Selling to Small Businesses

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? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, explains how they are marketing an upcoming conference using a homemade video on YouTube.  The video cost them just $148.  It took 18 hours of time (divided among 3 people) to create.  She writes: It’s a short video, just a minute and a half, but it sums up the point of our [...]

The Internet can be treacherous if you are a vendor faced with a disgruntled customer.  If a consumer doesn’t feel that his or her complaint has been satisfactorily dealt with — boom!  The entire dispute (at least the customer’s side of the story) ends up on the Web for the world to see.  Oh, and you can [...]

I’ve decided that for 2008 I will focus more effort on this site to compiling lists of resources and information kits.  What do I mean by this?  Well, I regularly get asked to identify resources for clients and entities that sell to small businesses.  Here are some examples of the resources I get asked for:  small business events where [...]