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.

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.