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.

However, somehow in the midst of ‘doing’, firms often can’t define or emphasise their competency in such ways that it would give them competitive advantage in the market. To improve the competitive advantage, we suggest to clients to look into three areas of strategic planning. The firms’ core competencies need to be identified, Market trends to be scouted for and competitor intelligence need to gathered to arrive at meaningful strategic planning outcomes.

This is where we ask- who is doing it? In smaller firms, marketing is often understaffed or not at all present. Increasing organisational capability is becoming vital if any firm wants to grow or expand. How would you know that your invested dollars are giving you return? The role of marketing in your organisation needs to be seen clearly. We encounter very different types of marketing personnel in organisations, not always with the set of skills required to identify competitive advantage for the company. In our upcoming posts, we will discuss some of the different ‘marketer types’ we think of.

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.

Consensio’s foremost differentiator is its attitude to business goals. Whilst many small businesses are run fairly efficiently without the use of strategic plans because the owners are technically good at their jobs (see the E-Myth), there comes a point where technical competence is not enough to grow or sustain the business any further without the knowledge and implementation of more complex business processes.

At this point business owners turn to either University courses or consultants for advice. At Consensio we add value through the experience and knowledge of our consultants who are technically good in their chosen professional fields, but are also guided by current business theoretical knowledge.

We like to be told about our client’s business. We immerse ourselves in the job, no matter how big or small, to connect our clients business objective with the market need. We make market segment background checks, before we visit potential clients and we are open to be taught about the ‘ins and outs’ of the client’s business before we recommend or implement any of our work.

We grow with the complexity of the project at hand. We are no large consultancy behemoth! Our clients don’t pay for large agency overheads or commissions. Consensio is small and agile and operates only with the required number of consultants on every project. Work rates are either hourly or by fixed negotiated contract.

What we offer for SME’s and Departments of larger organisations :

Strategic Planning – whether your company grows, consolidates or is at start up – we facilitate workshops, write strategic documentation and offer to implement Marketing and HR strategies.

Marketing Development – your brand and products need to stand out from the market crowd. With Consensio, you go from idea to market, using every step in between to your advantage.

Human Resource Services – when you prepare for growth and establish structures with HR policies and implementations. Consensio HR advises on talent and recruitment & retention strategies. We offer performance management documentation, remuneration and benefits structuring, position classifications, position description documentation.

Drop us a line, if you would like to know more or have a specific question about how we can help your business.

However, sometimes this book wanders the gaps between ‘how to’ and ‘theory’ too close to the edge. As a theorist, I don’t believe in SWAT analysis and certainly don’t need a template of it in the back of the book. As a practitioner, I am looking at the Boston Matrix and shrug my shoulders. But this is far as my critique goes on the detail of providing the reader with enough background. In detail, the book is thoughtfully written.

In service marketing, the actual experience is created by customer/client word-of-mouth (WOM). According to Young, the client is ‘able to feel a sense of relief’ (pg.26) through the service experience that fixed his/her needs and wants. Young argues that the professional firms are increasingly in need of in-house marketing staff, however, the classically trained ‘goods marketers’ skills belong to a different set of marketers. In short the author identifies that service firm marketers should have the stamina to cut through office politics by

• in-depth knowledge of service marketing
• partner level support from stakeholders in the firm to achieve process integration

Young goes on to identify strategies based on the size of the firm from sole traders to boutique and large organisations.
The chapter on segmentation focuses on what the differences really are between service and product marketing. It really means- honing in on the customer as individual. No more old school ‘industry’ and the ‘age, sex’ segmentation categories. It seems to me, the arrival of Generation ‘C’ is written all over professional service marketing.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce released their quarterly ACCI Westpac Survey of Industry Trends, and in  a nutshell

“The US and Australian manufacturing cycles have a
historical tendency to move broadly in synch. A widely
divergent relative performance was apparent from mid-
2006 to mid-2007 as Australian conditions trended
higher while US conditions deteriorated markedly.

That gap narrowed somewhat during 2008 up until the latest
quarter, as US conditions stabilised while Australian
conditions deteriorated. The December quarter saw
conditions in both economies deteriorate markedly further,
both well into contractionary territory (sub-50), more so
for the US.”

Apart form the economic indicators of this, and the ongoing fear of employees to lose the job that pays the bills, how does it impact on the intangible assets of companies?

We know that big business is supportive of brand development. A recent article in The Age confirms, that tough times call for strong brands. People like to turn to things they know, will work. Sales experiments are curbed during these times.

During the recession that followed September 11, just 25 percent of all companies boosted their ad spending — and those that did saw their market share rise more than twice as fast as it typically rises during a normal economy, according to a 2001 Cahners Advertising research report. (quote: BNet)

Downturn in Australian advertising spending is felt in particular by mass media like Channel 10. Less advertising expenditure does not mean less consumer spend. As social networking and other niche media make new connections to buyers, it is harder for marketers to measure and monitor neatly the traditional way.

The knives are out between the B2B sales quarters and marketing. Blogs are buzzing about who should be made redundant first.

“Even in groups that are well-known money-wasters, like Marketing…”

On a macro level, this sort of banter is not constructive to the question whether businesses should be more tactical than strategic in their approach to making money. It is like saying, business people do not need legs, now that we have invented cars. It is fairly simple. Regardless of whether MBA’s in suits are involved or not, Marketers of all calibres should know what sells to buyers. And Sales People should sell what the company makes for its buyers.

Whilst the Western Australian quality of health care debate continues to rage, his small business is making him enough money to cater for his personal need. Apart from his ethos, I admire his dedication to find out whether there was something wrong with his business practice. The niggling feeling can be examined by him without attending a ‘free business mentoring’ seminar.

No matter how small the practice and how busy you are, ask yourself:

• What is your vision about this business? Why does it exist?
• Do you want to stay this business size for the foreseeable future or do you maybe consider expanding in 2 or 3 years time?
• Do you have a one-page-business plan?
• Can you compare yourself to at least 3 other direct competitors and do you know their strength and weaknesses?
• Are there appropriate international industry examples you can learn from?
• What is your succession plan?
• How long is your cash flow holding up and when do you need to increase your marketing?
• What kind of clients do you want and what do you want them to tell others about you?
• What are your passive streams of income?
• How do you market yourself and what is your expenditure allocation per year?
• How do you know your marketing works for you?
• Who are your allies?

If there is one ‘I don’t know’ you reply to any of these questions, drop me an email or leave a comment so we can discuss further.

At first, it seems the investment in the re-branding stretches the strategic muscle to the limit of many business owners. The next step, actually using it to market, is an even bigger hurdle.

“Should we use it to express our message? What’s a campaign and what’s the difference in just saying who we are and what we do? How do we get there? Do we need to get there?”

I say to Consensio clients that corporate identity is like a passport. It identifies them on a superficial level, not on who their friends are, or what their personalities are like.

Getting to know a personality, you have to engage in dialogue. This is why we do it, when we market. How we do it, is using marketing tools.

Pressed for time and strapped for money, the call for brochures and websites is bigger than for meaningful strategy.

To resist the client pressure and develop a strategy beforehand, will benefit the client long-term, but it remains a matter of building client trust in strategy before action. Consensio has specialised in corporate identity and brand development since 2001.

10. Agencies don’t like to share. SME’s don’t have the same inflexible staff and strategies as large company departments. In SME’s people wear many operational hats and can often provide service components themselves. For example, graphics or programming can be provided by the client themselves. Agencies fear the uncontrollable client.

9. Agencies like to sell packages.Flexibility, tight cashflows followed by tight timeframes make the agency project management a nightmare. Agencies get often caught selling compromise instead of substance.

8. SME’s don’t have understanding of their own Marketing strategy. Agencies have a service selling strategy.

7. The brand is only as strong as the stewardship of the brand by the client who owns it. If it isn’t steered by in-house, agencies own it.

6. SME’s are too busy to care about their goals and lack in-house resources. Agency account managers are there to manage their brand project outcomes.

5. Agencies have large overheads and design competitions to win. SME’s think they need business cards.

4. Account managers listen to their clients. Account managers listen to their creatives. Creatives speak to their account managers. Creatives don’t speak to the clients.

3. “Time is money. We can only afford a limited amount on marketing. What’s the strategy again?”

2. “A website is what we need. Every business has one. What’s a web 2.0? Do we need a brand like Nike? I mean we are just a small fish in a big pond.”

1. “Two hours ago I couldn’t care less about this brand stuff. I’m just in admin. After this workshop, I have a sense of where we’re going and it’s exciting to be part of this. Can I come and see the design proposals when you’ve done them for us?”