Forget B2B: in a digital age we need to think more B2H
There has never been a more important time to ensure we engage SMEs effectively. But we must not forget how important it is to recognise the humans behind the brands.
I have always liked the idea of starting my own a business. I imagined something in stark contrast to my usual day to day, perhaps an origami jewellery company, a pop-up childcare facility for restaurants, or an alternative crisp-themed advent calendar.
Perhaps my ideas are a little maverick but I’m certainly not alone in my entrepreneurial ambition.
At the beginning of 2020 there were over 5.9 million small businesses in the UK, according to the Office When COVID hit, the future of many was called into question. However, despite an emotional and uncertain time for the economy at large, the future for small businesses remains bright.
While nearly two-thirds saw their revenues decrease during the Covid-19 pandemic, the vast majority have been able to stay afloat. 62% reported they were able to continue trading without much interruption and in fact, even in some of the hardest hit categories such as hospitality, 89% say they will continue or restart their business (Simply Business Report, June 2021).
One silver lining of these turbulent times is that many businesses have been forced to experiment with new technologies, products, or services to navigate the changing landscape.
The effect of lockdown also accelerated the entrepreneurial ambition of many aspiring SME founders, in fact in April 2020 five new online business a day were launched (startups.co.uk). We’ve seen many new start-ups emerge, among them a multitude of home-baking companies, private couriers, home refurb and property maintenance professionals, all with big year-on-year increases in requests for insurance, and business technology services.
SMEs remain fundament for growth of the economy. As Accenture reported in 2019, “SMEs are the world’s most powerful growth engine, accounting for 99% of companies in many geographies”. This remained the case in the UK at the end of 2020, when registered SMEs accounted for precisely 99.3% of all UK registered companies and generated 52% of total UK business turnover (Gov.uk, Business pop estimates for the UK and regions Oct 2020)
With opportunities emerging every day for advertisers, even during uncertain economic times, there has never been a more important time to ensure we engage SMEs efficiently and effectively. This involves taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture. Here are five provocations for accelerating results with SMEs in a digital age:
Think about the person behind the business
Importantly, 78% of small businesses are one-man bands, a further 22% employ fewer than 50 people (Gov.uk). When targeting their ‘organisation’ we are really speaking to them an individual.
This opens a huge opportunity for better insight into their human needs leading to opportunities for greater comms effectiveness.
Put another way, B2B needs to be more B2H (business to human).
Understanding common triggers that influence their decision making together with how we can authentically support them is the way to their heart.
Being business owners often means individuals running SMEs are expected to be multi-skilled in all aspects of running and maintaining a business. They are subject to high pressure and, perhaps as a result, getting right to the heart of what motivates them is fundamental in earning their attention, as well as driving response.
For example, qualitative research for Dulux Trade revealed that when Decorators and Tradesmen felt personally supported by Dulux they were much more likely to stay loyal to the brand. This led to the 2019 Dulux consumer campaign celebrating Decorators in consumer communications, followed by the ‘Your Home is in Safe Hands’ 2020 campaign which was specifically designed to target homeowners on their behalf. It identified people looking to have work done and reassured them that a Dulux Select Decorator will act safely and professionally in their home.
First-party data provides a powerful perspective
SMEs span over 100 sectors, from accountants and solicitors to shop owners, hairdressers through to local tradesman. When looking for addressable insights and targeting opportunities it can be very easy to get caught up in misleading demographic profiling, therein reducing the ability to reach those in the target entrepreneurial mindset effectively or authentically at scale.
For Lloyds Bank, through an extensive audience project we used first-party data to glean attitudinal insights that differentiate business audiences and their media behaviour beyond looking at straight demo or ‘firmographics’.
From speaking to 1,000 business decision makers and creating clusters based on their statements, we started to pull apart and find tensions in the audience and identify environments where our target audiences were in different states of mind. We then developed, and target messages based on those entrepreneurial mindsets, creating a more relevant message to a particular type of businessperson.
Power of the postcode unlocks addressable insight
Postcodes can often offer a more effective way of mapping groups of people with common behaviours and beliefs, leading to more efficient addressable targeting opportunities.
Working closely with specialist SME data partners, such as the Local Data company, and plugging this data into our proprietary targeting tools, we are able more accurately direct communication into specific areas based on their business needs and profile.
Using data from over 680,000 individual businesses, this allows us to take a granular area-first approach to media buying. It is possible to identify areas of high indexing SMEs, either as an entire group or as more specific industries and overlay specific business needs, activating into these areas with an addressable multi-channel campaign.
For the latest Sky B2B Business Broadband campaign this approach has allowed to reach 60% of small business owners in London using granular district level targeting to deliver a multichannel broadcast campaign that is 57% more efficient vs previous targeting approaches.
Always be innovating with addressable data
Speaking to B2B audiences in a relevant and personal way can be challenging, but data partners can enable us to unlock the potential of digital channels to create more addressable communications.
Bombora is the largest B2B data co-op of their kind and the largest aggregator of B2B intent data. Using their data gathered from a proprietary co-op of B2B research centers, we can identify audiences via firmographics as well as interest and ABM segments, creating a much richer audience pool that’s relevant to a specific message type.
And it’s accountable too – with audience verification we can ensure our impressions are going to precisely the right companies for the message being delivered.
Balance niche with broadcast
Where addressable data provides a smart way in, we must still be conscious of broader limitations.
Sky Adsmart provides access to Companies House data on all UK SME business owners. This data is mapped to Sky households to enable us to serve ads to small business owners within the Sky Media ecosystem.
However, given the potential size of the SME audience, using Sky alone we are only able to reach approximately 11% of all potential SME audiences.
Therefore, for broad SME campaigns, or to drive outcomes that require greater scale, we must also consider the need to balance granular targeting with wider traditional broadcast channels to achieve the desired outcomes.
Balancing granular data with linear channels has been proven to strengthen performance on many national scale campaigns.
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The best media planning sees the bigger picture. It also navigates some of the planning paradoxes emerging in the shifting media landscape.
In planning for SMEs, it means thinking about how we speak to business owners from different angles, standing back and thinking about the person behind the company, their mindset, and the most effective ways to speak to them about things that matter.
It means being selective and at the same time innovative with data, finding new and agile ways to consistently test and learn what shifts the dial on business performance.
It means embracing emerging channel opportunities whilst at the same time ensuring we don’t lose sight of the macro system effects.
Challenges in accurate targeting and gleaning true insight into the SME audience endure in a truly digital age, importantly, bigger picture thinking can really help us here.
Katy Woodward is strategic planning director at MediaCom
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