PC Forecast: Cloudy
Thursday, August 5th, 2010As a busy small business owner, you may not have heard yet of “cloud computing” – but it’s the latest hot topic among IT professionals. Among peers, cloud computing was ranked second on the list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. To provide you with a heads up and get the story straight [...]
Tips for your personal business – and sanity in today’s markets
Sunday, July 18th, 2010Keeping your cool can be hard to do when the market goes on one of its periodic roller-coaster rides. It’s useful to have strategies in place that prepare you both financially and psychologically to handle market volatility. Pieter Hollenberg, AAMS, associate vice president and financial consultant for RBC Wealth Management, recently passed along some tips [...]
Going Electronic: How Email Marketing Can Work for You
Monday, July 5th, 2010For small to mid-sized business (SMB’s), email marketing is fast becoming the medium of choice, especially for today’s cash-strapped businesses. Email is an electronic variation on direct mail which also goes directly to the customer/prospect through the mailbox. Email arrives in the computer’s inbox, but because it’s relatively free to send, it arrives by the [...]
Online? Offline? So far it’s a mix of both as major marketers continue to move online to reach small and medium businesses, despite small businesses’ preference for some offline tactics
Friday, June 18th, 2010Last year a survey from Bredin Business Information gave a somewhat mixed message on media usage by major marketer targeting small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). While they reported that major marketers targeting small and medium businesses (SMBs) are relying less on traditional marketing tactics because of the economic downturn, that’s still one of the top [...]
Software as a Service: The Small Businessman’s Friend
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010There’s little doubt that small and mid-sized businesses need all the help they can get, especially for those services and functions that could easily require additional clerical, management and IT people, assuming the business could afford them. For many such functions, a wide range of applications is available on the Web that, once mastered, can [...]
Turn Prospects into Customers and Keep Both in the Loop — with a Promotional Newsletter!
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010How long are the sales cycles for your company’s products? Three months? A year? Eighteen months? In today’s business-to-business marketplace, long lead times are the rule rather than the exception. And the higher the price point or the greater the complexity of your products, the longer their lead times will be. How do you keep [...]
Keep the dialog going with an e-newsletter
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010How do you keep a prospect interested over the course of an 18-month sales cycle? How do you head off competitors’ inroads into the prospect while your sales rep is working through the steps in the meantime ? One answer being discovered by companies in every industry is the promotional newsletter — often used in [...]
The New Marketing Imperatives
Friday, May 14th, 2010I recently attended the annual meeting of a regional trade organization, the Vermont-New Hampshire Direct Marketing Group, in Burlington, VT where they discussed changing the name of the organization to The Vermont-New Hampshire Marketing Group, dropping the term “direct.” Seems like a good idea. Why? And what does it have to do with you? First, [...]
Routes to Entrepreneurial Success
Friday, May 14th, 2010A recent business publication featured a profile of a young man, Andrew Dixon, in Concord, NH who started his own business providing a variety of services to small businesses in the area. These include paper shredding, courier and delivery services. It is of particular poignance in this case because the young proprietor has autism. The [...]
Big Business for Small Business on the Web
Friday, May 14th, 2010In a previous article I mentioned CNET Networks and its subsidiary website, BNET. They recently listed several web sites especially designed for small business as the Top Web Services of 2007, and since business folks rarely have the luxury of mousing around the web for the heck of it, we’ll report some of these items [...]
