Effective Marketing Tactics for SMBs by George Bounacos

It is a challenge to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and effectively convey the uniqueness of your brand. In a bid to connect with prospects across channels, SMBs get overwhelmed with the available options and the cost associated with exploring and using them to get satisfactory results. In the last segment of our interview with George Bounacos, after taking advice on SEO and tips on online marketing, we tried to understand how SMBs can effectively use various channels of marketing to establish themselves among their industry peers.

We hear a lot about online reputation management these days. What should SMBs monitor, where and how?

The best practical and free advice is to set a News Alert at Bing and at Google for your organization's name, the trade names of all of your products and the names of the individuals on your management team. Make sure to select to receive everything and have items mailed to one person. Make that person your early warning system.

There are commercial packages to buy, but for basic monitoring, you can't go wrong with this free, simple solution.

How effective do you believe mobile marketing is for SMBs and how would you suggest they get started?

Local businesses should already be deploying mobile solutions. The new buzzword in web development is "responsive design," which means that a site will adapt and configure itself to neatly fit on a smartphone display, tablet or a desktop computer monitor.

We see many U.S. businesses serving regular web pages to 10 to 20 percent of traffic across a variety of devices. For usability, a company's website needs to make a good presentation regardless of the device that is being used.

Mobile advertising is also an important strategy especially for local service businesses. Any business from food delivery to consumer-centric services such as plumbers or electricians needs to be considering mobile advertising because the percentage of people looking for those types of services is much higher on mobile. We're even seeing gains by local services such as psychologists and tutoring.