Targeting the ‘M’s amongst SMEs

SMEs: one of the most frequently used terms in B2B marketing, and the subject of a whole host of case studies and research papers. Of course, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that we spend so much time talking about ‘Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’, because they represent such a huge slice of business (99.9% of all active businesses in the UK). But what’s frustrating is how much discussion there is of ‘S’ sized business – and how little attention gets paid to the ‘M’s. This is a huge oversight.

In one sense, it’s understandable that the media obsesses about the ‘S’s. After all, the cool, the quirky and the young are predominantly found here. They make great headlines and an interesting read. However  genuine mid-market-sized businesses represent a huge slice of the buying power amongst SMEs – and their needs couldn’t be more different to start-ups and small operators.

The mid-market’s tendency to fall through the gap carries over to the media landscape. You can find plenty of specialist channels to put you in front of small business. There are far fewer that specifically address businesses with genuine scale that aren’t yet enterprise level. At Avaya we’ve always found the lack of quality marketing opportunities amongst the mid-market to be a real challenge – and I think it’s a challenge that plenty of other B2B marketers experience as well. From my perspective, one of the most important opportunities that LinkedIn provides is to help us engage directly with the mid-market. It gives us the opportunity not only to target these businesses, but to gain a greater understanding of them.

Our business, like many others, is specifically interested in companies that have between 200 and 2,000 employees – because this is the stage of their development when they are experiencing consistent growth, have ambitions and a strategy for where that growth could take them, and are fully engaged with the challenges that growth can present. In our case, we want to demonstrate how our scalable communications and network solutions can help address these needs – and how we can act as a business partner to help take them to the next level.

I know we’re not the only business for whom the genuine mid-market holds vast opportunities. I imagine that the ‘M’s become interesting to a broad range of different marketers at this same point in their development, for three very good reasons: they have capital to invest in technology and other solutions, they have enough scale to ensure that the ROI from such investments adds up, and they are starting to experience a broad range of needs that they’re not able to meet through in-house expertise. In many respects, ‘M’ is the sweet spot for B2B marketing.

The problem is that marketers simply cannot afford to address these businesses in the same terms as they would smaller SMEs. Genuine mid-market businesses don’t define themselves by size at all. They don’t tend to need support in recruiting the right people (unless it’s in far more specialist roles), developing their proposition or finding a way to grow. They’ve already got a very strong idea of where their growth potential lies and they’ve already proven their ability to fulfill a large part of it. They’re more likely to see themselves as the next potential leader in their category rather than a start-up needing advice on how the category works.

In my experience, mid-market businesses define themselves primarily by the challenges that stand between them and the next stage in their development. They are hungry for content that is focused on those challenges, and which delivers the right insight at the right time. That’s why we built our mid-market strategy on LinkedIn around curating value-adding content from a range of credible business sources. This isn’t hand-holding content, or straightforward product promotion; instead we lead with ideas and insight. And we are careful to distribute two pieces of third-party content for every item we generated ourselves.

The themes of this content could have applied to enterprise-level businesses as well: digital transformation, calculating customer lifetime value, or embracing opportunities in the cloud – but we select it specifically for how it relates to the particular challenges that growing businesses face. We never label it ‘mid-market’ content – but we know that the ‘M’ businesses we’re targeting will find it valuable.

The engagement rate that our approach generates proves just how much the ‘M’s value this not being lumped in with all the S players – and perhaps, how underserved they are in content terms. The click-through rates on our Sponsored Updates were 3x industry benchmarks – and we went from zero LinkedIn followers to over 2,000 in around three months.

A lot of this success comes down to the ability to target businesses by size on LinkedIn, with a precision you just don’t get anywhere else. This means that we’re talking to decision-makers in genuine mid-market businesses – and can tailor our content accordingly. But it also comes down to how you use that targeting capability. I think that our success on LinkedIn proves that ‘M’ businesses want to be addressed with the same tone and quality of content as the Enterprise-level leaders in their category – and they value the insight that can help them reach that level themselves.

You can find full details of Avaya’s LinkedIn campaign in our case study and you can follow our Engaging for Growth Showcase Page here.