small business marketing

Speaking with a client yesterday, I was a little taken aback when he said he’d not heard of cloud computing. For me it’s a very common term and has been for a couple of years, but I work a lot in the tech sector so this should be expected.

However, cloud computing offers too many opportunities for any company so I wanted to find and share with him an introduction to what it’s all about. As you might expect, Salesforce.com has produced an excellent intro video (see below) which explains the fundamentals in simple terms.

Whether you want to reduce costs by shifting your email infrastructure from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail, or speeding up your customer relationship management with Salesforce.com rather than an expensive enterprise edition of SAP for example, Cloud Computing is definitely a journey you want to go on.

I’m attending an event this evening called SME 2.0. It’s one of the monthly events organised by TagTribe and this edition has the theme of collaboration. The session is being led by Don Ward, CEO of the industry body Constructing Excellence, who will be sharing his experience in collaborative working, industry change programmes, the value of the built environment and benchmarking.

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I was delighted to be asked to speak at the Chartered Institute of Marketing Construction Industry Group (CIMCIG) conference on digital marketing this week. It was part of a packed day for me, sandwiched between running a half day conference for a large software company and enjoying the b2b social media event Dell organised with Google and FIR.

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Quite often I hear people talking about doing social media marketing because it’s free. I always smile at this, because  social media marketing as I understand it is far from free.

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There’s one thing about clients that’s difficult not to love and that’s a client that brings you more clients. Those people you have impressed so much, they’re happy to go out and do your advertising and selling for you. I’ve worked with some companies that secure half of their new business through clients like this, their advocates. As you can imagine their marketing budgets are low.

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If there are two tactics in your marketing kit bag that are better designed to be integrated than events and social media then I want to know about it. For me these two go together like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, absolutely perfectly.

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There’s a lot written on the subject of planning in marketing and it’s clear there is a need for marketers to prepare a plan of action for any strategy or campaign. I’m a big believer in planning too and work with clients who use both six and twelve month planning cycles for communications, or with longer lead times for more strategic thinking.

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I spotted an interesting story in the Evening Standard last week about ambush marketing – the idea that you unofficially promote your product at an event without actually sponsoring the event. The example cited the Bavarian beer company who sneaked 30 or so blond models into a world cup football match recently, catching the world’s attention.

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I’m a big believer that a good marketing organisation is one that puts the customers at the heart of its business. What I mean by this is when decision making is focussed on meeting the customers needs and wants, rather than that of the board or MD. But how to you measure your levels of customer focus?

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If you ever want a really simple definition for what business to business marketing is all about, it would be that marketing is the management of acquiring sales leads.
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