Selling to Small Businesses

MarketingSherpa is out with a special report on subscription-based B2B sites. Subscription sites are in vogue these days, especially for B2B. I know of at least a dozen subscription-sites that cater primarily to small businesses, and I belong to a few myself. The MarketingSherpa report covers a wide variety of issues relating to marketing B2B [...]

If you wanted to sell small businesses on advertising solutions for their business, here’s a new way to break them down: 1. “Branded branches,” (e.g., Bank of America), which reportedly comprises 60% to 65% of the advertiser spend. This might be thought of in the conventional approach as the “national-local” segment. 2. Co-op sellers (e.g., [...]

Reaching small-business owners, managers and decision-makers is notoriously hard to do. You know that, right? There are lots of reasons for this — here are just a few: The small business market is fragmented. For example, a time honored approach to reach SMBs is through industry organizations, chambers of commerce and similar affiliations they belong [...]

Contests are a popular strategy today to reach small business owners. A good contest can: engage the hearts and minds of business owners create goodwill toward your company sometimes get a viral effect going build brand recognition be a source of PR and media attention But if you are running a contest with an online [...]

Half of women surveyed said that blogs influence their decisions to purchase. That comes from a recent survey of roughly 6,000 women by BlogHer (the network of women bloggers) and Compass Partners. The study has a number of findings, but the one about purchase decisions stood out to me. Here’s the chart that shows the [...]

Only a relatively tiny percentage of entrepreneurs and small businesspeople use anything other than Google or perhaps Yahoo to perform searches for vendors and suppliers and important business research. B2B search engines are not used nearly as much. However, they are worth looking into, to make sure you cover all the bases, as a recent [...]