Marketing to small and medium businesses requires different approaches than marketing to large businesses. While owning a company is the American dream for many people, that dream takes an enormous amount of work. Understanding the challenges that small and medium businesses face daily can help marketers shape their communications accordingly. Here are a few of the things you should keep in mind when you're communicating with small businesses.
1. Small business owners wear many hats.
Small business owners, by nature, wear many hats. They are often the marketing department, sales team, client-relationship builders, accountant and myriad other things. The “many hats” syndrome is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses. Even small businesses that have management teams are often faced with the same challenge. Small business decision makers simply have a lot on their plates.
According to Huffington Post, 53% of those surveyed indicate that covering multiple jobs is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses today. Furthermore, 50% said there's simply not enough time in the day to get things done. To many business decision makers, time is money. According to Huffington Post, small business owners report that one extra hour in the day is worth more than $500.
So how should marketers deal with this reality? The reality is that business-to-business decision makers are constantly wondering whether or not every email, phone call or direct mail contact is worth their time. Will this really help their business, or is there a better way to spend their time. Communications need to speak to decision makers and their business. Communications need to quickly get to the benefit. If not, you’ll probably lose their attention.
Since decision makers tend to wear many hats within the business, they often guard their time and priorities carefully. Relevancy is a key strategy to improving your chances of getting business customers’ attention and driving them to action. Make the communications about them. Leverage information and behavior to tailor the messaging and increase relevancy. Create variable fields that help the communications get even more specific.
2. Capital isn’t always accessible; therefore, financially related decisions should message benefits for today and tomorrow.
Forbes recently explored the issue of capital as one of the predominant challenges facing small businesses. Of course, we can never have enough money, but for an entrepreneur who isn't able to access enough capital, his or her entire livelihood and company could be on the line. Even if loans can be obtained, the interest rates or terms of the deal are often unattractive, and this can leave decision makers strapped for cash.
According to Forbes, only about 32% of respondents from a recent survey were able to satisfy their needs when it came to borrowing capital. So what does this mean to marketers? Marketers should clearly present financial commitments to small and medium business, including short-term and long-term payouts and/or benefits, as well as any financing options.
Additionally, marketers should fall back on one of the core principles of direct marketing. Provide a compelling offer and reason to act NOW. Many business-to-business marketers are not fully leveraging offers or incentives in their marketing. “Contact us” is not an offer.
Offers and incentives are a proven technique to increase response. Sending out general messages that don’t provide a reason to act now subliminally give decision makers a reason to deprioritize whatever you sent them. Human nature is to put off things that don’t have a definitive deadline. You can probably think of many examples in which someone procrastinated about the delivery of an item because they weren’t given a definitive deadline. That is the power of the expiration date—simple, but effective.
3. Finding the right people and the people you can trust.
If you've ever caught yourself saying, "It's just easier if I do it myself," you certainly aren't alone now. According to Forbes, 44% of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) members who responded to a recent poll had a great deal of difficulty filling open positions, indicative of pools of unqualified applicants. Furthermore, 33% of respondents indicated that they had positions, which they ultimately weren't able to fill at all.
Finding good people is always one of the challenges facing small businesses, and it seems that recently that task has only gotten tougher. In any industry, attracting and retaining great employees is at the top of the list of challenges facing small businesses. The more money and energy spent in hiring and training, the less productive the business will be. So how does this insight translate to marketers?
Understand your target audience is likely time-constrained. Ensure your communications clearly state the benefits to the business. Clearly state steps that the business needs to take for the desired action. Ensure your communications strategy provides all necessary information to make a decision, but present it in a format that respects time. Include information in a scan-friendly format. In email, provide icons that link to more information. In direct mail, utilize right rails and multiple elements to satisfy both the scanners and readers.
Also, clearly provide a way to learn more. Most business-to-business decision makers prefer to have an opportunity to do their homework before talking to a salesperson. That makes integration with landing pages a must. Ensure your landing pages continue and expand on the storyline that you started in the outbound communications of email and direct mail.
4. Their business is likely one of the most important things to them—treat them accordingly.
Ensure small businesses feel that their business matters to you. Most small business decision makers aren’t thinking about your products and services that often. That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t want to feel like they are doing business with other businesses that don’t value their business. Once you start communicating, don’t allow your organization to fall back into the trap of not communicating with small business decision makers on an ongoing basis.
Take an educational tone and explain the “whys” to overcome the sense that this size business isn’t important to you as an organization. Also ensure your communications take an educational slant. It’s important that the communications provide a level of mental “hand holding” and not overly assumptive.
Another effective technique is to allow them to do their homework. Ensure you are in the right place at the right time, when small businesses are thinking about your products and services. Content and inbound marketing provide a mechanism to be in the right place at the right time. As business-to-business decision makers are looking for information, content marketing delivers solutions packaged in a customer-driven way.
While most everyone in business feels time-compressed today, small and medium businesses face some specific challenges. This article provides fodder for how marketers can shape their communications around these challenges. Need help adjusting your small and medium business marketing strategy? Contact J&C to transform your B2B marketing strategy and becoming a lead generation and lead nurturing machine.
