Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 5)

Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 5) Yes, I am awake. Working non-stop. According to our plan, we needed to market ourselves to vendors. I just did not expect the response we received. One company we talked to said our labeling solution is exactly what they were looking for. They developed a very nice package of warehouse and inventory management that is connected to QuickBooks.
They, like us, also believe that corporation between companies is beneficial to all. The customers gain the experience of specialized companies – like us. The companies working together can generate leads for each other. We both are able to offer our customers a better solution than we did before. They do not need to spend money on additional development and we gain access to new customers. We are now working on incorporating our software with theirs. We decided that the best way to market ourselves to these companies is through phone calls.
So here is the plan: Make an initial phone call – tell the company about us, what we do, how we do it, and our general business model. Follow up with email – Set a web demonstration to show them our software and various solutions we have to the issue of printing labels from various data sources.

Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 4)

The website is coming along. We want to make it both informational and interactive. We want it to be useful; a place where potential customers can come to and get solid information. PR is the next big item on our list. It seems that anyone can purchase ads but that does not give a company the validity and endorsement as news media can give us. We found a neat list called the HARO. It is a clearing house type list of reporter’s inquiries. Most of them give full credit including company’s name and website – free publicity for us. It does not cost anything to subscribe. We need to look at trade publications and get their media kits to see if we could write anything that could be published.

Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 3)

Like I promised before, here is the link to the e-business workshop. The name dates it.... I am probably not going to have much time to write – we are redesigning our entire site. We are in the process of collecting material, examining everything to see if it fits our goals. Our tech people just finished re-doing a demo of our DrumWizard software and want us to offer it on the site. We are designing our brochures – our customers came back with some terrific ideas. We decided to open an on-line store. Our store is going to be very small. We are not trying to compete with the big on-line outfits. This store is mainly for our customers. There they can re order supplies, purchase additional printers and barcode scanners, upgrade their software, etc. So far, we did not need to spend any money, other than man hours (that was to be expected.) While the site is being re-designed, we will start calling on companies we think we could partner with. We will also see what we could do to add products to the store.

Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 2)

In the past few days I spent hours researching approaches to marketing. The worsening economy produced a bountiful crop of marketing advice for little or no money at all. I noticed however, that most of the advice is for B2C (business to consumer) rather than B2B (business to business). We already answered the most difficult questions: who is our target audience and what we want to communicate to them. Now we come to the How. How are we going to market? What tools are available to us? What new tools we may need to acquire? Tools we have: Company website, brochures of our chemical software, and contacts. We looked at our website – I am a little ashamed to say that it is pitiful. The saying “the shoe maker always goes barefoot” is especially true for us. We design websites as well. We do not advertise this fact and we do not intend to market this area. Our clients include few companies that we have worked with for many years. We started designing their websites years ago and it just stuck. Some of the sites we design are for non-profit organizations. We do it as a charity for the most part - we either do not charge them at all or very little. Our site has not had a serious update in at least 4 years. We are thinking now that instead of updating the site – we going to start fresh. We will use some of the information we had on the site before, but we are going to have to add information. Make the site more interactive. Years ago, I gave a workshop to non-tech people about websites. This was at a time when most companies did not have any web presence at all. I found the materials I prepared for that workshop and going to use it for ours. If you want to have a look, I am going to upload it tonight. It is simple, but good and straight forward. Tomorrow I will post the link to the document. Our brochures for the chemical companies were old. They did not reflect all the enhancements and upgrades we have made. We decided to give them to some friends and business acquaintances to see what they got out of them. We are too biased. I called two customers today to ask them if they will look at our brochures. We want their input. Based on their experience with the software, they may be able to point to us what is missing and what is not needed.