Most of the SBS companies I know have grown organically, that is they have mainly grown from referrals. Sirona was established on referrals of one type or another and we wouldn’t be where we are today without them. The phrase “’It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” rang very true over our first year of trading. In fact even our most recent customer originally discovered Sirona because his kids went to the same nursery as my business partner, Alex.
All that said, we’ve always wanted to grow faster than the organic approach has allowed us. At the end of last year we signed up to Robin Robin’s Technology Marketing Toolkit after hearing her talk on one of Karl Palachuk’s conference calls. The Toolkit is an amazing resource of marketing material, if a little American, it’s certainly fantastic place to start your marketing effort. The amount of content available in the kit blew us away and you could easily have someone working with it full time if you wanted to make use of absolutely everything. In February 2009 Alex flew out to Washington DC to attend one of Robin Robin’s conferences and found the whole trip incredibly worthwhile. He was actually invited to dinner with Robin and a few other members while there and also recorded a testimonial available on her site, currently the third video down here.
Soon after the trip we embarked on our first marketing campaign, a direct mail campaign using one of Robin’s templates. This involved a sending letters out to contacts from a list bought from the Chamber of Commerce. The letter had an offer of a free IT audit and used a multi-touch approach. We’ve since learnt that multi-touch is key in marketing and it simply means sending more than one thing to a potential client. In this instance we sent three letters to each contact, with about a week in between each one. We got the most replies from our second letter, where-as most marketing experts would expect the most from the third touch. Sending multi-page letters to 800 contacts takes a lot of time and costs a fair amount of money. However we did convert two leads into contracts, so that covered the costs and certainly proved that direct mail does work.
Fast forward six months or so and we’re back into marketing full swing after a rather turbulent year. Our first email campaign started last week and that has gone out to around 5000 leads in Stockport and Manchester. We’ve had some great help from a marketing expert we found through the Chamber magazine and with his assistance we have created three independent marketing campaigns based around our key services. One of those campaigns went out yesterday and the second touch will go out in a couple of weeks. On paper email campaigns are very attractive, but getting email addresses of people who have opted in is tricky and the company we have partnered up with have been difficult to work with. Saying that, just a couple of conversions from this campaign would more than cover the costs and this company could still redeem themselves.
Our next campaign is going to be telesales based and we’re working with a company in Bolton to run that for us. We’re going to test the water with a three day campaign and the company hope to get around three appointments from that. Taking the business average of converting one out of three appointments, securing an average contract with that company would cover the costs. Converting more than one and/or selling a bigger contract or more profitable service and we could well be deciding telesales is the route for us.
By the end of the year we will have tried the three main areas of marketing and we may find one to concentrate on. What I think is more likely, and what we have already been told, is that all of them together give you an effective marketing strategy. This shows the scope for a full time marketing person, but until we’re big enough to justify such a role we will probably just concentrate on the area we get the most results from.
I’d be interested to hear your stories of marketing and how they compare with what we’ve found this year.
Hi Nick
The outfits that I ply my trade at are setup a little differently from the SMB market you work in, but there’s a lot in common. We look at it from three angles: Channel, partnership and direct. We run marketing campaigns in all three.
Our channel differs to you a bit, as we have a large base of existing customers (Cisco networking/IPT) that we can hit with the Microsoft proposition. In your case, your channel is your existing customer base. I’d personally be offering referral incentives to your existing base – they’ll potentially do the marketing for you.
Partnership we run with Microsoft, and it’s vitally important that we create visibility with them. Your mileage may vary in the SMB market, but we make sure we’re at events so when an SMB approaches Microsoft, we’re always in their mind and we may get a referral.
Second to Microsoft we have developed a partner ecosystem to supplement firstly where we lack in capability, and secondly where there’s synergy to help develop leads together as an end to end solution. Here we run joint marketing campaigns and plan events together. Have you tried running any SMB events up North? You could try sharing the cost with another organisation and run a co-event, and if you speak to your Microsoft Partner Account Manager, you could even get funding, facilities and marketing thrown in. Again, it all stems back to that visibility.
Lastly is our direct marketing, which is the road you’re flirting with here. It is essential, and if it pays for itself and a bit of profit, plus starting that relationship off it’s all worth it. Our experience is that it can be hit and miss though, and you’re doing the right thing by testing the water with the different options out there. Building a brand for yourself through micro-blogging, blogging and community involvement can be valuable too, but it’s also hard work. Perhaps even contributing to other well known SMB blogs or magazines could be angle to explore.
Good luck with it all. You look like you’re doing well for yourself this far where a lot of others would have failed.
Tim