Market Early, Market hard, Market to Win - A Year of Working with SME's

Let me just start by saying something at the outset, 10 Yetis is an SME and proud!

10 Yetis has just reached its fifth birthday, I know, Jilly and I cannot believe it either but encouraging you to send us cakes to celebrate is not the point of this blog.

Over the years we have gone from being hugely disorganised to not as disorganised as we once were (no matter what our brilliant accountant says). We have processes and policies in place to ensure that our growth is managed sensibly and our team knows what bit fits where etc.

One of the areas where we have gotten brilliant is tracking and managing leads (one of the wonderful aded value areas of KashFlow that I said for years they should make more of*) and this takes me ever so smoothly on to the purpose of todays blog, the need for us SME's to plan our marketing and PR campaigns a bit more, something that has lept out at me when reviewing leads from the previous 12 months.

I have often mentioned the fact that when smaller business come to us for their PR needs, they are often doing so from a point of "we have launched the biz 2 weeks ago, but have no traffic to our site or footfall to our door". So, we go through the motions of asking what marketing (to see what we can fit the PR around) or public relations activity they have tried to date.

"None" comes the reply... So then we get into the realms of understanding why this is so, and it comes down to the person behind the idea concentrated soley on getting it open and not on how they would promote it. I have seen some business commentators mention this before and say that it is because the owner thinks people will just come to their shop/site as they think it is just a good idea.

I find that approach slightly patronising. Personally, I think it is excitement about launching the new business and in most cases, people just don't realise how important a role marketing is.

We saw this more and more at the end of year three so we decided to be a lot more detailed in our tracking of leads to understand and report back for year 4, so here goes.

Over the course of the 12 month period we had 189 speculative calls/emails from small businesses (companies with less than 50 employes). Quite a healthy number and largely down to our nice search engine positioning...

117 of these companies (just over 61%) had launched their business within the last month (with no marketing/PR) and had decided to start looking for PR. Of the 117, over half were in some form of distress position where sales volumes were not going as planned and they needed a boost quickly. (Interestingly, the majority of the distress people came via UKBusinessForums)

35 companies (19%) were due to be starting to trade within a week and needed a press release or some form of PR activity there and then.

32 companies ( 17%) were looking to launch in the next month (interestingly, this is where we won the majority of our clients) and were planning in advance.

Out of all of those leads, just 5 companies (3%) were coming to us planning for 3 month plus in advance.

I had planned to go back and see what percentage of the 117 companies had gone under but I just have not had time, what with the launch of our tech-PR division and all (shameless plug, I apologise). So maybe that is a story for another day.

Moving on to the larger companies that came to us, only 2% were coming to us for immediate PR and this was crisis comms related and understandable. The rest, and that is an amazing 98% of companies coming to us with 50 or more employees, were doing so for campaign planning AT LEAST 3 months in advance.

So, something to think about for all of us in the SME market. All the above said, our Tech-PR division launches in a few weeks, have we finished the campiagn planning... have we hell!

#NOTE: I am rubbish at Maths, so apologies for any poor calulations :-)

 * was once a client,  now just good friends... just so you see that my ass-k*ssing is transparent