SMB Marketing considerations

What is SMB marketing and why is it such a commonly used phrase amongst corporate managers that works for fortune 1000 or large companies? SMB is a term that refers to the Small to Medium Business community or channel. It’s more commonly referred to as SMB in the United States. Europe and the rest of the world will typically refer to this sub market as SME or Small Medium sized enterprises. Regardless of what you call it, large companies are interested in marketing to this group because it is a growing group with significant potential. The challenge for most comes in trying to figure out how to market to the channel and why products and services carried over from the large enterprise channel, government channel, and retail channels simply do not work or resonate with the smb customer channel.

Once a company decides that it is part of their core strategy to pursue the smb channel, it is the responsibility of the chief marketing officer, the product marketing officer, the chief strategy officer, and others to ensure that the smb marketing campaign is successful in it’s endeavors. While the product team is working on a product or service that they feel will resonate with the smb audience, the chief marketing officer will begin his or her tasks at hand. The first consideration is whether to take the product or service and market it to the entire smb community or to specifically market to some verticals of choice. The challenge here is that it is very rare that one product will be universally applicable or appropriate to the entire smb customer base. Typically a product that’s appropriate to one government customer is perfectly appropriate to other government customers and for that matter to all government customers. This thinking simply does not extend to the smb customer base. SMB marketing is different because the small to medium business channel is not a market, but rather it is numerous fragmented sub markets. An example to consider is that a bagel shop, dry cleaners, flower store, and shoe repair store are all distinctly different businesses with different pains and needs. However, it is very easy for a chief marketing officer of a large company to cluster them all together under the neat headline title of retailers. This thought process is very flawed and will result in poor and subpar results.

Instead, it is more appropriate for the large company to craft products and services in a manner that will resonate with each of the vertical markets they choose to go after. Segmenting the smb marketing efforts will yield much better results. Additionally, segmenting the customer base by the size of the business and their growth stage will provide even better intelligence and results. It is very important to determine whether the target you are marketing to is in a revenue growth cycle or not. The SMB channel is composed of companies that are in a negative growth mode, no growth mode, growth mode, and hyper-growth mode. Ideally, it is the task of the CMO to for his smb marketing efforts on the companies in growth and hyper growth modes.