SMB Who's Hot: Wells Fargo (Again)

Wells Fargo is at it again. After a successful launch of their small business webcast series, the well known bank is airing their second webcast on Protecting Your Business tomorrow as part of the company's commitment to celebrating Small Business Appreciation Month.

The interactive webcast will feature leading industry experts who will offer relevant and practical advice for small business owners on protecting the physical and virtual assets of their businesses. The panelists will include internal experts at Wells Fargo as well as external sources with legal and security backgrounds.

Protecting your business is not the sexiest of topics. Most entrepreneurs only really deal with these issues when they are forced to and are reactive instead of proactive. From experience any topic relating to sales, marketing, and financing will always bring a crowd.

That being said, Wells Fargo is taking the right steps to reach out to the small business community and go beyond the call of duty to provide additional value to their clients. I am looking forward to seeing their future lineup of webcasts.

The webcast can be viewed here: http://www.wellsfargo.com/biz/webcast

7 Tips For Marketing To Small Business

Kim Gordon wrote an article for Entrepreneur.com that brought up 7 tips for marketing to small business owners.

The challenge is, entrepreneurs are time-strapped multitaskers who are also relatively risk-averse--making them a difficult audience to reach and persuade.

Her Top 7 Tips include:

1. Increased sales: Most business owners say their primary objective is to increase sales. Will buying your product or service help your prospects achieve that goal?

2. Safe choices: When it comes to buying outside products and services, entrepreneurs as a group tend to be cautious. Demonstrate that buying from you is a safe choice by providing a content-rich campaign.

3. Maximum convenience: Running a growing business often requires long hours, making shopping convenience a major draw for entrepreneurs. Multichannel marketing--including, for example, a website, a brick-and-mortar store and a direct-mail campaign--is essential to building sales from this target group.

4. Ways to save money: Business owners are likely to be spending their own money and are correspondingly conservative. Adding value to your offers will help overcome resistance.

5. Do-it-yourself solutions: Time-strapped business owners have just enough work hours to get their own jobs done--and they don't want to learn yours. Low-cost do-it-yourself solutions are appreciated, provided they're turnkey.

6. Reliability and performance: Entrepreneurs carefully consider the post-sale customer experience when making a purchase. To motivate business owners to complete sales, make reliability a central component of your marketing message--don't bury this information at the bottom of your marketing materials or website.

7. Vendors they trust: Entrepreneurs often prefer to work with other business owners they know and trust. Special events and networking are great ways to foster interaction with prospects.