Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Marketing & Exposure

LW: And in your opinion, what do you think the best kept secret about getting exposure for small businesses is?

Brian: I think the things you need the most are the people that are closest to you, which is your network. You're able to look at the customers, clients and people that you know and make sure that you get your information in their hands. Then ask the networking question, "If you don't need my services, who would be the first person that you think might need my services, and by the way, would you introduce me to them." To be able to work that network and be able to move through those closest contacts to you gives you the warm referral which is the thing that you would want the most.

I would say probably the secondary consideration is professional societies, groups or user groups or things like that that are in your area. That's going to give you exposure to people who have similar interests in mind. For my particular business, I'm interested in business process management groups, there are some IT architecture groups and various user groups that are in our city that we try and integrate into to make our presence known and get people to understand what we do. And that gives us a conduit into other cities that we normally wouldn't talk to.

I'll throw out a final one of networking through software vendors. We talk to a lot of software vendors and tell them, "We can assist you in deploying some of your software and all of your clients that you talk to can get their software put in better and more efficiently using our methodology and our consultants to help out. And so it's something that we try to build that linkage and help build channels to which you can extend the number of people that you can get contact with. And that's really what the name of the game is.

LW: I hear you talking a lot about linkage and networking and exposure. I think a natural thing that goes along with that is your advertising and marketing in a more official way of doing things. What were some of the main advertising avenues you took? Would you do things differently? Or is it just along the same lines as networking?

Brian: I think it's really more along the lines of networking. It becomes something that's specific to the business. You're not going to pick up the yellow-pages and find a consultant. And you're not going to read your daily newspaper on page C-25 on the bottom and see there's an ad for a consultant. So really the things that are effective are going to be the things that are dealing through your network or dealing through those contacts that you can do whatever you can do to get your name out there or to get your brand out there. There are some things we're considering as far as professional trade magazine advertising or some local very targeted sorts of advertising, but we're still looking at some of those things and that may be a ways off.

LW: When did that start coming up? Did you think of that from the beginning when you first thought advertising or is that a recent development?

Brian: It's more of a recent development. We're getting to a point where we're trying to get our methodology into a more formalized type of thing and we're trying to move from just a services company to a services company that has some intellectual capital and some things to bring to the table. When we can begin differentiating ourselves using some of those messages, that's when we started talking about okay now it's time to start doing some advertising where we can highlight other than "hey we have smart guys," to "now we have smart guys who have tools that have been proven in the marketplace." And it's a different story and it's one that I think we can begin doing some advertising with. More around generating user interest by getting training sessions with folks rather than just traditional advertising, but actually going out and saying hey we're going to sponsor a seminar. I think those are some of our next steps.

LW: And does your marketing budget include just advertising or does it include this development of the business you've been talking about as well?

Brian: We kind of have two different budgets for that. I'd say we have a budget for what I would consider client development and honestly it's more of a lot of our clients and a lot of our prospects. We spend a lot of time at lunch with our clients but it is effective as a way of helping to get the quality time and help explain our differentiating messages. As far as some of the other materials, we do have some white papers and glossy type things we've developed, but we haven't spent a whole ton on that stuff. I think there is a separate budget we've set for developing the tool and developing the training materials and also we're looking at revamping our website to be more of a product specific thing where you can download white papers or training videos or other content like that. So there's a variety of things like that we need to do that we haven't done yet.

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