We recently surveyed 1,662 SMB principals of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) on their favorite ways to learn about products or services for their business. Here’s what they told us, starting with offline tactics:

Offline Tactics

Trade shows and events top the list. While events can be expensive and difficult to scale, the upside is that the SMBs that are there are in shopping mode. SMBs also like meetings with your sales team, where they can learn in depth about how your offerings will benefit their business.

Although SMBs rank radio relatively low as a way to learn about products and services, radio actually indexes very high with SMBs, and can be an important part of your top of funnel strategy.

Online Tactics

Online, SMBs’ first choice to learn about products is search – which presumes, of course, that they are aware of it in the first place. A search may well lead them to the second highest ranked tactic, the product section of your website. An effective product section should make it as easy as possible to understand the benefits of your product or service, learn how businesses like theirs have benefitted, and determine which options or configuration is best for them.

Resource centers, such as the American Express OPEN forum, rank third. A resource center is a great tool to add context to your product or service. For example, a financial institution may provide educational content about the difference between a loan and a line of credit, and then link to their credit offerings from that article.

Finally, even in this age of social and mobile marketing, email continues to be an effective way to engage with SMBs. SMBs can read it, save it, delete it, forward it to a colleague – it’s a very user-friendly tactic. And typically an email newsletter reaches a more receptive audience, as it is likely something they have chosen to receive.