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
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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