RTM: What about advertising and media strategies?

RW: The first thing you have to realise is that you have a problem.  They are not homogeneous; they do not gather together and they are not alike.  So you can either bite off chunks, say, at a local level, or you can take the longer view and try to raise awareness more generally, and so get SMBs to self-select you.  But again this is an expensive mass-marketing approach. 

This self-selection process is the key, I think.  SMBs will actually respond to people who can help them solve their own problems.  If you can provide media marketing or channels, which enable them to identify you, or your intermediary, as a problem-solver, then you have won half the battle.

RTM: Let’s come back to that.  How do you reach SMBs with media?

RW: With great difficulty!  One issue is that the local press is 2.5 to 4 times more expensive (in cost-per-thousand terms) than the nationals in the UK.  Maybe Yellow Pages is the best starting place.  Or you could try advertising once a month in a national paper.

And the one medium that cuts across everything is the Internet.  It starts off feeling like a free call, until you start down it, and then you find the rules are exactly the same.  You have to spend a lot to keep yourself at the front of the queue.

RTM: In my experience, most large suppliers say they want to reach the growth companies, the SMBs that really want to develop.

RW: Yes.  But that is a bit like saying "I only want to reach companies who want to buy our product."  Advertising can’t do that – there is always wastage; your media efficiency depends on your ability to target accurately and then find the medium to match.  Media selection is always about finding the most efficient compromise. 

And in any case, the growth companies are a tiny fraction of the SMBs.  Direct marketing and research might enable you to identify growth companies, but all that effort will be far too expensive to pay off.  For example, it is easy to identify the top 20 magazine publishers and their growth rates.  Repeating that exercise for the top 500 would take forever.  It would simply not be worthwhile.