While not an exhaustive list, they are certainly start-up tips that I would have been grateful for.

1. Be Honest

Honesty is at the root of every good business relationship. In order to land, keep and develop a design client into an ongoing account you need to be honest about quality, ability, pricing, timescales and volume upfront. Being honest with a client allows you to manage their expectations throughout the delivery process. It also means you may lose the occasional job if you are brutally honest about your design ability and capacity but in the long run by developing a reputation for honesty clients are more likely to come back and ask you again, knowing they will get a truthful quote and answer.

2. Respond Fast

We live in a 24/7 society. People are online and connected to email and social networks by a mind boggling array of electronic devices. Old excuses like “I didn’t get the email” or “I was out of the office” simply do not cut it.  You may not be working for an employer any more but essentially if someone is paying you to do something, they are your boss – for the moment at least. Therefore, if your boss/client sends you an email or calls you, you need to answer them quickly, professionally and efficiently.

3. People are your biggest asset

There is an old, but still very relevant saying that people buy from people. As a freelancer you need to develop a whole host of relationships in order to keep your B2B business functioning. Be they with clients, with other providers or with suppliers, the relationships you develop will reflect the quality of your business.

As a freelancer your biggest asset is your reputation. You get your reputation not only from physical design work delivered but from how you interact with those you come into contact with. The way I look at it is if a pitch for business comes down between you and another provider, and there is very little to choose between the two of you, clients will go for the provider they like. Give them another reason to hire you by being the one they can see themselves working with.

4. Cash Flow

The ideal cash flow model for any start-up business is to get the money in as quickly as possible and hold on to it for as long as you can. Where start-ups tend to fall down is trying to balance the need for incoming funds with the demands – sometimes red bill demands – of the outgoing.

As you begin to build your B2B design business you will be able to negotiate better terms and conditions. These may include staggered payments for delivered work rather than waiting until completion to invoice.

Likewise with your own suppliers, as you build a reputation as someone who pays their bill on time, you may be able to negotiate looser terms that allow you to hold onto cash for longer.

Cash flow in a B2B start-up is not something that you think about when you sit down with a sheet of blank paper trying to plan what shape your business will take, but with a family and mortgage the need to have a steady income each month becomes fairly acute.

5. Get a good accountant

Asking why you need an accountant to do your accounts when it is so easy to do it yourself online, is the same nonsense argument people use when pondering the value of hiring a B2B design agency versus using Microsoft to design a logo. Bottom line – professionals know what they are doing. You get a service from a professional accountant – and a professional B2B design agency for that matter – that you cannot match just because you can use an Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Paint.

Death and Taxes might be inevitable but while you wait for one, you need a good accountant to help you through the quagmire of the other. As a start-up and as a B2B business that runs almost exclusively from home (apart from a few well placed Starbucks research days) you may be entitled to a tax break on your outgoings from some of your earnings.

Accountants for small start-up businesses are fairly inexpensive and as a contractor report to you on time, or Tax deadline.

Starting a small B2B design agency is not an easy ride but it is rewarding. By taking advice from people like me who have experienced the bumps in the road already, you can at least begin to smooth out the terrain ahead.

Rise above the beige

There are a lot of very boring products and companies out there aimed at the B2B market. The default marketing of these companies is beige leaflets with dull lists of samey benefits. Widget Company A looks, certainly on paper, indistinguishable from Widget Company B. So, if you are Widget Company C, there is a real opportunity to rise above this baseline beige and create a strong, unique brand. As it would be the exception, rather than the rule, buyers take notice.

B2B buying decisions are based on emotion

B2B procurement processes are often tightly controlled. They have to be. With huge amounts of money riding on orders or contracts, the right decision has to be made first time. Even so, with procedure followed to the letter, emotional responses creep in to the decision making process. Ultimately, in marketing we use brands to elicit emotion in a consumer – whether they are B2B or B2C. Be that a love – or hate – of meerkats when choosing your comparison site, or emotionally attaching yourself to being a Mac or a PC. (By the way, at Matizmo we are Mac)

This emotional response is just as real in B2B marketing as it is in B2C. Strong branding helps you leverage that emotional response.

Make the decision easy for buyers

Look, someone buying from a B2B company is not just a nameless, faceless person in an office. Their purchase decision has consequences. Your branding is how you position yourself in the market for this buyer. Make yourself as safe and trustworthy as possible and the decision becomes easier. A strong and recognisable brand, with strong selling points helps buyers make their decision, and furthermore justify it if needs be.  Brands are known quantities. B2B buyers want to know their decision will be seen as “decisive” rather than “brave”.

Branding is distinction

Branding is only part of the jigsaw. To be a successful as a B2B marketer you have to deliver on the promise that the branding has made.  That means ensuring everything downstream from the sale adheres to strict brand and customer service guidelines. This may mean that the whole after sales process needs to be looked at internally. While this may mean short term pain, for your brand to remain distinctive, it has to remain congruent.

Not all B2B marketers accept the fact that strong brands drive business. That being so, working on developing your brand and branding can have considerable impact in a B2B environment.

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Social Media is like a wave. You ride it well, you are riding high. You crash it, you can be engulfed. A traditional marketer’s nightmare was a brand that could not be controlled. Nowadays, where social is the central plank of most effective marketing strategies, marketers have had to face and embrace the fact that their brand may spin out of control. There is very little Habitat could have done once the damage was done but to put their hands up, apologise and try to rebuild their damaged credibility. They took three months to come back onto twitter and in September last year, under the watchful eye of a twitter expert, they decided to stick their toe back in the social water.

For B2B brands learning to swim in the self same waters, how can they prevent this disaster happening in the first place? Despite the new mediums and technology evident in campaign plans, marketing still revolves around a core set of principles. It all starts with brand values. If you align all your activity and outward interaction to your brand, even if the toe dip in the social world is not a spectacular success, it can hardly be said to a spectacular failure. Couple your brand with clear social media engagement policies and you create a framework from which you can interact – for that, dear reader, is what social media is about.

B2B marketers need to accept that there are parts of the online debate that they will never be able to control, but if the opportunity to explain the company position on controversial issues presents itself then it should be taken. For example, recently O2 announced the end of unlimited Wi-Fi with their iphone tariffs and there was a certain amount of geeky outrage. However, for every question, query and point of annoyance that was raised on their blog about it, they duly came in officially and answered the criticism. Although it may make uncomfortable reading in some places, it is a great example of how a debate and point of annoyance can be turned to a point of advantage for the company.

Social media is about interaction – the good and the bad. If you do not join the debate then you cannot influence the conversation. Social outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, give you an opportunity to meet with critics on your ground. As long as your responses remain brand congruent and depersonalised, then while you may not be able to turn the conversation round, you certainly may have stopped others believing the other side of the story.

Attention Age

We have moved beyond the Information Age into the Attention Age. As the amount of information available increased so our ability to consume it all decreased. Information providers now vie for the attention of an increasingly discerning information consumer.

Search Engines hold the key to the Attention Age. Search is the preferred way for individuals to find information. This in mind, search returns – through their algorithms and formulas – strive to become increasingly relevant to information requests. The good news for individual information consumers is that it is up to the information provider to demonstrate the relevance of their site rather than for the web users to stumble upon it.

Information Overload

Information is everywhere. We find ourselves in a state of constant bombardment by the messages and opinion of everyone from genuine industry experts, to the web equivalent of a man with a placard heralding the end of the world. There is no way that anyone could read every piece of information in the public realm. That in mind, and in order to give us time to do things other than consume information, it is wise to ration the amount we take in and tune out the irrelevant noise. Instead of seeing it as information overload, see it more as living with constant choice about what is relevant and where to get your information. Information itself is no longer the commodity. Our attention is.

Social Media

Another great difference between the Information Age and the Attention Age is the rise and use of social media. Through social media platforms such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube individuals create, consume and share information amongst followers and friends. Often they have micro-relevance to an individual or set of individuals but the fact that it has been created and shared means that it can be consumed.

Tools have been developed to cut through the noise and hone in on what is relevant to the personalized interests of Joe or Josephine Bloggs. RSS feeds, for example, allow you to subscribe to channels providing interesting comment or information at the exclusion of others.

As long as we have an increasing pool of information to draw conclusions from, the Attention Age will continue to develop as a concept and as a reality. For B2B marketers, the Attention Age offers opportunity to hone their dialogue with consumers and make it relevant and accessible via the filtering channels. More information is not always better, relevant and accessible information is.

Especially in technology marketing, you want the subtle call to action after someone has read your content to be “if I want to do this with my business, these are the go to people”.

Writing engaging content is one thing but unless you have effective distribution channels via social media then you could build the most effective library of content ever and no-one will come to read it. This is not the Field of Dreams. You don’t build it and they will come. You have to work damn hard to squeeze every last drop of value out your content. This can be done by using social media like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to promote your content, or by ensuring that your website is easy to find through leveraging effective SEO techniques and finally, by varying the delivery method of your content you attract different audiences. B2B clients, for example, love video. They feel that a webinar or single subject video talks directly to them. It works for your own personal branding too as potential clients get to see you in the facilitator role talking eloquently and verbosely about your subject.

Content marketing is fast becoming the preferred way to market a business in the B2B environment. Even as recently as ten years ago, decision makers in business got their news and industry information solely from monthly magazines and quarterly digests. Slowly their intake of information changed from monthly magazines, peppered with expensive full page adverts selling services and products, to getting news online and getting only comment and debate from the magazine. In the last 18 months it has changed again, not least because the media landscape itself has changed. Magazine and newspaper publishers have gone through somewhat of an apocalypse in this recession. They have faced the triple whammy of recession and reduced marketing spend, increased paper bills and further migration of content – free content at that – and readers online. Pressure on budgets have slowed attendance at costly roundtables and conferences as businesses prefer their decision makers to do their own research and upskill in their own time. If anything the economic conditions have accelerated the change and solidified content marketing and social media platforms such as LinkedIn as the place to network, promote their business and get quality information and industry insight.

This genie is not going to go back into the bottle. Content, insight and information is now expected to be free. If you want to ensure that your brand and company is aligned with quality content you need to consider your B2B content marketing strategy now.

It is now commonly accepted that email newsletters are an effective form of customer communication. Anything, therefore, that can be done to encourage open rates and interaction with the content and offers it contains works to improve the overall effectiveness of the communication. The most opened HTML email newsletters are ones with simple messages that mentioning the brand or company in the line and give a clear descriptor as to what the email is about. For example – John Smiths Bitter March Newsletter or British Airways Volcanic Ash Disruption Update.

Consciously or not readers form their expectations of what is in the email newsletter and whether they will be interested or not from the subject line. It is therefore worth testing subject lines and their effectiveness by creating two or three test groups from your newsletter sign ups. By altering the wording test group by test group you can begin to understand which wording is most effective. Putting the work in ahead of the big send out will give you a better open rate and allow you to hone your understanding of what customer communications work best in your field.

Customers have likely signed up for an email newsletter to be kept informed about what your company is doing – new products, offers, expansions etc. That does not mean they necessarily want to be sold to via the newsletters. Research shows that it is best to avoid certain words and symbols as they come across as sales-like and can therefore be deemed junk mail. These words include, but are no means limited to free, help, reminder, special and sale and if you can avoid using %, ! or ? then your open rates should see a rise too.

Email marketing is an opportunity to build a relationship with your client or customer. It is also an opportunity to add value to their understanding of your niche or give them information and market intelligence they can use in their everyday work. This being so, customers will come to value the consistency you commit to producing these newsletters with. If it is a weekly newsletter, make sure you send it weekly. If it is monthly, make sure you send it monthly. The consistency of sending will also become related to the consistency of the subject line. If you find a type of subject line that works for your audience then don’t be afraid to use it. It begins to build brand recognition and should have an impact on your open rates.

Whether you are starting a new newsletter or are looking to increase the open rate of a well established one, starting with a good subject line can make all the difference to your customer communication.