We’ve just had the biggest seasonal event of the year but many businesses have seasonality in their business to a greater or lesser extent. At the extremes are those that rely on a key date like Christmas or holidays but even in B2B there is often seasonality such as financial year ends or shutdown periods.

Should you just ride out the slow times and hope the good times compensate? Or are there practical marketing strategies you can apply to make the best of a seasonal business? It makes sense to do the latter and in this blog I will be looking at 10 strategies and tactics that should make the good times last that bit longer.

As yesterday was the 12/12/12 I thought a little themed blog wouldn’t go amiss. So here is my 12 days of Xmas ‘Marketin’ Style’.

If you consider one a day in the lead up to Christmas, hopefully by January you will have a plan of action and some new ideas to help promote your business more effectively.

Someone told me today that Christmas was only 7 weeks away, and before you all groan I am not going to blog about how you need to start planning you Christmas marketing (you’ve probably missed that boat and should be concentrating in Easter!) Instead I thought I would share some of the great gift ideas that are available for the loved one in your life who is a graphic designer, photographer or just is a bit of a geek when it comes to things like pantone and fonts.

It may sound counter-productive for a marketing an design agency to be giving away trade secrets about low cost ways of promoting your business, but as an SME business ourselves we know how hungry the ‘marketing animal’ can be and also how sometimes the low cost, simple things can be very effective.

So here is a list of 16 ideas and tips for marketing your business. Hopefully you will be doing many of these, but even if you are, there should be a few that are new to you. If they are new to you, then you have a great list to work your way through the appropriate ones and really start to have a positive impact on your business.

Recent meetings with clients who run SME business and have responsibility for their marketing has made me realise the challenge that they face as opposed to working with dedicated marketing professionals.

And it is not the obvious ones of lack of marketing experience, tight budgets or the scarcity of time to focus on this activity (although these are all common challenges they face). No what suddenly hit me like a bolt from the blue is that they are torn – they know they need to be proactively marketing, but sometimes when you are working flat out in a business this can feel like it is just generating a whole lot of extra work!

For any B2B company effective marketing is about building long standing client relationships, relationships that are built on trust and an understanding of the products and services you can provide.

So how can email with its fleeting messages and spam hangover be something that can help this? For SME business who are in the B2B or industrial sector, email may not seem like a particularly useful tool, after all you rarely have special offers or sell from your website. Yet as a relationship building tool, when used effectively, email can be extremely powerful. Keeping in contact with prospects through a lengthy sales pipeline. Keeping clients informed about the full range of services and products provided. Above all, keeping your business ‘font of mind’.

So if we accept that email can be extremely useful for B2B companies, I thought it would be useful to look at some specific pitfalls that B2B email marketers can fall into, plus a few reminders of best practice that apply to all.

reminders of best practice for all emailers.

VAT, we all have to pay it and if you are a business (whether you are VAT registered or not) you have to pay VAT from your suppliers if they are VAT registered. One area that many business owners may not be aware of is that some parts of their marketing does not attract VAT.

These are certain print items that you will be using to promote your business and sometimes print companies send incorrect invoices and charge VAT on zero-rated items which is a cost you could do without incurring.

What is and what isn’t VATable can seem a bit complicated and not always logical –so I thought I would create this handy list (this isn’t an exhaustive list however, so if in doubt contact HMRC!)

So here goes.

If you make and keep one New Year’s Resolution for your business it should be to make this year the year you really get stuck into social media. I have waxed lyrical in previous blogs about the benefits to small businesses - it is low cost although does require the time resource. Unfortunately time is a scarce commodity for most small business owners and directors, so despite its potential I know it can be a struggle to find the time to fit it in.

So I thought I would put together some tips and strategies to help you fit social media into your day. I cannot add an extra couple of hours to your day, but I may give you a couple of ideas that can help.

In December 2010 I wrote a blog called ‘2011 Marketing New Year’s Resolutions’ - not sure where that year has gone, but here we are again first day back in work in 2012 and looking to make changes to the way we run our lives and our businesses. Looking back at last year’s blog, the resolutions still stand, so please check it out, but I have added some more.

In challenging times, when so many things in the wider economic environment seem out of our control, the one thing you do have control over is your marketing.

As someone involved in marketing no one can ever accuse me of being shy of using the odd buzzword and it can be very difficult to avoid certain terms and words that are just so commonly used. Think of how many companies profess to offer ‘bespoke solutions’ or ‘quality that counts’. I call these ‘weasel words’. Words that are not untrue, but are either so overused that people stop listening to them, or are bland and generic.

Well it seems this phenomenon is spreading to how we present ourselves online, specifically with our LinkedIn profile. This week, LinkedIn released its list of 10 most overused professional buzzwords .

Having worked with SME businesses for the last 4 years, one of the most satisfying aspects is the immediate and tangible impact the marketing decisions can have on their business.

One of the frustrating aspects, however, is the fact that often good ideas can lose momentum and opportunities be missed because there is no ‘marketing infrastructure’ in place. Or to put it bluntly, with marketing an add-on to someone’s role (often the business owner) they often lack the time and know how to fully implement and capitalise on the marketing that they could be doing.

With Halloween fast approaching and all sense deserting us as we decide that severed fingers and dodgy fancy dress outfits are appropriate purchases, it got me thinking about what is the most scary social media platform.

The answer definitely has to be Twitter. It is one of the most talked about yet least understood social media platforms I come across when talking to businesses. And, because of that, it can seems to be an alien place full of its own language and connected to crazy things such as the disgrace of football players or the incitement of civil unrest. For many it feels like a dangerous place and not one that is appropriate for them, especially in the B2B market.

So I thought it best to address these fears with tips about how to use Twitter for your business and, like all good ghost stories, with the lights on it is never so spine tingling as first appears.

One of the biggest impacts social media has had on how businesses market themselves is not about low cost routes to market or the ability to ‘engage’ (I hate that word) with your audience, I believe it is the shift is emphasis from pushing out controlled sales messages to sharing knowledge and expertise.

But for many business owners this does not sit comfortably.

I have had conversations with business owners who do not want to publish case studies in case there competitors see them (not that most of us don’t have a very good idea of who our competitors are working with anyway). I also come across the argument about the giving away of knowledge for free, especially for service companies where their knowledge is usually attached with a fee or charge.

So what is the happy medium? What are the arguments for being more open with the sharing of your knowledge be it through blogs, forums or free guides or white papers?

Networking is one of the main ways we build contacts and gain new business. It is not an easy option and takes time and dedication, but the pay offs can be well worth it. Wherever you are based there are oodles of networking opportunities from ad hoc events to more committed referral groups such as BNI.

Your business card is a key tool in these situations, but just having a business card (and believe me there are many people who turn up and don’t have any with them) is not necessarily making the most of this opportunity.

So after rule number #1 – HAVE ENOUGH CARDS TO GIVE OUT – what else can you do with your humble business card to make the right impression?

So what is your greatest fear? Flying. Spiders. Heights. Accidently calling your boss ‘dad’ ... well what about public speaking?

If the mere mention of speaking in front of a crowd has brought you out in a cold sweat, then you are not alone. In fact, a number of surveys put ‘fear of public speaking’ (or Glossophobia) as a top ten fear and for many it is the number one, above dying!

Even if not a full blown phobia then it is estimated that 75% of us suffer from anxiety at the thought of speaking in front of a group or audience. Now as someone who has to regularly present and make pitches as part of my job, presenting comes relatively easily (although it wasn’t always the case). But every week I see evidence of just how stressful it can be for people who aren’t used to it.

If you are like me you will have noticed the increasing momentum and prevalence of those funny black and white squares. They are popping up on business cards, ads, posters and banners and last week even a featured on radio 4’s You and Yours (so they must becoming mainstream).

QR (or Quick Response) codes originated in Japan and were used in manufacturing to tag parts so that they could be machine read. In effect they are like bar codes, but unlike the traditional bar codes we all know, they can hold far more data. By using a smart phone you ‘take a picture’ of the code (using a QR reader which is easily downloaded) and the information embedded in the code is revealed.

It hasn’t been until the spread of smart phones into the population, however, that QR codes as a marketing tool has really started to take off – after you need people to be able to read them!

We may be technically out of recession but for many businesses, times are still tight and with squeezes in both consumer and public sector, it is often the B2B businesses that are stuck in the middle, beings squeezed from both sides.

So what can businesses to business organisations do to make the most of their marketing in these testing times?

In a financial climate where every penny of marketing spend counts, I am always surprised at how many small businesses fail to utilise one of their cheapest forms of advertising – editorial coverage or PR, especially in local media.

Now I am not a PR expert and have always deferred to specialist PR agencies and consultants when working on national brands and large businesses. They have the contacts and knowledge about what is newsworthy and what the editors are looking for.

But getting your business in your local paper, local business pages, e-publication or trade magazine is something that is worth spending some time and effort on and doesn’t necessarily need PR specialists. And, if done correctly, this is effort that can pay off exponentially as you build relationships with editors, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Let's start at the beginning and debunk a few myths ...