Got SMBs? 5 Proven Tips for Reaching SMB Prospects

Although landing a big customer is always exciting, it’s more likely that winning the business of small- and medium-sized business (SMBs) will have a greater impact on your ability to reach revenue goals.

 

But here’s the challenge. Targeting and reaching SMBs isn’t easy. At OMI we’ve focused a big part of our business model on this crucial sector as a cornerstone of our business contact offerings. Drawing upon our experiences in supporting customers to use our SMB data to win more customers, here are 5 crucial steps for effectively reaching SMBs with your marketing messages:

 

1.Tee up your website: While your website should communicate who you are, it also needs to serve as a helpful resource to educate your SMB targets. It must contain the keywords that will cause it to be ranked highly by search engines – keywords that align with the types of solutions your prospects are searching for. Also, if you spend marketing dollars on any paid search or contact data for email campaigns, you must have landing page(s) ready to welcome the website traffic that may follow, with capabilities for not only collecting qualifying information to feed your sales funnel but also tracking all relevant metrics. Having your paid ads or email clicks simply lead to your company home page (and hoping prospects find the right content) is a waste of money because a home page is too broad and visitors will get lost, leading to lost conversion opportunities.

 

2.Take a problem-solving approach with content: What is the primary pain point that you can solve for your target prospects? Again, as your prospects may search for potential solutions by looking online or by responding to your email campaigns, be ready with content and tools that provide a deeper understanding of the challenge, convey potential solutions and deliver expert guidance. Take a consultative approach to providing the best overall solution and reaching the best overall business outcome.

 

3.Segment and personalize: MailChimp reports that marketers who segment their lists get a 14% increase in email opens and 60% more clicks compared to non-segmented emails. In addition, personalizing your email content will make your recipients believe you are communicating directly to them. Studies show that personalized emails have 29% higher open rates, 41% higher unique click rates and six times higher transaction rates compared to non-personalized emails.

 

4.Compare your metrics: You don’t know if you’re winning if you’re not keeping score. How do your lead generation results compare to those of your competitors or industry averages? Do you know your sales conversion rate? What about your average lead cycle? If your metrics are below par, you can utilize proven templates, concepts and tactics that can get your game back on track. To get you started, you can find out how your email campaigns rate by using free resources from companies like Campaign Monitor, who recently published a report on email marketing benchmarks by day, industry and more. Lastly, if you aren’t keeping score, you don’t know what questions to ask when educating yourself through online resources or industry experts.  

 

5.Leverage the pros: Don’t feel like you have to start from scratch or learn as you go. Turn to professionals for advice and implementation support. For example, OMI can get you started on the right track with SMB prospect data including access to more than 40 million qualified SMB decision makers. And we offer a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

 

I hope you won’t wait too long to improve your odds of achieving your 2019 revenue goals. If your business focuses on serving SMBs, it’s important to find an effective way to reach them. And believe me, we have done our homework – we know what works. Get in touch with us for more information.

 

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate email data can enable you to achieve better email marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Take a look at our case studies to find out more