March 26, 2018: This Week's Best Business-Building Articles

March 26, 2018—To better assist shop owners with their production management, marketing tactics and leadership styles, Ratchet+Wrench has compiled a short list of essential business-building material from some of its favorite sources.

11 Dallas Marketing Ideas That Can Help Local Businesses Grow — Forbes

Eleven members of Forbes Dallas Business Council share some locally focused marketing approaches they’ve employed in Dallas, ones that have helped them successfully develop their business.

Messenger Marketing: The Next Frontier for Business Growth — Adweek

A perfect storm of market forces is leading to the emergence of messenger marketing as the next big frontier for business growth. The growth of mobile messaging, combined with the saturation of other media, is leading to the migration of both consumers and marketers to messaging applications.

Customer Retention Strategies that Work — Augusta Free Press

Customer retention is valuable and essential, but you have to know how to do it correctly, and you have to be dedicated to building loyalty. It’s much less expensive to maintain a current customer as opposed to acquiring a new one, yet boosting loyalty isn’t a top priority for a lot of businesses.

The average business loses around 20 percent of its customers each year, just because they don’t emphasize building relationships. So what can you do to change this trend in your own organization?

Why People Lose Motivation—and What Managers Can Do to Help — Harvard Business Review

At some point, every leader has dealt with a person—or, worse, a group of people—who has lost motivation. Sometimes, we view their unhappiness as a bug in their mental makeup—and, therefore, we think they should be able to suck it up and snap out of it.

Although it’s easy to fall into this mindset as a leader, this type of thinking is counterproductive and it ignores the underlying reasons why people lose their passion for what they do (or never find it to begin with).