything and run your business on your own. One of the benefits of owning a business is that you don't have to work for someone else. You want to get to a point where your business can run without always being present. With that said, if you fall into this category than you might want to consider growing your team. Think of positions you need and want to fill. Of course, take your budget into consideration and be realistic on what you can afford.

Email lists have been a foundation for essentially every business over the last several years simply because of the utility of incorporating an email list for customers to subscribe to. Having a way to directly reach customers who want to engage with your product or service holds a much higher value than otherwise broadcasting your business, hoping customers will connect with you. 

Staying connected with past customers is as important or even more important than reaching new customers. Pareto's Principle of the 80-20 rule can be applied to business in the sense that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Now this is not an absolute for every business or even any business, it simply stresses the point that loyal customers make up a large percentage of a business's margin and should not be neglected. This is why so many business professionals will yell from the rooftop about how important building an email list is.

Good news! Your restaurant is everyone's favorite place to stop by and enjoy dinner every Saturday night. The bad news? This has resulted in longer wait times for guests.

Though wait times are a factor that can be out of your control, there are different ways you can try out to reduce wait times for your guests. Let's go through 5 ideas you'll want to consider.

Online Food Ordering is a Trend

Your customers will no longer have to wait for a seat. Instead, customers will be able to stay in the comfort of their own home. For this reason, more restaurants are turning to mobile food delivery services for help, not to mention, it's growing quickly.

A Statista survey showed 20 percent of its participants claim to use a food delivery service at least one time every week. Numbers also show that within one year, the food delivery service went from contributing 30 billion dollars to the overall sales of the restaurant industry to an increased amount of 206 billion dollars (Statista). What a difference a year can make.

There was one point several years ago the Kulture Konnect Blog went dark for a few months. This is a classic example of "Do as I say and not as I do!"... Please, don't ever let your blog go dark for three long months as we have done. Of course, there are a bazillion reasons why we put a tragic halt to our content marketing machine like getting too busy to manage the content, prioritizing our client work over our own marketing, scrambling to get everything done before the holidays, etc. As they say though, hindsight is 20/20 and looking back today, those excuses seem to be small potatoes. After looking at our website analytics (comparing/contrasting, before and after), we learned some lessons the hard way and we want to share these lessons with all of you in the hopes of inspiring you to keep chugging along the content marketing train. Here is what we noticed when looking at our metrics over our dark period.

You already own a restaurant and it turned out to be a success. Your next goal is to expand and you're considering different locations. Do you want to expand locally? Or do you want to take it up a notch and open in a different state? And if so, which locations should you consider? New studies show there are 10 U.S. cities you'll want to explore. Let's take a look.

photo courtesy of Arlene Garcia

Look around right now.  

Just stop and take a look at your desk or your chair or the cup you are drinking out of.  Someone designed that; someone with a focused desire to reach out to you through a structured idea.  They made that thing you are looking at right now.  Does it inspire you or make you feel flat?  Does it brighten your day or darken it? Have you really thought about why you chose that dress or those glasses or that phone? 

Designers have their prints on everything we see and touch.

With social media being utilized as a marketing tool to build and grow brands, engage with consumers and reach a specific target audience, you want to be able to measure and review your monthly analytics effectively. Each platform whether it might be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter includes an analytics page designed to help you understand the behavior of your fans and consumers.  Depending upon the results from your analytics page, you should be able to glean from your data in order to make better marketing decisions. The problem is with an overwhelming amount of social media analytic data to process, it is fairly easy to leave out the most vital metrics and determine which metrics really matter. We can help.

We designed a Social Media Reporting Toolkit for business owners and professionals that will help you focus on the most important metrics and setting the right goals. In result, proving ROI. 

Your social media metrics have been around as long as you can remember but even with that said, so many restaurateurs have never really mastered what to do with their monthly data and how to get the most out of it. Which is why Kulture Konnect's co-founder, Jorge Pacheco, offered a free webinar this past Tuesday titled, "Restaurants 101: How to Analyze Your Social Media Metrics Like a Marketing Pro," to share with restaurateurs the tools to understand and utilize their social media metrics like a marketing pro.

Each month, our team prepares a social media report for our social media clients and at some point we asked ourselves, as much as we prepare and meet with clients to go over numbers, do restaurant owners truly understand what these numbers mean?

Kulture Konnect wants to help restaurants utilize their social media marketing to it's full potential. This webinar will give restaurant owners a clear understanding of how to read monthly social media metrics, teach them which metrics matter the most, why they matter, and how they can make the most of these metrics proving ROI.

Facebook and Instagram have proved to be two very effective platforms when it comes down to marketing brands, but what about LinkedIn? For years, LinkedIn has been known to be a wonderful community for entrepreneurs, professionals and a variety of businesses to connect. Today, the professional social network has become so much more. Over 500 million people are said to have a LinkedIn profile and are actively using it daily to locate jobs, network with consumers and businesses. Now, businesses and professionals are using LinkedIn to build relationships by marketing themselves as well as their companies... but how? There are several ways to market your business on LinkedIn. Let's begin.