The biggest marketing challenges for small businesses – and how to overcome them.

A survey has highlighted eight major challenges facing marketing teams.  SME’s need to acquire new skills to overcome these challenges and succeed in today’s digital climate.

Recent research by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Act-On Software (see details below) asked small business marketing decision makers what they felt were their biggest challenges.  The response is illustrated in Table 1 below. 

Whilst the research identified responses from SME’s considered “successful” relative to those less successful, the differences between the two groups were broadly similar. They are represented in the table below as an average from all SME’s in the research.

Table 1: Biggest marketing challenges for SME marketing decision makers:

So what can small business marketing decision makers faced with these challenges do to overcome them?  A few thoughts on each follow.  Whilst not exhaustive, hopefully SME’s can take something from these comments to move things forward in their business.

Increasing sales from existing customers:

Assuming SME’s already have strong relationships with existing customers then the task facing them is to maintain visibility with key stakeholders and continue to build credibility whilst keeping an ear to the ground for any new order opportunities.  Personal networking is a proven technique here but SME’s may be limited in terms of the number of contacts they can effectively network with.

Another option is new media.  Being visible on relevant digital and social media platforms can indicate to customers that your business is keeping up-to-date with the changes in the business communications landscape – a perception that might then extend to the rest of your business.  That’s a positive, as few customers will remain loyal to suppliers they consider slow to adapt in the current economic environment.

Of course, being visible on social platforms means producing effective content in sufficient quantity.  It’s an opportunity to demonstrate understanding of industry issues and be seen as an organisation with high industry competence.  Owners of SME’s must task their marketing teams to develop editorial programmes, then create and distribute this content.  It can be a very cost effective way to be top of mind with existing customer contacts when they are ready to place new orders.

Converting more leads into opportunities:

Usually, the problem here is that the enquiries or leads generated are not yet ready to buy.  That’s always going to be the case.  Depending on the demand generation tactic used to produce the lead in the first place, a firm could have hundreds of names to sift through to identify what’s about to turn “hot” and what needs to be kept warm or placed at the bottom of the pile.

This can be addressed in a number of ways.  Firstly, make sure that the leads generated are of required quality right from the outset.  It's better to have fewer leads but of high quality than masses of poor quality names. It’s faster to identify and work upon those that will generate business and means staff will be more productive.

Once you have enquiries of good quality, it’s a case of building a dialogue with each one, providing them with relevant information depending on where they are in the buying cycle and tracking subsequent behaviour.  Lead scoring plays a role as can marketing automation in sophisticated environments. 

Clearly the right content needs to be in place at all stages of the process.  Each item of content should be designed to dovetail with the sales process, to get to BANT qualification stage and, consequently, a sales opportunity that can be forecast.

Differentiating from the competition:

This is often a problem for small businesses.  Resolving it requires something of a strategic review, taking an objective assessment of competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, value chain and industry trends.  The trick is to emphasize a strength that has perceived value to customers – ideally one that competitors would find hard to replicate.  This usually manifests itself around the area of service, skills / competence, or experience.

Once the strength has been identified, all sales and marketing materials should be aligned to emphasize the advantage to existing and prospective customers.  Here again, carefully crafted content needs to be developed and distributed using the media channels most appropriate to your audience.

Closing more deals from existing leads flows / Accelerating the lead to revenue time:

This is linked to “Converting more leads into opportunities” above.  It’s all about improving lead management and opportunity management performance.  

One of the reasons closure rates may be poor is because the sales people involved are spending too much time trying to nurture “leads” that are not yet ready to buy.  Lead nurturing and scoring activities should be implemented by your marketing or inside sales team to deliver qualified leads to target carrying sales staff.  These should be leads that meet an agreed "sales qualified lead" standard. 

This will do a couple of transformational things to your business.  First, sales staff will be focussed on converting a smaller number of qualified leads, which will automatically improve the conversion metric (as conversions will be measured against a lower base of leads). 

The second consequence is that, for your marketing or inside sales team to provide the volume of qualified leads to sales, they will become more focussed and expert in filling the funnel with higher quality enquiries in the first place and then developing the most effective nurture activities.  Use external support to fill any gaps in knowledge, skills or expertise until you have this well-honed internally.

Raising awareness:

This is often a problem for SME’s because it can mean high expenditure.  Exhibitions, advertising, direct mail, teleprospecting can all provide excellent results but the cost can be crippling.

New digital and social media channels offer a realistic alternative.  Indeed evidence from the Forrester Consulting report suggests some 50% of SME’s have tried digital and social media awareness tactics and found them to be successful.

However, here again the small business marketing team needs to be flat out creating carefully crafted content in sufficient quantity to not only increase recency and frequency of visibility, but also to ensure the content is engaging.  It needs to present the firm's differential advantage as well as keep prospects coming back or “following” for future content releases.

Driving more traffic to your web site:

This is a big subject!  Apart from the obvious SEO activities and the inclusion of web details in outbound email addresses and printed literature, prospects need to be stimulated to visit your site.

Blogs, newsletters and PR articles should all point back to specific landing pages on your site.  The trick is to know what content to put into your blog, newsletter or press release in the first place.

It can be opportunistic: a new customer win or order deployment, or maybe a new product introduction.  Some content can be planned, perhaps a piece of commissioned research or a whitepaper on an emerging industry trend.  The planned material should also allow you multiple opportunities to distribute and communicate with your audience, especially using social media channels.

Any content a prospect is likely to find valuable should be hosted on designated landing pages on your web site and all outbound communications and content must be created with this in mind.  Material appearing on social platforms should have share buttons enabled too.

Generating new leads:

To some extent this heading has been addressed by much of the above.  The importance of effective and appropriate content creation cannot be overstated.  So, perhaps here we should mention the demand creation vehicles.

Understandably, SME’s tend to rely on the tried and tested traditional mechanisms to generate leads: personal contact, exhibitions and events, advertising, PR, email and direct mail.  Increasingly they are adopting new digital and social media platforms too.  When they do, they tend to use the following content types:

·         Case studies and testimonials

·         Videos

·         Whitepapers

·         Webinars

·         Research reports

This is based on research conducted by by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute entitled “B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America” .  This report  also noted the emerging trend of using infographics and e-books too.

Implications for SME’s:

The marketing challenges cited by small businesses are all surmountable.  The issues typically involve finding sufficient time, budget and human resources to do the job well.  In many ways it requires changing the way you and your team work. 

Owners of small and medium sized businesses will need to ensure their marketing teams acquire the skills required to succeed in a digital and social world. That’s in addition to what they do now.   

Another option is to use external content providers to help build an initial content campaign and help transfer skills to the internal teams at the same time.  Acquiring the content marketing skills for today’s changing business environment has become another priority for owners of SME’s.  Those quick to adapt are likely to secure an advantage over the rest.

(Source of data: : “Driving SMB Revenue in a Tough Economy”, conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Act-On Software (download the full report from the Act-On site).  Sample: 208 SMB marketing decision makers based in North America.  An online survey conducted between August and September 2012). 

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Social Media: Make sure you’re using the right platform

New entrants into the social media arena offer additional opportunities to reach segmented audiences.  But which are best for your business?

Do you know which social media platform is best for your business?  Research undertaken in August 2012 by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute  provides some useful insights.  Whilst the survey base was B2B enterprises in North America, it’s likely that the UK and Europe will follow similar trends.

Some 87% of respondents claimed to use social media to drive content awareness.  As tracking and moderating social media feeds can be a drain on the time of key people in the business, it’s useful to understand which platforms warrant the most attention. 

So who’s tops and, perhaps more importantly, what are the trends?

B2B Social Media Trends

Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are pretty much equal with around 80% of respondents claiming to use them (up from around 70% in 2011 suggesting the trend is entrenched but maybe plateauing). 

One interpretation of this is that businesses are playing safe and posting to all three so that they don’t miss out.  If this is the case then we can expect a fourth to be joining the top tier soon in the shape of Google+ which shows clear growth.

The interesting trend is the appearance of many new entrants.  This could be the start of some serious fragmentation in the social media world.  Some of the strongest starts are among platforms that are “graphically” oriented.  It will be interesting to see if Instagram, Foursquare, Vimeo and Pinterest start to align more with particular industry types and whether they start to take share away from the likes of YouTube.

Of course, any trend towards more graphically oriented sites will require businesses to produce images and videos of suitable quality, and in sufficient quantity, to maintain a competitive presence.  This would mean diverting budget into a new area which, given current market conditions, might be a bold move for some.

If your business offering lends itself to graphical formats it may pay to create some appropriate assets and test the water.  These new formats certainly look set to attract new visitors over the coming year, but whether they generate sustainable business remains to be seen.

In the meantime, if time is limited, it looks like posting to at least one of the top three platforms will see your content distributed amongst the largest audiences actively using social tools.

Search for: 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks – North America, Marketing Profs, Content Marketing Institute.

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Social media could be about to consign cold calling to the bin

The adoption of social media is reaching a tipping point that may have a profound impact on the way businesses generate sales leads.  The logic is compelling and firms need to get access to new competences to compete in the future.

The use of search engines and social media looks to have reached a tipping point and is set to change significant parts of the business landscape.  One key area is around the way firms find new sales prospects.  Many predict that social media will make cold calling obsolete.  There’s much to suggest this is a logical conclusion.

Whilst cold calling has proved an effective way to generate new business in the past it does have a few drawbacks:

•       It’s a disruptive tactic (the caller interrupts the prospect) which can lead to negative perceptions
•       It is increasingly being regulated
•       It can be a slow and expensive process to generate quality leads.

So, is calling a list of customers and prospects to “discover” the one in “n” that has sales potential in the near future, still an efficient sales tactic?

Technology has changed the landscape. 

Prospects are increasingly using a search engine or a Social Media platform to start the search for information when they have a business need.  They want to stay in control of the buying process and undertake as much of the groundwork themselves before engaging a sales person.  Technology enables them to do that.

Consequently, in order to be in a position to engage positively with new prospects, organisations need to have search engine optimised content in blogs, articles, PR releases, newsletters, trade reviews and other web enabled formats.  Our prospect needs to be able to click on this content and the embedded links to find the information he or she is looking for.  They will typically go through a behavioural process shown in the diagram below:

When cold calling, the caller interrupts the prospect to try and discover if they have an imminent business need and then tries to control how the prospect goes about the buying process.  Today, prospects and procurement professionals are likely to be more resistant to any steering from a sales person – they want to be in control instead.

The good news is that organisations can embrace this change. 

The phone call still has a key role to play – to qualify inbound enquiries and accelerate sales opportunities in addition to the usual active customer account management function.  

Those same telephone agents are also ideally placed to monitor and engage in the social media dialogues and “chat” or “call-me” requests.  Only now, those inbound enquiries will be from from prospects who have actively decided to engage with your business, and so are more likely to have high sales potential!

The generation of new sales enquiries will increasingly move towards the Search / Social Media environments.  Firms will need to take great care in producing content that not only can be found in a search but also engages prospects, satisfies their information needs and encourages them to stay involved (perhaps clicking the “Follow” button or sign-up for newsletters, RSS feeds or alerts, etc.).

For sophisticated organisations using marketing automation systems or businesses unable yet to embrace the many new applications available, the key task will be to develop content that:

•      Ranks highly in relevant search results
•      Engages prospects and prompts them to click for more information
•      Aligns content to the prospect’s specific information needs at the right moment in the buying cycle
•      Has embedded links to foster an on-going dialogue.

This is the core task that firms will need to focus upon to generate new leads in the future.  Marketing professionals need to orient their skill sets towards effective content creation, and owners of small and medium sized businesses need to plan for all future content to be search friendly as well.

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What successful small businesses do differently to win new customers

A recent study has revealed the different behaviours used by successful SME’s over their less successful rivals, highlighting the new marketing tactics that are helping to win new business.

A recent report of small and medium sized businesses provides a useful insight into the different behaviours adopted by those succeeding in the current climate compared to those doing less well.

The study was conducted amongst 208 SME marketing decision makers in North America via an online survey in August and September 2012 (see below for respondent profile).  The research appears to define “successful” as a company exceeding its planned business targets for the year and those less successful as those behind budget.  

Clearly the different budget setting processes adopted by each business represents something of a question mark over these results, but the research was undertaken by much respected Forrester Consulting and so should be robust.  (If you want to view the full report, download it from Act-On Software who commissioned the research).

What do successful SME’s do differently?
One of the tables in the report highlighted the extent to which successful SME’s differed from less successful ones in terms of what they found most challenging.  Using the figures from the report, table 1 below shows the “Marketing Challenge” profile between the two groups.

Table 1:  Biggest Marketing Challenges

Whilst the profiles differ in terms of rank order, significant differences are few.  Table 2 looks at the percentage gap between the two groups.

Table 2: Differences in perceived marketing challenges:

Increasing sales from existing customers appears to be the widest gap between the two groups.  It seems that the more successful firms found this less of a challenge, presumably as they have strong relationships with existing customers already and / or are actively looking to acquire net new customers.

If the presumption is correct it would help to explain the second and third largest gaps between the two groups. Having secured strong relationships with existing customers, the more successful firms look to maximise the performance from existing lead generation activity.  They appear to have less of an issue generating new leads or in raising awareness (that’s not to say they don’t have a challenge in these areas, just less of one).

Less successful firms have a greater struggle differentiating themselves from competitors.  This implies a weakness in market positioning and possibly under-developed customer facing marketing and sales content.

The tactics SME’s use to acquire new customers:
Around 20% of respondents from both groups find it challenging to drive traffic to their website and generate new leads.  This is unsurprising when you look at the techniques they use to acquire new customers, which are heavily weighted towards traditional sales techniques.

The research report unfortunately does not give a break-down of tactics between the two groups of firms – choosing instead to compare SME’s to larger enterprises.  Despite this, table 3 does reveal some useful insights.

Table 3: Tactics SME’s use to acquire new customers:

Traditional methods remain prevalent (i.e., personal relationships and networking, trade shows, print advertising and PR).  What is interesting is that around three quarters of respondents claim to be using “Content Marketing”, SEO, email marketing, lead nurturing and social media to target new customer acquisition.  

This probably reflects the innovative instincts of the SME respondent audience sampled and that they are investigating these options rather than declaring them as tried and tested tactics to acquire new customers.  Having said this, the report goes on to explore one new customer acquisition method that does appear to be succeeding – social media.

SME’s are winning new customers through digital and social media channels:
The report highlighted the extent to which SME’s are using different digital and social tactics to acquire new customers.

Table 4: Digital and social media tactics used by SME’s for customer acquisition:

This table reflects the tactics SME marketing decision makers claim are working and intend to continue using.

So, over half of this population of 208 North American SME marketing decision makers are using video to help in their customer acquisition activity, closely followed by social networking sites and then blogging.  More to the point they feel these tactics are working.

This is consistent with another report conducted earlier in 2012 amongst marketing decision makers in North America, although this sample included marketing professionals in larger enterprises too.  This showed high usage of social media (87%), content marketing (83%), blogs (77%) and video (70%) too.

If this North American research translates into a similar experience in the UK and Europe, then we can conclude that:

• Traditional customer acquisition methods remain the most popular, however…
• Two thirds of SME’s are exploring digital and social media tactics and almost 50% feel they are yielding success
• Over 80% of SME’s recognise the importance of content marketing yet...
• ...some 20% still struggle to drive sufficient traffic to their web site or generate sufficient lead volumes.

The report is not clear about the underlying causes for these challenges – typically it’s around work load, limited time, budget and/or a lack of skilled resources.  The cost effectiveness of leads generated from traditional methods relative to digital or social sources was outside the scope of the Forrester research but should also play a key role in SME marketing planning.

Small and medium sized businesses are limited in terms of the number of exhibitions and events they can attend and the number of times they can tap existing customers for new business.  Growth is most likely to come from spending more on advertising or using the newer digital and social media channels.  

For this to be effective, firms will need carefully crafted content in sufficient volumes to maintain awareness amongst its target audience and keep prospects engaged.   If social media has reached a tipping point in terms of business acceptance, then owners of small and medium sized businesses need to expand their skill base even further or utilize external support.   As the Forrester report highlights, it’s the digital and social routes that are more scalable and represent the best techniques to adopt for growth.  

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Source: “Driving SMB Revenue in a Tough Economy”, conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Act-On Software.

Data profiles: 208 SMB marketing decision makers based in North America.  An online survey conducted between August and September 2012.  Employee size breakdown:

48% - 50 to 249 emp
16% - 250 to 499 emp
14% - 500 to 999 emp
22% - 1000 to 2500 emp

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How small businesses can significantly increase PR visibility...with a little bit of extra effort

Press releases can give small and medium sized firms great exposure and help fuel rapid growth.  What’s more, recent research suggests they can significantly improve their chance of high visibility by working a bit harder and creating a fully supported press pack.

Using relevant trade press remains a reliable way of raising awareness and communicating your latest news amongst your target audience.  However, it appears the days of sending out a text based news release alone may soon be over.  Recent research suggests that including multiple media support with the text version can increase visibility up to ten fold! 

Before we look deeper into this, we need to be clear why using the press is critical for most SME’s in the first place.

Research presented by Nicholas Holmes recently found that over 60% of business owners had not spoken with a journalist in the last twelve months, many fearful of the outcome!  In reality, journalists, especially those covering niche markets, are keen to build relationships with business owners. 

Journalists recognize that they are more likely to get genuine information along with knowledgeable industry insight “…direct from the horse’s mouth…” rather than relying on agency spokespeople.  The natural passion for the subject that comes from a business owner can often inspire journalists to produce compelling coverage that can work wonders for a firms’ visibility.

So, how do you get noticed by a journalist in the first place?

Build firm foundations

Obviously, before you craft your press release, you need to be clear about your messages, not just about your new news story, but the “corporate” messages too.  Be clear about the strengths you want to emphasize but also be sure to have a clear position on how to respond if challenged about a market threat or business weakness. 

Use staff and colleagues to generate a list of positive and negative questions about your business and the industry.  Make sure the questions reflect the views of end-user customers, channel partners, competitors and pressure groups.  Building and maintaining this list, and formulating responses, will help enormously when it comes to drafting the press release itself and, perhaps more importantly, will help to build your confidence about engaging with the Press.

Draft your press release

Jerry Brown provides some valuable guidance on this subject.  Taking Jerry’s input, I see the steps involved as a series of hurdles.

Hurdle 1: Getting the journalist to read beyond your headline:

Stick with one key headline message.  It must be clear, concise, obvious and interesting to your audience as well as your target journalist (who will spend just a few moments scanning your headline before deciding if it is something he or she can use).  Writing the headline is harder than you might think which is why external PR or marketing support can really add value if your time is limited.  It is often the last part of the release to be written but the first hurdle to be cleared.

Hurdle 2: Getting the journalist to read the first main text block:

This is often referred to as a “nut” paragraph.  It is a really brief overview of your story.  What is the subject, why is it important to the audience, and how will a reader be better off after reading it?

Hurdle 3: Getting the journalist to read the main body text:

This is the story itself.  The who, what, when, where, how and why.  Always keep in mind the audience you are addressing and be clear about why this story is important to them; how will the information in the story help the reader?

Include one or two quotes from people directly involved in the story.  Keep the length of the release to two pages where possible.  

Remember to include a boilerplate as a final paragraph.  This needs to be a concise description of your business and include your contact details.  Avoid any sales pitch! This is all about communicating news, raising awareness and generating some inbound activity.  The selling should only start when readers react to your published article – the inbound activity.

But, there’s a problem!

So, you have laid a solid foundation and jumped the hurdles to get your press release in front of relevant journalists.  Alas, evidence suggests you now have another hurdle to jump, and getting this one wrong could hurt!

Hurdle 4: Getting your journalist to accept your article over others:

PR Newswire recently studied its press release data and found that text only releases are losing out to those submitted with multiple supporting media assets like videos, photos, slides and downloadable files.  It appears that including multiple assets with a text based release can increase published visibility by up to ten times!  The impact appears to apply as shown in the chart below:

Chart 1: How including different content assets can improve press release visibility:

It appears that including additional content assets along with the text based release helps journalists (and the publication’s design team) present news in a more visually attractive way.  It’s easier for them to present interesting and engaging content in their publication.  They don’t have to go and find visually stimulating material to support an editorial piece, it’s all provided for them. So it's not surprising that PR submissions containing multiple content assets are being considered ahead of many text-only submissions. 

Small business owners and in-house marketing professionals who do not employ a full-time PR agency will now need to create supporting content when they develop press releases and articles or risk missing out.  Relying on text alone to get visibility is going to be more of a challenge in future.

Marketing teams need to plan for the inclusion of the PR element of a campaign right up front as an integral part of the content marketing plan.  What's more, they will need to acquire the skills to develop and create a range of supporting content assets. Either that or use external support to help create the required content on time.

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Real World Content Creation

Three key set-up steps to help ensure you create content that makes a difference.

Much is written about how to create great content and much of it is sound advice.  However, many marketing professionals and small business owners struggle to get the results they are looking for.  The normal day-to-day demands of the job leave little time to dedicate to the task.  

Creating content itself requires much preparation, research, word-crafting and endless editing amongst other things. This article looks at why some struggle and how real progress can be made by ensuring the groundwork is in place right at the outset.

1 – Alignment with business objectives: what are you looking to achieve? 

Many pundits correctly say that the first step in any content development programme is to align with business goals.  That’s true, but it really needs to be specific.  It’s usually not enough to talk about aligning to the high level goals of an organisation.  It’s more about meeting the annual target for a profit centre – perhaps increase product Z sales by XX% in twelve months in the West region, or maybe cross-the-chasm from early adopter sales to run-rate order volumes of XXX.

Documenting the objective in these terms will ensure the correct focus and identify how success will be measured.  That is what the business expects of the content.  Succeeding here builds careers!

A dose of realism in terms of timescale is needed too.  Content may be required to build awareness, educate and inform, handle objections, and persuade someone to take an action…in an environment where the visitor is in control. 

Stakeholders need to be managed to understand that one item of content alone will not be able to compete with a face-to-face environment in terms of the speed of conversion / progression. 

Managers need to have a realistic understanding of how a series of assets can work with other parts of the business process in order to meet the stated business objective.  Getting agreement on this interaction should also help identify the KPI points so that each stage of the process is monitored and measured, and true accountability is introduced!

Getting these ground rules in place first will help smooth the development of the content that needs to be created.

2 - Audience Requirements:

This usually consists of two parts.  First, document your audience.  In B2B that tends to consist of at least one role at C level and many others at more operational levels.  It’s about identifying decision makers, influencers and any others involved in the procurement process. 

The trouble is, it varies by industry, enterprise size, and even “divisional personality”.  What do they need at each stage of the buying process?  How can this be provided in a way that maintains your competitive differential? 

It really is an art-form, gathering input from Sales and having it re-shaped by those with a more reflective, strategic focus.  Yet it is fundamental to the whole content development process, and it really does need to be written down!

Having created the audience requirements document, the second part of the process is to align existing assets / content to each player in the buying process.  Does each asset satisfy their needs?  What gaps exist?  Do the assets effectively handle objections at each point of the process? 

Testing is the only way to prove this but that requires time, budget and resource.  This will be unrealistic for short term projects but is a must in initiatives likely to last more than twelve months in a competitive marketplace.

3 - Content Plan and Delivery:

Most marketing professionals tend to be constrained by time and budget.  If your content is to be effective and measurable, a planned approach will be essential, otherwise odd bits of money will be thrown at tasks on a whim and unlikely to align with the overall objective.

As mentioned above, being clear about the objective and documenting the audience requirements are the first key steps to have in place.  When you then overlay the time and budget constraints, the hard decisions can start to be made about what assets, specifically, need to be created to address the most critical requirements and how they will interact with other parts of the sales and marketing process to deliver success. 

Finally, the relevant content needs to be “in place” and distributed at the right stage.  That may require training staff how to deploy it, considering media options, utilizing traditional events, webinars or any number of other communications routes.  It is surprisingly easy for great content to “fail” because it has not been made available in the right way at the right time to the right audience.

All three steps are interlinked and it is essential that the whole end-to-end process is managed like a strategic project.  The good news is that after you have followed this process successfully the first time, it will be easier and faster to apply the process again.  Much of the groundwork will be in place, staff will understand how it all works, and the business can become more agile.

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