Small Business Tip Tuesday: Your Business is the Sum of Its Parts

Small Business Tip Tuesday: Your Business is the Sum of Its Parts:

I’ve been helping my 16 year old son study his chemistry and yesterday we were working on Boyle’s Law. Not to bore you to tears, but Boyle’s Law indicates that an inverse relationship exists between the pressure and volume of gases. Basically, as pressure increases, volume decreases, and vice versa.

Then there is Charles’ Law, which highlights the direct relationship between the temperature of a gas and its volume. Mix all of this together and you get the Combined Gas Law, which explains the mathematical relationship between the three variables of pressure, volume, and temperature in gases.

Have your eyes glazed over yet?

Then there’s the Butterfly Effect which states that a small change in one place can result in large changes elsewhere.

Cause and effect. Relationships. Inverse and Direct.

But what does this have to do with your business?

We often compartmentalize our business activities when that can be a big mistake. We might create a radio commercial and wonder whether it was worth the expenditure. We create a print ad and try to figure out how much traffic it generated in our store. We spend time on a Facebook business page and wonder if we’re getting a good return on investment.

But perhaps we’re thinking about all of these things improperly.

One of the reasons it is hard to nail down an ROI for your Social Media is that Social Media does NOT exist in a vacuum. If you don’t think a particular platform “works”…is that because the platform itself isn’t viable, or because of how you are approaching it? Even traditional media can be difficult to measure, because more often than not, there are lots of other variables at work. And if word of mouth is such a powerful presence, the measurement aspect becomes even more difficult.

If you integrate your efforts, you will be more effective as a business. There are two types of integration on which you need to focus:

1. Integrated marketing – You don’t have print advertising, billboards, radio commercials, Facebook, Twitter, and a blog. You have a communications and marketing plan. They all feed into each other and off of each other. If you are doing it properly. The moment you start thinking of any of these, including Social Media, as a discrete element, you’re making a mistake.

Sales professionals speak in terms of touch points, noting that every time you have a contact with someone, you build on the previous touch point. With Social Media, things change. You may now have multiple touch points happening simultaneously depending on how you might be reaching the same people across multiple platforms.

Forget the sales funnel. Don’t just flip it. Flatten it.

“Oh, I guess I better post an update on Facebook!”

That mindset will kill you. Integrate all of your marketing and communications efforts so that the sum of the parts completes the whole.

And then, take it one step further.

Don’t just integrate all of your marketing, integrate all areas of your business.

2. Integrated, social business – This is the idea of tearing down those internal silos. You don’t have marketing. You have a business. And all of the elements of that business: marketing, sales, human resources, customer service, manufacturing, etc, are part of an integrated whole. Everything function of every department in your business should be directed toward ultimately making the sale. And to that end, every function of every department in your business also needs to be focused on providing the best possible customer experience. Social Media is just one part of that, and it might just be the part that forces you to take all of this more seriously.

Everything should be integrated. Whether you realize it or not, everything you do has either a direct or inverse relationship on your business as a whole. You might not see it right away, and it might not be a major impact, but it is there.

If you’re efforts in Social Media or any other don’t seem to be working, ask yourself if you are focusing too much on a particular discipline as a piece of the puzzle, as opposed to focusing on the entire puzzle as a whole.

What’s the ROI of how you run your business? What’s the ROI of the quality of your product or service? Sometimes we just need to step back and focus on the whole, rather than just the parts.