Information Information

I feel bombarded with all this new information about marketing and PR. As it is, I spend many hours a week reading and learning about new technologies that are related to bar-coding.
Today I had an interesting call from a University that want to implement an RFID solution. RFID sounds like such a cool technology - and it is. Only that it is still not practical for most companies. The problem with RFID is the cost of the tags. The printers and scanners have come down a lot in price, but not the tags. There are also very little options when it comes to sizes. There are only few standard sizes. Huge companies do not need to worry about that, because they can afford to order the sizes they need. Small and even medium size businesses could not afford to have special size orders. I did my best to explain all of this to the customer. I think that people are under the wrong impression that RFID is here to replace barcode. It is not.
RFID is a different technology that has specific uses. We had a customer, about a year ago that ordered an RFID printer, 1 roll of tags and no RFID scanner. I asked if he already had a scanner. The answer was that he did not want to spend his money on a scanner yet. I asked if he was going to ship his goods to someone else who required him to put the RFID tags on.
The answer was no. Someone in his company just thought that RFID was cool technology and did not understand that it did not replace barcodes. Since he did not want any more input from us, we sold him the RFID printer. Few months later I met someone from that company. He told me that the RFID printer is sitting in unused in the IT manager's office.
I think that one of the most important things we do here is talk to our customers to find out what their real needs are. I believe that over the past several years we probably saved companies thousands of dollars.

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.

Set Back with our on-line store

We had a terrible set-back with our on-line store. We used an open source store that has a free version. Some of the features in the store did not work correctly. They recommended upgrading the store to the newest version. We followed all instructions, only to find that the entire store inventory was gone! We are in the IT field, so we always make backups and more backups. None of the backups seem to work. Reading in the forums, we discovered that we were not the only ones who experienced this set back. Our guys worked for 2 days to restore all the products. The uploads did not work right. This is when I decided to put a stop to it.
Before we went on, I wanted them to test the functions in the store. Again, things did not work right. We went to the forums only to discover that there more bugs, some with fixes and some are not. Our goal was to spend minimal amount of money, but this was ridiculous. We spent so many hours working on something that did not show any results and seemed to be riddled with problems. Again, being a small business, we are able to make quick decisions and change course, and this is exactly what we did. We came up with a list of requirements and set out to check what was available out there. We saw 2 common solutions:
1. Hosted Stores – these are on-line stores that are hosted by another company. The company has to maintain the servers and all updates to the store (software updates.) Cost – includes usually a set up fee and reoccurring monthly fees. They also have various plans depending on the number of items in inventory. Some stores charge a percentage of every transaction. Some have different features available depending on the monthly fee.
2. Store software – these companies have developed a complete solution. You need to purchase the entire package. The software is installed on our servers. They provide installation support, but charge for that as well. The up front cost is high. The stores that had the features we were looking for cost between $1,000 to several thousand dollars.

We decided that we wanted a hosted store – the benefit to us: we do not have to maintain the server and the updates. The monthly fee seem reasonable to us. We currently have an eBay store. This store is going to be closed as soon as the new store is up. After searching many companies we found one company that we just love. The store is easy to manage, and has tons of features. They even have real people answering the phone. (We stopped doing business with companies that do not bother to pick up their phone.)

Bloging

I see that this word is not yet in the dictionary. When I first started bloging, I did it because I just felt like doing it. Now, I find out that it is also used as a marketing tool. Well good for us. I do not think I have any following, but I do not care, since I have truly enjoyed writing it. If it helps us in our marketing efforts than that is great!

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 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.