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Small businesses are always looking to improve the service they offer their customers while also improving the bottom line.  For some small business owners the answer might be to drop the old ways and embrace new technologies.

Let’s take the first, and most interesting I think, example in the article is a small dry cleaner who has brought “Phil” on board.  Phil is what they call the hand-held scanner that is part of a $40,000 investment in upgrading the operation to leave pins and slips of paper behind for barcodes and scanners.

Although employees had some trepidations at first, they now find it faster and easier to get the right clothes to the right customer faster.

Related to this is a car-wash owner who implemented a speedpass system that reduced staff stress and has virtually elminated the lines and honking that plagued them before.

IT analysts feel that small businesses are in the best position to implement new technologies both in operations and marketing because there are fewer staff to train and generally less infrastructure to update and replace.

Sources: Small businesses go high-tech — Small Business Trends

CHALLENGE: "Web designers want pretty people's heads on a home page," says Ken Kornbluth, President MarketingPilot. "They fought us like crazy on our design."

It’s a constant battle for marketers, your website designer wows you with a beautiful design.  It’s innovative, it has style, it looks amazing.  But will it work?  Will it engage your customers?  Will your customers act on your call to action?  Is it clear on the homepage or landing page—landing pages are special pages that you use for banner ads they are focused on that particular call to action or audience—what your call to action is?

MarketingPilot had a problem.  Their site looked great, but visitors didn’t know what to do.  In this case study from MarketingSherpa, you learn about making navigation simple.  Just simple black text on white.  On making sure that once you have some one ready to sign up for your seminar or whitepaper that you don’t distract and lose them.

As a ten-year veteran of the web-design world, I found this article to be very instructive.  It shatters many myths of “good” website design and is a worthwhile read for anyone who is thinking about building a new website or redesigning their existing one.

Source: MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR — Screen shots of the example

When people are looking for something, a product, an answer, a review, 96% of internet users start on one of many search engines—most likely Google.  You have probably seen the ads Google has on its own sites’ and on many others as well.  How do you, as a marketer, then learn how to get your ad in front of the right person, at the right time, for a fair price?  Part 1 of this multi-part article from SmallBusinessComputing.com sets the stage well for anyone starting out in search engine marketing.  This isn’t how to make sure your site is listed and ranked well in a search, but how to effectively determine what keywords most closely match your product and what the costs to advertise using them will be.

The article is simple and easy to digest.  The next segments of this series should also be instructive and informative.

Source: Search Engine Marketing: Part I