It may sound like a recruiter’s job only, but the matter of fact is, your marketing success will be determined by the skill set and experience of the person in charge of your marketing. As such, you should take a keen interested in finding the person with the right profile for your SME. As discussed earlier, in SMEs marketers have a generalist profile, but even the most broad knowledge does not cover all aspects that are necessary to connect to the target audience on an initial shoestring budget.

Hiring for the start-up phase

You want a person who can market plan and understands the value of organising not only your planning, but comes well connected to local vendors when it is time to implement activities. It is important to start off with a strong brand development. The marketer in the start-up phase can either develop brands (has a creative background, e.g., comes with a job title like ‘art director’) or is a marketing manager who can direct an outsourced team to develop the brand in accordance with your market strategy. This includes knowledge or access to market research so that the brand development is grounded in real world needs and wants of your customers. Don’t fall in the trap of thinking that all you need is a logo for your business cards, unless you are not serious of building a company brand that gives you return on investment.

A person with strong creative background may give your visual market presence the edge if you are in life style industries, however, if you are manufacturing widgets or other commodity products, you may want to consider a B2B (business-to-business) marketer with a commerce degree who understands the ins and outs of B2B marketing and out sources the creative parts on your behalf.

SME brands are now in a fortunate position to have low-cost, far-reach digital tools at their communication disposal but it requires some dedication and expertise to leverage them. Most of all, after the start-up phase, marketing is about widening the appeal and building on existing equity internally and externally of your business. You might find, that your start-up brand builder or manager does not want to continue in a monitoring role, or that stewardship and control is not their cup of tea. Find a supplement or replacement for the next phase in your company life cycle.

Hiring For Growth

This is the phase when initial ground work has been done, the company should have a brand identity and marketing direction. And a pretty good understanding who their customers and competitors are and will be. The creative part now involves planning and steering the brand. Stewardship is replacing development for the most part of the marketer’s SME role. Budget presentation, market research and campaign planning are the forte of SME marketers in a business growth phase.

The role is working closely with your sales department (where applicable) and influences service delivery and internal brand building (internal brand building: connecting your brand with your employees). How much of the stewardship can and should reside in one person depends on your growth plans and business strategy. As mentioned in part 1 of this post, its about skill distribution and industry fit.

PROFILE: Senior Marketer, Corporate

In a larger organisation, the marketing department consists of a team of marketers who have complimentary administrative and strategic skills. Senior marketers are often strategic planners who are guiding the company.

Under their leadership, junior staff are collecting market research, research competitors and execute and administer the marketing plan. Brand development and advertising in most cases is outsourced. Corporate Marketing’s overarching objective is stewardship of the brand.

PROFILE: Senior Marketer, SME

In SME’s this is usually a combined skill set resting within one person. This person should have both, administrative and strategic skills. This is very difficult to find, as the marketing field requires a large set of skills and people tend to specialise in one of the areas of marketing expertise as typically required by larger organisations. Often SME senior marketers have a stake in the company and spearhead their investment.

Senior marketers are on board either from the early start-up phase or when the company hits the financial glass ceiling where further growth is only possible with customer relation management, positioning strategy and regular budgeting. SME owners have to identify whether the marketer has the right skill set to transit from strategic to administrative task set and back.

We commonly see  job ads asking one marketer ‘to design ads’, ‘create brochures’ write marketing plans’, ‘liaise with sales teams’,  ‘conduct research’ and ‘manage events’. The ‘on a shoestring, one size fits all, versatile and exciting busy role’ approach is asking for the amalgamation of ‘Graphic Designer’, ‘Marketing Manager’, ‘Marketing Analyst’ and ‘Events Coordinator’ in one person.

Would you trust the effective and timely delivery of your service order from one single person attempting to explore, survey, mine, quote and sell gold from the mine you own? In the next part we discuss more on the profile of SME marketers.

The most prevalent areas in which the small businesses have problems
are Sales/Marketing (40.2 per cent),
Human Resource Management (15.3 per
cent), and General Management (14.3 per
cent). Specifically, Promotion, Market Research, and Training are the most frequently encountered problems, all of which are knowledge or skill related, reflecting the general shortage of expertise in small business sector.

It is not that these smaller businesses are not doing any marketing – they would not be in business if they were not – but that the effort in marketing lacks professional input and expertise. And, when businesses turn to the published literature for help, they find that writing on marketing focuses on larger organisations. Managing marketing activity is a different beast within a department of 10 people compared to the owner/manager developing their own marketing.

Regardless of the view among smaller businesses that marketing is a weakness many smaller businesses are very good at marketing. SMEs may even be more responsive to the market and far more flexible than their larger competitors. But these businesses still look enviously at the big consumer brands and wonder how they too can achieve such awareness and provenance. Marketing in smaller businesses tends to concentrate on sales and promotional tactics rather than on the big strategic issues.

And herein lies the problem. Despite the perception, that such wide awareness requires lots of Marketing expenditure, it is actually the lack of strategic competence and knowledge amongst SME owners/managers that prohibits effective Marketing and market awareness of the SME offering. Sales and Marketing are often either lumped together wit Sales taking a precedent over Marketing. As Paul Fifield writes:

Remember:
Sales is about ensuring the customer buys what the company makes. Marketing is about ensuring that the company makes what the customer wants to buy.

Both areas require a different professional skill set and mindset. Companies, regardless of size, should not be lead by either mindset or preference. They should be market-led, not inside-driven. But that is another aspect of the problem altogether.

There are however, fundamentals that can make all the difference. These are Consensio’s SME brand observations based on market experience and marketing literature:

• cultivate brand emotions
• build corporate and product/service brands and understand how to use them
• integrate marketing and brand development
• develop matching brand affiliations
• create a consistent brand logic
• link the brand to the people and personalise it
• Document your logic and keep experimenting with the right media mix

Ten Years later, and without quantifying the number of businesses in WA, I am assuming the same Marketing issues still apply to our SME’s.

“Intangible assets are the the reason marketers get out of bed in the morning”.

According to Olding, assets that make up brands, reputation and customer value are only slowly coming to the attention of other senior executives particularly in Australia.

Quantifying brand performance has senior marketers and finance executives fighting to grasp each other’s language and context.

“Quite simply, successful brands require effective marketing and financial management”

Major contributing factors to the communication gap are:

• A culture of departmental silos
• mistrust in the marketer’s measurement skills
• underestimation of the importance of brand from the senior management
• limited and fragmented relationships between departments

Olding goes on to cite two Australian business case studies illustrating her point that only a joint collaboration and coordination between Marketing and Finance achieves deeper brand equity.

She goes on to quote Prof. Don Schultz, who is summarizing the standard of Australian brand management as too little up-front investment in resource allocation and too much time spent on measuring past performance.

This is a very poignant article which is very appropriate to all firm sizes and industries across Australia. How often does your CFO/Accountant partner with the Managing Director, and the CMO/Marketing Manager/Coordinator in your business to discuss the next year in a brand panel?

To clarify this, we firstly need to look closer at small business research. Although over 96% of Australian businesses are employing less than 20 people, the majority of management recommendations and findings is deducted from academic research into large industry organisations.

This is pretty much the case for the US, Japan and other industrialised countries as well.
Secondly, as Verreyenne (2006, 220) points out, the lack of suitable measurement tools and best practice study courses hinder small business owners to integrate strategic management into their daily practice.

Small Business Strategy Types

Strategic Decisions in small businesses are usually following the ‘rational decision-making model’, which is for example used to obtain financials through a business plan.

A less stringent approach is called adaptive or logical incremantalism, which means that management is providing a broad directive and employees follow through with detailed actions.

The other form of strategy is dubbed vision or umbrella strategy, as it employs involvement of external stakeholders that may have influence on the small business.

The command strategy approach, you guessed it, means that the owner or senior executives exercise complete control over the firm. However, the intrapeneurial form of strategy-making is the opposite and inclusive of employee input.

Small Business Strategy Applied

Martie-Louise Verreyenne researched previous small business findings. She observed that researchers only reported whether small businesses made rational strategy decisions, and not whether they engaged any other strategies. She tested all above described strategy modes and the results are summarised as follows:

1. Pure rationality may not at all occur in small firm decision making, therefore, academics are better off using different models to describe and measure small businesses
2. Adaptive, intrapeneurial, participative and simplistic modes of strategy making are primarily used
3. Simplistic mode means the owner/manager bases her/his approach on previous strategy making without previous analysis of the environment. She found and a strong link to actual firm performance
4. Internal and external stakeholders play a more important part in small firm strategy than previously thought
5. In small firms, value and culture are successfully driving a participative strategy mode, unlike in large organisation, were participative styles are more likely to lead to politics and negativity.

The learnings small business owners/managers can take from this are manifold-

• Leadership styles of owners/managers matter. The more you as a leader are aware of your behaviour and actions, the more likely decision-making is fruitful. Continue to learn something about yourself and others
• Input from internal (your staff) and external (your suppliers, friends, family and investors) does matter. Different angles help to make better outcomes. Play Devil’s Advocate more often
• Gut-feel matters. Verreyenne specifically states, that simplistic decision-making is made without the sophisticated scenario-rendering tools of big business and yields results for small business
• Value and culture of your small firm matters. Sit down with your staff and ask them what (apart form the money) gets them out of bed and makes them join your company environment every day.
  Friday afternoon get-togethers (with or without alcohol) and networking opportunities don’t have to cost the world, but can cement a better work climate. Do you know how your staff see your future as a company?