The Website is up

Our new website is up. We still expect to add more to it. The only problem now is that it does not work in Internet explorer. It is working well in FireFox and Chrome.
We need to solve this problem. We started our Google Ad Campaign. We are starting with just two ads and a very small budget to try it out. Our first article will be published in a IT magazine; the subject is asset tracking. I now devote about 30 minutes a day to PR.
Our new store is being built is I write these words. Business is good.

Marketing Plan for SMB on shoe string budget (part 6)

Happy New Year. The phone started to ring! I am hoping that this is a good sign for things to come. We are now busy working with our current vendors to generate more leads. We decided that once our website is up, we will try to use Google ads. Many of the articles I was reading spoke of social networking. That was not something I could envision us doing. So to prove myself wrong, I met a guy in a party that told me about his websites and how he markets them through Google. I told him a little about our plan. We agreed on a fair exchange – We will help him with his websites and he will help us with Google. We are looking for other networking opportunities now. Still checking what is available and what is worthwhile. The website design is almost done. We will put up a beta site in about two more weeks.

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 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.