In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy. In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed

Anu Venkitaraman, Managing Partner of ReThink Marketing of Addison,TX and I, conducted a private chat discussing why small B2B marketers have embraced social media in a stronger way than their bigger B2B sisters and brothers. A Clean Slate - With little to no marketing infrastructure, a small B2B marketer can leapfrog to a web presence that includes social media. Today I attended Forrester' s Webinar "Defining Your B2B Social Media Strategy" with Vice President and Principal Analyst, Laura Ramos, and Vice President of Tech Industry Consulting, Dan Klein. The seminar was

Summary: Infusionsoft knows exactly how to sell marketing automation to small business: promise more revenue, less work, strong support and a low price. The system is designed for entrepreneurs, not full-time marketers. Since marketing automation for small business was on my mind last week, I checked in with the good folks at Infusionsoft , whose 15,000 customers make them leaders in the field. I ended up chatting with Scott Martineau, company founder and VP Product Management. It was a helpful conversation for a few reasons.

Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online. Here Are Kathy’s 6 Secrets to Video Success for Small Business: A small investment in good quality audio equipment will pay off in providing professionalism this to your video. Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.

Small businesses willing to invest some effort should be pleased with the results. Yesterday’s post described one strategy to sell marketing automation to small businesses: provide a specific, turnkey service that requires virtually no skill or effort from the user. Marketing automation vendors entering this market are essentially betting that they can make their systems powerful enough to be useful and easy enough for a small business to run. Summary: Hubspot offers a bundle of Web traffic generation and lead management features in one low-cost package.

Susan's radio audience is mostly small business marketers, so we talked specifically about what small, smart companies can do to become trusted advisers for their customers (and turn prospects into buyers). Why delivering valuable information to your customers is a key to driving your business? Biggest mistakes small businesses Big thanks to my good friend Susan Friedmann, CSP for having me as a guest on her radio talk show, Riches in Niches , this week. As you'll hear, Susan is a real pro and we had a great time chatting about the subject of attracting

The most difficult websites to search optimize are those of small or new companies, in a market with larger and more established players, focused on a highly competitive set of keywords. A company blog can also be used to give a (small) SEO boost to the corporate site. No matter how well the on-site optimization is done, it is tough to compete with the amount of content and external links that the established players have built up over time. However, a blog can be a valuable tool in helping smaller, newer players improve their rank and generate search traffic.

In case you missed it (as I did), Anita Campbell a few months ago published 137 Twitter Tips: How Small Businesses Get the Most from Twitter , based on input from the readers of Small Business Trends . This report provides a treasure trove of guidance for marketers who seek to increase their brand awareness, credibility and business results using Twitter. The tips are categorized into six sections. Among the recommendations provided, by section: Getting Started Matt McGee provides tools (such as Nearby Tweets and Tweepz ) and methods for finding

Even a modest effort at a small company takes a lot of time, which must be funded through the sweat of your manufacturing and sales efforts. The second reason is this: For now, some companies may be willing to experiment with social media, but at some point the big boss is going to sharpen her pencil. You should be able to demonstrate a business case and that business case must be built on hard dollars ... We're pushing onward with our discussion of social media measurement, ROI, and non-financial indicators. Today, let's do a very simple calculation to determine how much

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work. These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn. 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Smart Content Marketers This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth: Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact,