Going Beyond Search Engine Marketing: Matchmaking for Business

Web Sites, Blogs, RSS feeds, email newsletters and social media services are all great and good, but sometimes it can be quite overwhelming to know where to start and what works for your business.

Services such as Homestead.com's Search Light and other tools can help small businesses with their online marketing and in fact going direct to Google via Google AdWords small businesses can create and manage their own online campaigns.

However, for many small businesses, online marketing is still a challenge. Into this void steps in a service like Matchpoint.

Matchpoint matches small businesses looking for products and services to service provdiers who provide these services or products.

Small businesses can use Matchpoint to find a variety of products and services. Matchpoint narrows down their request to 3 - 5 vendors providing what they need. The vendors can choose to contact the small businesses via email or phone. But guess what - the small businesses email and phone information is not given to the service provider - it's cloaked.

So what does this mean?

Matchpoint has the burden of ensuring it markets its service to service providers and of course builds a growing list of small businesses who want to use its products.

While Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo and Ask will return billions of search results for queries you input, services like Matchpoint will return a limited set of businesses who can provide just the service you need.

Matchpoint is very similar to BuyerZone.

1 comments

Comments

#1 posted by sallybaggett, March 12, 2008 4:17 PM

Hi Ramon, I'm Sally Baggett from Matchpoint. Thanks for writing about our company—the recognition is always nice and I appreciate your insight. One small point I wanted to clarify is that Matchpoint is really more a consumer service that has specific benefits for small businesses that list with us. As you noted, there are other companies out there that focus only on B2B.

Our goal is two-fold, 1) make the consumer experience of finding service providers simple and fast and 2) provide a convenient vehicle for businesses to present their offers to people specifically searching for their products and services. A lot of small businesses do not have websites and Matchpoint helps those businesses attract online consumers by bringing them relevant leads via the phone or email.

That being said, of course small businesses can use Matchpoint to find service providers too. B2B would probably search for different services, but we list service providers in over 2,000 business categories nationwide, so both should be covered.

Thanks again for your time.