Selling to Small Businesses

Technology products and services are famous (or infamous) for all the barely decipherable technical terminology. Technical, legal, scientific and financial terminology — all can be confusing to the very people you are trying to communicate with:  business owners.  The thing is, most small business owners are not subject-matter experts in your industry.   When you use insider lingo it makes your [...]

If you send out B2B email blasts, newsletters and other marketing communications, the traditional wisdom is not to waste them by mailing near holidays when your prospects are likely to be out of the office and not reading emails.  However, for emails to small business owners and staff, different considerations may apply.  Prospects to Go has created a helpful calendar showing [...]

Content-based strategies are extremely important for reaching B2B prospects and marketing to existing customers. But do you know what B2B prospects really want? Or are you guessing? I suspect most us do a lot of guessing. And a recent study suggests we may be guessing wrong. Marketingsherpa and Knowledgestorm conducted a study that compared content [...]

In my Small Business Trends Radio program on Tuesdays, I do a short five-minute segment where I highlight a trend that affects the small business market, called “Today’s Trend.” The topic of today’s segment related particularly well to B2B marketing and reaching small business owners and managers, so I am reproducing the full text of my segment here [...]

The nature of public relations has been turned upside down by the increasingly online world we find ourselves in.  An article about PR trends by Mike Nikolich of TechImage in this month’s Bacon’s Navigator Newsletter describes what to expect in 2007: Social media will cause a lot of heartburn for public relations executives Life used to [...]

Articles defining “influencers” are not too hard to find.  However, it is the rare article that gives actionable advice about how to create a dialogue with influencers.   A recent article by Nilofer Merchant at MarketingProfs.com is one of those rarities.  Five Ways to Develop a Dialogue With Key Influencers offers insights into how to develop a communication program with [...]