Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 1)

Marketing has always scared me. I envisioned graphic artists and copy editors PR companies and money, money, money!!!
How can a small company like ours afford to compete with the big companies? What is the best approach? Who should we market to? How should we market our products and services? What is the most effective way to market? Can we afford to market? Can we afford NOT to market? So again, we are going to the drawing board.
Let us start at the beginning: Who are we targeting? Businesses that need to print labels. (New industries, new markets) Chemical manufacturers (established base.) Complementary companies - Companies that already service the industries we are targeting.
Our goal is to team with them, offering customers a more complete solution. Vendors - Hardware or software companies that will let us sell their products as part of our package. It surprised us when we realized that we needed to market our abilities to companies that were not potential customers in the traditional sense of the word. What is our message?
Our basic message is the same to all targets: We want to communicate to them our experience in label printing. Our capabilities: software design, need assessment, designing solutions that work, implementing solutions, working with in a budget, Project management, technical support and maybe the most important of all: our work ethics: Superb customer service and support. Education. And finally our basic belief that one size does NOT FIT ALL.

Planning for a better future in the middle of economic crisis

Every day seem to bring another story of failure. Another big company is going under. Thousands of employees are laid off. Trying to plan for a better future in this environment is very hard. We were going to do our plan in 2 days, but it was difficult to put our hearts and minds into it. Eventually we did come with a plan this week. It builds on our assessment. Another criteria that we added to it - it has to be cost effective and cheap. Return on Investment (ROI) has to be quick. So here is a short summary of our plan.

Mission Statement: Find new ways to approach new customers, new markets and still continue to provide excellent service and products to our base - chemical companies. Do all of it in a short time frame (2 months) with minimum expenses utilizing all of our assets.

Diversification:
a. Transfer - Apply our knowledge and experience to other industries. Expanding our products and services accordingly.
b. Identify and Target new markets - Shift our concentration. We have worked in the past with companies that use warehouses and need to keep track of inventory. They have a need to print labels with barcodes from their existing databases and warehouse/inventory software programs. They also need the hardware to go along with it, such as barcode printers and scanners. This is a perfect fit.
For that matter anyone needing labels with product information will be a good fit. Expand our offering through cooperation with complementing companies:
a. Approach manufacturers of hardware and software that serve warehouses and track inventory. Thus, expanding what we have to offer.
b. Team with companies that already service the industries we are identifying. We can help each other by referring customers to each other, working together to provide customers with a complete solution.
c. Modify DrumWizard UPM to easily integrate with other software to enable sophisticated label printing requirements. This can come in two basic flavors: as an add-on or as an approved external program that can be called through a command line.
d. Marketing - In the past, companies approached us. Now, we have to let companies know who we were and what we could do for them. Time line: 2 months Side note: Marketing will require a whole other plan.

Going to India

I am going to India tomorrow morning. I always wanted to go there. I am fascinated by its history and people. I cannot wait to go. Scheduled some meeting with software development companies. I am not sure that we want to do it, but I do want to know what options we have. I was told to be sure to take toilet paper with me, as they do not use that over there.... First culture shock before I even left.

Going Green - It makes sense and we are expanding

We got excited about our success in recycling and reducing paper waste. We now started looking at more things we could do. The next thing on our agenda was cardboard boxes. We receive packages all the time. We like to keep original packaging of our expensive equipment. We had a room that was full of boxes. The regular brown boxes were usually tossed.
We took this in small steps. We started with our boxes for the expensive equipment. We decided to keep boxes of equipment that was still under warranty. That reduced the amount of boxes by about 80%. The rest of the boxes were assessed to determine if they could be reused. We ship packages ourselves. Usually we need small boxes as most of the equipment we ship is relatively small - barcode scanners, small thermal printers, rolls of labels, etc. We do not have a need for the big boxes. The ones that could not be reused were marked for recycling. We gained a room. Now as we get boxes they are either kept, reused or recycled. A small community center in our area is collecting the boxes. They sell them and using the money to pay for special programs for the kids they serve. Again, we saved money (we do not buy boxes any more and benefited our community.