By Tanya Henderson, Advertising & Membership Relations Director for SNA
Small and medium size business owners (SMBs) are busy people who need to streamline their advertising and someone to help make those decisions.
According to research from Belden Interactive as part of a recent SNA/Borrell Main Street Interactive webinar, business owners are only talking with one to four reps a week – walls are being put up because they just can’t talk to everyone. They are literally getting one pitch every business day. Think about it…in the old days a business decision maker may talk to a TV rep, a radio rep, a newspaper rep and their Yellow Pages rep once a year…now they are talking to them, as well as a plethora of Internet companies who are trying to get a piece of their budget. These businesses need representation.
One thing that we hear over and over is that the newspaper is a trusted medium. If your reps have that relationship with the business, they could be the one voice heard amongst many. As Borrell Associates stated, an SMB’s agency tends to be a persistent sales rep. Other points made by Borrell:
- SMBs don’t distinguish advertising from marketing dollars - for example in the Belden Interactive survey, SMBs participate in a number of marketing efforts including event sponsorship, maintaining a web site and maintaining social networking pages like Facebook.
- Local advertising tends to be sold not bought – according to Borrell, online ordering systems aren’t working as well with small and medium businesses – they don’t have the time to work through the issues. It’s easier for them to have a sales rep come in and “sell” them a program.
- Branding is less important to SMBs than results – this is why Groupon is attractive – immediate results.
- The ability to sell SMBs is high right now – many are cancelling long term contracts to free up dollars.
Directories and direct mail may be the place to start directing our strategies. According to Borrell, in the next five years, the projected ad spending forecast shows directories declining 27.4% and direct mail declining 19.7%.
Direct mail, a large legacy medium who has seen their margins grow in the past decade has been “disrupted” by email and that medium is also becoming mature (think deal of the day platforms). Mailing issues including higher rates and possible reduction of mailing days will affect direct mail revenues.
Paid search, directory listings are big with these businesses as well as online video. SMBs are buying online commercials and this is projected to grow. It’s a way for them to see themselves online at a fraction of the cost of a broadcast or cable television commercial. Yellow Pages are doing these videos now in your market – go to
www.youtube.com/yellowpages. With 14,000 sales reps across the U.S., they are being retrained to go after these small businesses.
Have you initiated new strategies for small and medium sized businesses? Are you initiating an agency approach at your company? Let us know. SNA will explore the Agency Approach and other related topics in our 2011 webinars. Stay tuned for the webinars that will be announced shortly and will kick off in mid January.