Katie is owner and creator of Kerfluffle, a peanut butter swirled with marshmellow fluff. She used SBDC's Getting Your Recipe to Market program to bring her yummy fluff to households around the area.

There’s probably no better way to get customers interested in your food product than giving them a live demo. They not only get to look, taste, and smell your product, but they get to experience your brand and the story behind everything.

With that being said, when you do demo your food product at a live event, you want to make sure it’s a memorable experience for consumers. Not only do you need to showcase your product in an effective manner, but you need to get creative in order to stand out in the eyes of potential customers.

With all the buzz around digital marketing and e-commerce, it might be tempting to think that brick and mortar stores are going the way of the dinosaur. But you’d actually be wrong. As a matter of fact, 94 percent of all retail sales in America are still generated by brick and mortar stores.

But before opening a brick and mortar store, you need to have all of your bases covered as a small business owner. There are a lot of moving parts to getting your physical storefront up and running, and with that comes a lot of opportunities for things to go sideways.

Digital marketing can be a dizzying arena when it comes to the amount of tools, systems and platforms available to businesses. The moment you think you’ve seen one platform that can literally “do it all,” two or three others spring up with more functionality or the same feature set at a cheaper price.

Keeping up with the latest in digital marketing tools might seem like an impossible task, especially for small businesses. How exactly is one to supposed to find the best digital marketing platforms for small businesses?

Getting a business started and off the ground can be hard, and every business owner wants all the help they can get. If you're a minority business owner, there's targeted aid and opportunities available to you. To take advantage of them, however, you'll need a Minority Business Enterprise Certification (or MBE Certification).

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As a small business, it can be hard to set aside the budget necessary to do the marketing campaigns you want to do, especially with newer mediums like digital, it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed. When you consider the fact that the U.S. SBA holds that a small business with revenue under $5 million (the average annual revenue of a small business with a website) should be spending about 8% of that revenue on marketing (roughly $400 thousand annually), it may surprise you than 83% of businesses with 50 people or less (i.e., truly small businesses, or about 90% of them) spend a mere $1,000 on marketing per month — this amount is only appropriate for businesses with revenue limited to $150 thousand annually, and digital is only a small portion of that budget.

In an industry where sales can make or break your business, it's important that you (or your sales team) have good sales habits. However, there's more to it than just having good habits, it's about breaking bad sales habits, too. In this post we’re going to discuss how to break bad sales habits so you can improve your bottom line.