2nd Windows Vista Small Business Challenges Supplement heavily promotes SBSC!

  • Article

Front CoverRemember the SMB Supplement that was focused on a Windows Vista Small Business Challenges campaign and competition? It called out SBSC partners and was distributed in big name magazine publications including Vista Magazine, What Laptop, PC Plus, Computer Arts, 3D World and .NET magazine. In total these magazines have a subscription base of 203,240 people! Well, the second supplement has just been published and is going out to that very same subscription base. This version has even greater focus on the SBSC partner channel and has even more input from SBSC partners. Let's take a look...

The first thing to point out it that the supplement highlights SBSC partners on every page. We start with the contents page where the editor, James Stables states in his editorial that:

"The SBSC is a fantastic group of experts who understand small businesses and provide specialist IT support tailored to its client's needs."

Contents Page And in the contents list he highlights that Page 14 gives "six reasons why you should always trust a Microsoft Small Business Specialist" Plus, you can see the SBSC customer awareness banner that we use on the Small Business Customer website and in the customer ready datasheets prominently placed at the bottom of this page.

Each page of the supplement focuses on one of the five winners of the Small Business Challenges competition, who were set a number of tasks and were supported by an SBSC partner. Each of the five SBSC partners who supported the competition are given the opportunity to give their own opinion, which enabled them to highlight their own businesses, but also demonstrates the wider capabilities of SBSC partners.

Page 8-9_Guy Gregory    Page 8-9_Guy Gregory - Copy

In addition, on the last page, we have a whole page dedicated to promoting the SBSC partner channel.

SBSC Overview Page

This page takes on the look and feel of the SBSC Customer datasheets, but in addition we have included a brilliant quote from SBSC Partner Area Lead, Vijay Riyait, who talks about the value of the community.

SBSC Overview Page - Copy

Finally, the customer call to action is to visit our Small Business SBSC page on the customer website to find your nearest SBSC partner. This will utilise our partner finder tool.

The investment into this activity was quite substantial and we are really pleased with the outcome. I hope you will agree that reaching over 203,000 subscribers is great promotion for the SBSC channel.

Thank you so much to the following SBSC partners who kindly gave their time to contribute to this activity:

  • Mike Gibbs - Technos
  • Lee Evans - Vital Online Studio
  • Guy Gregory - Peak Support Services Ltd
  • Gareth Brown - Sytec
  • Edmund Davis - OLT Consulting
  • Vijay Riyait - iQubed

We should also point out that these two supplements go hand in hand with some online promotion for the small business challenges competition website. So a big thank you to the Windows Client product marketing team who grabbed the opportunity to work with SBSC partners and helped us to promote the SBSC channel out to the end customers.

If you have any feedback or comments to share about this please send them to sbscuk@microsoft.com.