Comments on: Small Businesses are Being Sold a Bill of Goods

By: Ignore Robert Scoble, SEO Still Matters For SMBs

Ignore Robert Scoble, SEO Still Matters For SMBs — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:44:01 +0000

[...] business owners are leery to get involved with search engine optimization to begin with, having been scammed for years. Telling them that SEO is now irrelevant in the new world of social media and real time [...]

By: Matt Howard

Matt Howard — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:18:29 +0000

Want to reduce churn? Then stop scamming SMBs with BS promises of guaranteed clicks. Instead, give them simple and innovative tools that they can use themselves. Charge them a reasonable monthly fee. Encourage them to embrace “self service”. Empower them. Enable them to control their destiny. They’ll love you forever.

When to reduce churn? Then play a different game. Challenge yourself to innovate beyond “clicks” and “impressions”. Develop new types of “social” and “conversational” marketing tools.

Want to reduce churn? Refuse to believe that SMBs are lazy. Open your mind to the fact that SMBs are eager to embrace self-service, if only you gave them the right tools.

Want to reduce churn? Go back to the basics. Leverage the fact that SMBs are skilled conversationalist off-line, relying on good old fashion “word-of-mouth” as their primary source of new customers. Give them tools to transition those “word-of-mouth” skills to the web.

By: David Mihm

David Mihm — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:11:23 +0000

Rick, I think you are SPOT ON with this assessment. SMB’s care about traffic IN THE DOOR, not on the web, and they’re just not as concerned with tracking (and frankly, don’t have the bandwidth to do it) as larger enterprises.

By: brad

brad — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:59:01 +0000

I use to be highly involved in one of these aggregator programs (10s thousands of clients).

It’s not necessarily that all the services are poor, in fact, many of them are exceptional.

It comes back to the product definition and the sales call. If you first work with the client to set proper expectations, and then secondly report to the client on conversions (which is mostly phone calls) – you can have very happy small businesses.

The issue is some of these services do not do a good job at the two above points (there’s much more to product definition than those two points).

Here’s an article I wrote last year on this subject:
http://www.bgtheory.com/blog/businesses-are-confused-do-you-have-the-right-product/

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:03:24 +0000

Ya, too many companies over promise and under deliver… Greed is the main problem. Plus, guaranteed clicks often times don’t perform either

By: Ric P.

Ric P. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:52:22 +0000

Unfortunately for small businesses, the marketing gap is wider than automated campaign management and billing. Most small business people don’t run their businesses on the basis of “leads.” For them, the only justification for laying down cold hard cash is tangible new customers.

Since most of the validation of which leads become customers must be done by the small business itself, it never gets done, and so the ROI calculation is impossible. And since delivering and attributing sales from an advertising campaign is deeply impacted by post-click behavior, much of it off-line, it will likely be a long time before SEM takes off for smallm business.

SEM will only take off