Do you mean "small business" in the federal definition which includes companies with up to 1500 employees and $20m in revenue, or the colloquial definition which is 1-5 employees in a home office?
The latter is closer to selling to consumers than businesses - you deal directly with the principals and they pay you directly. Some things I learned from selling IT services to these clients as a young entrepreneur:
1. They are frugal. $1000 is considerable sum of money to them (even if just psychologically). They are very wary of subscription services/increasing their fixed outgoings and prefer to just fix stuff when it breaks.
2. They care about saving money and saving time, in that order. Anything that does not contribute to the core business function is extraneous to requirements. They will spend money on things you can directly show will save them time/money. Selling backup services or preventative maintenance is difficult until they have a disaster and see how expensive it is to clean up.
Companies who have scaled this market successfully and should be studied are Vistaprint and GoDaddy. Hostgator, Hubspot and Wix/Weebly are also successful companies in this space who operate mostly online and with smaller budgets (ie. no superbowl ads, but scaling SMB marketing is still going to be expensive).
Any other good small biz web companies who have good marketing? I'm also interested in this space as it seems like there is a huge opportunity there, but after a few years of looking for the best way to target them I'm wondering if it's just a tempting mirage on the horizon - promises of untold riches, but you'll get dashed on the rocks trying to reach them.
> They care about saving money and saving time, in that order.
I don't think this is true. For most businesses saving time is more important than saving money, but with a big caveat. Your service needs to actually save me time, not save me time "once I change my business processes and learn how to use your service." So if your service can save time right out of the box, businesses are not only more likely to pay for it, but they'll also probably pay more.
Of course, a necessary precondition is whatever your selling needs to solve a problem businesses believe they have. So if you're not solving a problem businesses believe they have, even if you're giving it away, few businesses will use it.
The flip side is if you're solving a problem businesses believe to be important, companies are more willing to invest a lot of time if they believe the end state will be substantially better than where they are now.
The latter is closer to selling to consumers than businesses - you deal directly with the principals and they pay you directly. Some things I learned from selling IT services to these clients as a young entrepreneur:
1. They are frugal. $1000 is considerable sum of money to them (even if just psychologically). They are very wary of subscription services/increasing their fixed outgoings and prefer to just fix stuff when it breaks.
2. They care about saving money and saving time, in that order. Anything that does not contribute to the core business function is extraneous to requirements. They will spend money on things you can directly show will save them time/money. Selling backup services or preventative maintenance is difficult until they have a disaster and see how expensive it is to clean up.
Companies who have scaled this market successfully and should be studied are Vistaprint and GoDaddy. Hostgator, Hubspot and Wix/Weebly are also successful companies in this space who operate mostly online and with smaller budgets (ie. no superbowl ads, but scaling SMB marketing is still going to be expensive).
Any other good small biz web companies who have good marketing? I'm also interested in this space as it seems like there is a huge opportunity there, but after a few years of looking for the best way to target them I'm wondering if it's just a tempting mirage on the horizon - promises of untold riches, but you'll get dashed on the rocks trying to reach them.