Author Archives: Meredith Wood

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About Meredith Wood

Meredith is Editor-in-Chief at Fundera. Specializing in financial advice for small business owners, Meredith is a current and past contributor to Yahoo!, Amex OPEN Forum, Fox Business, SCORE, AllBusiness and more.

How to Create a Pinterest Profile for Your Small Business

Running a business, you know that getting the word out there is can be a hard task. In order to make the best use of small margins and few employees, strategic marketing becomes essential to the survival of your business. This means utilizing every social channel you can. As a small You already know that Facebook and instagram are essentials at this point. However, there is another social media channel with a large, engaged user-base that businesses often overlook: Pinterest.

This visual platform allows users to create virtual mood-boards with content shared by other users from websites. Since these mood boards often feature decor, products, and recipes, many Pinterest users set up a board to help make a purchase decision. This makes Pinterest the perfect platform to introduce potential customers to your product or service. Pinterest users tend to be very open to discovering new brands on their search for the perfect image, allowing smaller businesses a chance at winning a client.

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The Anatomy of the Perfect Small Business Instagram Profile (Infographic)

With the number of social media users around the world approaching 3 billion, it’s now more important than ever to execute a solid social media strategy as a small business. If you want to stand out against your competitors and make noise in your space, digitally connecting with your customers is no longer an option — it’s a necessity.

Each social media platform offers unique benefits, but which one will tell your business’s story best? When it comes to brand-building, Instagram may seem like the obvious choice — just make sure you’re going deeper than posting beautiful content if you want to see meaningful results and significant ROI.

Fundera created this infographic to break the process down into actionable steps from creating the perfect bio and sharing the right mix of content to perfecting your engagement strategy.

The Anatomy of the Perfect Small Business Instagram Profile

How to Handle Difficult Customers

No matter what industry you work in, there’s a very large chance that you’ve come into contact with a challenging customer at one point or another. While these interactions can be challenging for a number of different reasons, if you learn how to understand different types of customers, you’ll be better prepared to handle any difficult customer service situation that comes your way. Fundera has created a fun infographic that outlines the 11 different types of challenging customers you may run into and provides actionable tips for how to handle these interactions. Check it out for everything you need to know on how to handle your next difficult sales encounter!

Money Tips for Young Entrepreneurs

In the early days, startups face many hurdles they need to be overcome in order to gain success. From market competition to the challenges of raising venture capital money, it can be difficult for an entrepreneur to know what first steps to make. As a business owner, making strategic moves to build a solid financial strategy is key. Be aware of predictable or common problems, to avoid making the same mistakes as other failed startups.

If you’re a young entrepreneur, you may have less experience or financial years, than the more seasoned professionals. However, startup growth and development rely directly on capital, so it can be helpful to shift your focus towards this. Consider tracking your purchases and opening separate personal and business accounts as a start. Fundera provides 10 essential money tips for young entrepreneurs in the visual below, to help guide you and your business towards success: