This was a burning question in my head in September 2021 but didn’t have much luck googling it. Here’s our experience and analysis of Small Business Awards by Corporate Vision. Read on to find out whether the awards handed out by Corporate Vision awards truly are a legit or not.

How did we hear about Corporate Vision?

Corporate Vision contacted us in September 2021 announcing us that we were nominated as candidate for being the best company in the ‘IT Infrastructure Management Specialists - Finland’ category for Small Business Awards. At that time (before this blog post) there was very little information online about Small Business Awards or the company behind them. What I learned at that time was that they seemed to be a so-called ‘vanity award’, where winners have been preselected and everything else was just for show. We could not be absolutely sure about that then, and we thought that “winning” might have some marketing value, so we decided to play along and see where it leads us. I will first go through the process, then I’ll try to give an answer the question in the title.

As an entrepreneur you are flooded with attempts to persuade you to buy something. Typically what is sold is services like website development, mobile application development or outsourced developer/devops workforce. Most attempts are mediocre, but only a few can be classified as outright bad. As inbound marketing and sales are dear to our heart, in this series we present some of the worst marketing attempts we’ve seen, in the order of appearance. We try to add some value by adding a humoristic analysis on top. All the names and emails have been converted to John or Jane Doe and example.org so that you don’t accidentally buy anything from these guys. However, with pinch of luck you may find the exact same message in your INBOX if you feel the urge to buy something from these guys.

Introduction

The purpose of this post is to show that search engine marketing (SEM) can be started rather easily. Small businesses, like our company, may not have resources (money, knowledge, time etc) to spend on marketing and consultancy so I’m hoping that sharing this experience will help and encourage other SEM newbies!

This blog post is in no means a complete SEM tutorial. There are plenty online, paid and free (I’ll list some in the next chapter). My idea instead is to focus on the main points for getting started with SEM and also to enlighten some of they key concepts and terms. I’m trying to write down things that I hope I had heard of before starting with SEM!