In this week’s edition of Wash Wisdom, discover seven marketing and business growth strategies, techniques on how to improve employee performance, and ways to find and hire the best employees.

7 marketing and business growth strategies

On Entrepreneur’s website, contributor Deep Patel shares some entrepreneurial wisdom from Jay Abraham, also known as the “Billion Dollar Man,” in the article “7 Time-Tested Rules for Marketing and Growing Your Business.” According to Patel’s article, here are the seven tips:

• Marketing tools change, but human nature doesn’t. People care about what you can do for them: How can your product benefit them, help them attain a goal, or solve a problem? Communicate with your customer base by appealing to their desires and acknowledging their fears, so that whether you plan to market through ads, email or social media, the message won’t change, optimizing your business growth strategy.
• Know that attention spans are shrinking. The newest generations have shorter attention spans, which can be both positive and negative, challenging your business growth strategy. All the same, just make clear that you can provide a product they really want.
• Review your marketing strategies. Most people stick with a known business growth strategies that works for the entire industry, but even just a minor adjustment could have great results. Look outside of your industry for practices you can introduce into your business that will awe your customers.
• Be creative. Look at problems from new angles. For instance, if you don’t have the capital to expand or grow, look to create a mutually advantageous partnership with a complementary (not competitive) business to share assets, says Patel.
• Become a trusted provider. Creating value in a customer’s life is most important and can augment business growth strategies. Care for your clients by offering advice and seeing how your actions impact them.
• Don’t just be a proprietor. The distinction between a proprietor and an entrepreneur is in providing real value to customers. Whereas proprietors are interested in providing products to make a living, entrepreneurs focus on making the experience better so that clients return.
• Ask yourself if you have what it takes. Ask yourself if you have the drive, creativity, and ability to keep a business afloat. Can you put in the effort to learn and find out how much you can contribute?

Find the article here.

Improving employee performance

Featured on Facilities Management Journal’s website, contributor Sarah OBeirne offers some advice from a research group within Great Britain’s Advanced Workplace Associates in the article “How to boost employee performance this Small Business Advice Week.” According to OBeirne’s article, here are the six tips offered:

• Encourage friendship at the workplace. When employees are comfortable with each other, there is a natural exchange of knowledge and ideas. Make everyone, regardless of seniority, feel able to speak his or her mind.
• Provide support. Just as you need the support of employees, they too need to feel that their managers support their professional goals. Consider whether you should provide more training in coaching for your supervisors.
• Share the knowledge. Make sure your teams can not only create a well of company knowledge and experience, but also access it. Let your employees figure out who has what experience, compile it in a system of your choice, and reward their productivity to keep them sharing, says OBeirne. This can help advance business growth strategies.
• Give employees a purpose. To keep employees engaged in their work, they need to have individual, team, and company goals to achieve. Managers need to instill a sense of purpose in every employee.
• Expose employees to diversity. People often stay contained in their own worlds at work. Urge workers to expose themselves to a variety of viewpoints and experiences outside their own teams to stave off mental stagnation.
• Build trust through collaboration. In order for employees to feel that what they contribute will be used in their interests and that they can depend on one another, they need to work and interact together.

Read the entire article here.

Finding the best employees

In the article “How to Find Employees That Make a Difference” featured on Business 2 Community’s website, contributor Shirlene Pickard discusses how to find the best employees:

• Create an original job posting. According to PWC, Millennials will make up more than 50 percent of the workforce by 2020, so they are the generation you will most likely want to target with your posts. Millennials gravitate towards creative and unconventional ideas, so your job posts should not only be original but also be available through both traditional and non-traditional media.
• Prepare for the interview. Make sure that you know the company, the products sold, and the particulars of the job for which you’re hiring so that you can offer quality information to the candidates and make them trust you. In addition, don’t prepare just the basic interview questions. You can communicate on a deeper level with a candidate through unique and thoughtful questions. The candidate in turn is less likely to have a “prepared response.”
• Look into the candidate’s past successes. Excepting interns and junior-level candidates, make sure to inquire about previous job successes. In order to be certain their answers are truthful, check out their references, recommendations and digital presence. It takes more time, but it does make a difference.
• Give skill tests. No matter what the job, test your candidates to make sure that their skills are real and not exaggerated. If you’re worried about disqualifying candidates who are worse at testing, you can combine testing with other hiring strategies to gain a broader view of a candidate’s abilities.

Check out the entire article here.