SMEs: Marketing’s Low Hanging Fruit By Nubla Iftikhar

For marketers, small and medium businesses are the ‘middle child’ which is largely an unexplored customer base with huge germinating return. SMEs are defined as independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees. In fact, the vast majority have between 1 and 100. They may be solo operations, ‘mom and pop’ set ups or entrepreneurial firms.
SMEs are neither large scale business enterprise nor are they individual customers – they share attributes of both. Similar to an enterprise, they buy products and services for business applications but like consumers their buying behaviors are highly individual. Their buying power matches those of larger companies like volume discounts, special products and contracted corporate service accounts. They also require individuality and intimacy in their business relationships.
The SMEs are very much in the middle. They may expect the kind of sales force attention that big enterprise customers get – but there are simply too many of them for marketers to deploy direct contact tactics cost effectively. SMEs are also so diverse that communicating via mass forms like advertising will not support the customized messages they expect and need.
Typically, marketers deploy highly focused sales forces to sell to their major business enterprise customers. They position advertising, direct mail and other broadcast media to market to the vast consumer market.

The Power of Social Media
Also referred to as ‘Web 2.0’, social media circumscribes various internet-based technologies and tools that make it easier for people and businesses to listen, interact, engage and interface with each other. Social media has created tremors in the marketing mix. Through blogs, message boards, videos and other social media, anyone can post what they think about a vendor’s products, services and offerings.
Another aspect is word-of-mouth advertising (or viral, in today’s terms) that has traditionally served SMEs so well. SMEs also tend to be less concerned about spin control than their larger counterparts, and there’s really no place for spin in social networking. The economic opportunity for companies to sell products and services to the SME segment is very, very large-much larger than we initially anticipate.
As a starting point, we need to know if our audience is best segmented by revenue, number of employees, industry vertical, number of offices or number of computers units. We then prioritize those segments, determining which SME audiences represent the most cost-effective way to gain a position in the SME market. Finally, and most importantly, we need to do some audience research and a critical analysis of our own marketing materials to ensure that the stories we are relating are resonant for SMEs. For example, what sources of information does each segment turn to? Do they trust salespeople, or advertising, or white papers?

The Challenge
It is incredibly hard to reach customers by and large (reasons being media fragmentation and information overload) and just as important, customers are more empowered than ever before (e.g., with a web search they can do a split-second comparison on products, price, etc.).
Many SMEs require the individual attention that marketers shower on their large-scale enterprise clients through dedicated sales forces – yet direct contact of this kind can be cost-prohibitive in the SME world, the reason being the sheer size as well as the diversity of the SME market.
Every marketing effort needs to speak as directly as possible to the customer on value, relevance and brand itself. SME marketing can leverage mass media like TV and print advertising very successfully, but advertising should be just one small part of a much bigger approach. Given the very individual nature of SMEs, marketing to them through advertising alone would not really work. Instead, one-to-one should be the keywords of SME marketing.
Yet there are cost-effective ways to achieve direct engagement with SME customers. For example, SME customers can be very effectively engaged at the retail level, from banking to technology products and services. Marketers can cater to the sector by simply adapting retail displays and ensuring that the retail staff is prepared to connect their products and services to SMEs’ needs.
In the SME world, the specificity of the individual customer can be effectively reflected and addressed. The most cost-effective approach is through online marketing tactics, are not surprisingly already being used with significant results as a way to reach SME customers on a “mass” scale but in a much targeted fashion. Particularly in the automotive and technology sectors, marketers are emphasizing the creation of web advertising and collateral materials that speak to the individual in a literal sense, and that invite the individual to partner with the brand to create a product that meets their needs.
The ideal event scenario for engaging SMEs is one where the brand presents itself as a partner that can contribute to their success. Of all marketing activities, events and interactive experiences are among most rich means to engage SME audiences. This ultimate one-to-one tactic can be applied in many different ways. Marketers can create an SME exhibit presence at tradeshows, but because many SMEs are simply too small to attend tradeshows, marketers also have to think more innovatively about creating their own branded tradeshows and by-invitation events.
For example, given the huge need that SMEs have for professional counsel on running their businesses, street smart marketers can create seminars and workshops where they provide useful educative content for SME customers.
Ideally, marketers can create events in conjunction with co-marketers in relevant categories, forging alliances of products and services that add up to joint solutions for SMEs. Such alliances can send SMEs the right message about the partnering brands and increase purchase likelihood across the bundled products and services.
Categories are broad and overlap – however the choice is to do it the traditional way or use innovative means like manually taking the juice out of an orange or using an electric appliance to take it out – but the purpose is the same: to reach established marketing objectives.