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.

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.