How SMB Networking is Driving More Referral Marketing

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Many small businesses have picked up on referral marketing options, but word-of-mouth referrals are an ancillary benefit of networking with other local business owners. “The entire business community needs a way to connect and have ongoing dialogue,” says Ro Prakash, co-founder of Townsquared.

The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs

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Surely small business owners belong to the class of ordinary users. Expecting them to invest the time and energy to become power users is a good way to guarantee that your user base will remain small. This realization could lead to a very different and more fruitful approach to product design for SMBs.

Frustration With Digital Marketing Vendors Boils Over for One SMB

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If it’s possible to distill the 30 million small business owners in the U.S. into a single persona, Marc Reisner strikes our columnists as a great candidate: “Marc has been disillusioned by past performance and that poor performance has understandably tarred the entire industry with the same brush.”

The Coming Polarization of the SMB Software Market

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Strangely, despite the size of the opportunity you don’t find too many SMB companies in most VC portfolios. You see plenty of consumer and enterprise-focused startups, but much fewer on the SMB side. The reason for this is that it’s “hard” for companies serving SMBs to grow at the rate that can deliver “venture” returns.

Is There an SMB Analytics Market? And If So, What Should It Measure?

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“I’m not convinced small businesses without a full-time in-house marketer really care about analytics,” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly chat. “They certainly don’t have the time or expertise to dive in each week and change their marketing or customer service behavior based on what a dashboard is telling them.”

Vistaprint Continues Push Into Digital with Focus on Micro-Business Market

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As the company’s platform expands beyond print to include a full-service digital marketing suite, it’s working overtime to change public perception and expand its role as an all-in-one service provider for small and mid-size firms.

Vistaprint Launches Platform to Connect Online and Offline Marketing

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Vistaprint is expanding beyond its roots as a provider of custom printed products today, with a new suite of digital marketing tools for “micro” business owners. The company’s redesigned website building platform will include tools for social media marketing, local listings, email marketing, and business email, along with design services.

For Local Companies Focused on Specific Verticals, a Sharp Focus Can Be Key for Growth

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Bloated technology platforms designed to serve the entire SMB market have slowly been replaced with more targeted vertical plays, but industry veterans still caution that every vertical requires a unique approach.

Tackling the Problem of Measurement in Local

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“Google’s always had the disadvantage of being a more complex and opaque product than Facebook,” writes David Mihm, “but it feels like they’ve made almost zero progress on this front in the last eight years.”

How Much Do You Know About Your SMB Customers?

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They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but when it comes to landing SMB clients, that’s simply not the case. That’s why we went out to more than 500 local merchants and asked them about their experiences in local marketing. The result? The Local Merchant Report…

How Local Publishers Can Make the Most of Non-Local Traffic Surges

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When local stories go viral, the often do so at the expense of local advertisers who see no added value in this influx of poorly targeted leads. So how do local publishers benefit from the periodic bonanza of visiting traffic without alienating their base?

E-commerce Is a $341.7 Billion-dollar Industry — Can SMBs Get a Piece of the Pie?

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Small businesses can close the gap between online and offline commerce with some hard work and adherence to a smart strategy. Here are a few tips to get you started.

7 Ways Local Merchants Can Use Messaging Apps for Marketing

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Smartphone messaging apps were used by more than 1.4 billion consumers last year, but very few of the conversations that took place were between shoppers and local merchants. Here are seven examples of ways that local merchants can start using messaging apps to improve customer service and boost customer acquisition right away.

Retail, Restaurants, and Roofers: Where Does On-Demand Work (and Not)?

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A year into the on-demand revolution, the question persists: Where’s it going next? So far, it’s gone into nearly every local vertical, but there are still areas with the right conditions for on-demand models to take root, some of which remain underdeveloped. These include higher-end professional services like lawyers and doctors, project-based work like design and writing, and, of course, SMBs, especially when it comes to local marketing and advertising.

NinthDecimal’s Staas: Programmatic Will Become a Strong Opportunity for Small Business Owners

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“One of the challenges is a lot of the tools around the ecosystem have not really been built to scale for the small business owner, and they still require a lot of sophistication in understanding how to buy and sell media. The opportunity is in looking at how some of these platforms are evolving. I think programmatic will become a very strong opportunity for the small business owner,” said NinthDecimal president David Staas about shifting trends in location-based marketing and audience targeting.

Report: Breaking into the Inbox with Successful Pitches to Local Merchants

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A new report from Street Fight Insights found that when being pitched a new product or service, local merchants want information on costs, a clear explanation — backed up by case studies — of how the product or service will benefit their business, and all their questions or concerns addressed.

7 Tools SMBs Can Use to Track Leads

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When local merchants spend big on digital marketing, they expect to see results. Without using the appropriate tracking technology, however, it can be downright impossible to determine whether a marketing method is working. Here are seven options, each for a different type of business or marketing scenario.

Mono CEO: In Local Marketing, U.S. Is Maybe 5 Years Ahead of Europe

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Since its founding in 2007, Mono Solutions has been giving SMBs a complete package — from website building, to helping with online visibility, to engaging with customers, to doing business online. We recently caught up with the company’s CEO, Louise Lachmann, to talk about how she sees the local industry evolving.

Small Biz and Big Tech: How to Connect Local Merchants With Today’s Ad Technology

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You can’t love what you don’t understand and the same holds true at every level of strategy – from local to global. We already know geo-targeted advertising campaigns equal success; it’s only a matter of jumping the hurdle of understanding before local businesses know it too…

What 500 Local Merchants Want: It’s All in Our Latest Report

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We’re thrilled to release the third edition of Street Fight’s “The Local Merchant Report” — a 70-page, 500-merchant study featuring dozens of charts, rich data, case studies, market analysis, and even pitch strategies…