Selling to Small Businesses

If social media and online communities are not part of your current strategy, you might want to get with the program. Jeremiah Owyang has a list of enterprise companies with employees dedicated to social media and online communities.  The typical roles would be:  the Social Computing Strategist or the Community Manager, although people’s actual titles [...]

With social media sites all the rage, a lot of companies have considered whether to start an online social-networking type of community. The Online Marketer blog offers 21 questions to consider before starting a social network. Among the questions are these two: 1. Can you invest the necessary resources to run a social network properly? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]