Sometimes I think small and medium business operators out there feel like that snail. Even when they find a marketing tool or technology that appears to provide some incredible “new” capability to them, they are very often dismayed to find that they were all hot and bothered about something, well, “so last week”. But it still gives them a rush (“wow, this mail merge thing is soooo cool!”)
I look at a couple of good friends whose businesses I would put squarely in the SMB category. They inevitably end-up with a “friend of the family” or “buddy of my buddy’s buddy (named Buddy)” who is going to hook them up with a deal. We know how that usually goes. Yeah, they have a website that opens and it even has PICTURES…maybe even talkies! OK, a link or two as well. Ahem.
The
tired old ways of getting the eyeballs (radio, print, television, direct mail, trade
shows, etc.) will always be there for this population to some extent, but the new
ways of spreading the word and ideas (blogs, video, social networks, permission-based
RSS information, consumer fan clubs, etc.) are steadily proving how well they
work. The SMB operator, though, is often
too busy and too far behind the curve to really know that they, too, can have
great stuff working for them!
A good marketer needs to understand what’s out there…new…or not-so-new. Unfortunately, most will never even know what they are missing as they load the Minivan with crates of direct mail pieces and doorknob hangers featuring the special of the week. They assume the snazzy marketing technology is all too expensive and will require a guy with the propeller beanie on staff. If only they knew.
Just look at things like Constant Contact, an email marketing and survey tool that is inexpensive (like $75 per month for unlimited campaigns to a list of up to 5,000), robust, and extremely easy to use for the typical non-technical SMB, to an easy web video tool like Easy Web Video where for $97, the user can quickly put up some decent video content on their site. Easy Web Video uses V2F technology to address the file size issues associated with video and it comes with video editing software that’s pretty slick. Yeah, the Easy Web Video website is a little tedious and feels a bit like a Ronco pitch…but it is very approachable for a non-technical SMB. There really are many choices out there and most can do a great job of helping the SMB get up and running with some really cool technologies that will exponentially improve their go-to-market efforts.
However, these technologies are still largely blind items for many SMB’s out there. If only they could just go to one place and get understandable, relevant, and accurate information about marketing technology. They’d be a happy bunch if they could just find the help they need to make sense of marketing technology and tools!
Well, OK…I guess we’ll be making a lot of new friends really soon.
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