5 Ways to Successfully Target SMBs: Introducing The Marketing Vanguard Podcast

Launching a podcast was not on my radar for 2025, but when it came to our attention that nobody in the podcast universe was focusing on how marketers can successfully target and engage small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), we decided to go all in.

Since our founding in 1998, OMI has been guiding brands to connect effectively with decision-makers across the SMB market, and we built the world's largest U.S.-focused SMB database—with 95M+ SMB contacts with email addresses—to anchor our SMB services. SMBs are often the overlooked giants in the business world, representing 99% of all U.S. businesses and serving as a critical growth channel for B2B organizations.

With a mission to explore what drives SMBs and how marketers can reach this important target audience, our podcast, The Marketing Vanguard: Leading Voices in B2B Innovation, will debut this month. We’ll bring together thought leaders, marketers, and SMB experts to discuss what SMBs want and best practices for marketing to them. The podcast will be available on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, Audible, and RSS.

Diving Into the Podcast Details

This podcast is more than a conversation—it’s a deep dive into change across marketing, database management, data analytics, media, and advertising. Each episode covers:

• Real-world strategies that drive impactful B2B marketing.
• The principles and values that define great leadership.
• Proven techniques for audience segmentation, omni-channel marketing, and leveraging data for business growth.

Be a Podcast Guest: If you’re a B2B leader with innovative ideas, apply to be a guest and share your insights with a growing audience of marketers and decision-makers. Learn more and apply here.

5 Strategies for SMB Marketing Success

Here are a few topics we plan to address as we assist marketers around the world in effectively targeting this dynamic sector:

1. SMBs Demand Personalization

To succeed with SMBs, vendors must focus on personalized approaches—tailored messaging, unique offerings, and scalable solutions that fit SMBs’ specific demands. Taking a one-size-fits-all strategy with this market won't work because each SMB has unique challenges and needs.

Customer acquisition campaigns that target SMBs are one of our most in-demand services at OMI, and we always stress the importance of crafting an ideal customer profile (ICP) and investing in well-planned audience building. As part of our audience-building strategies, we use a B2B2C data matching approach that links and overlays consumer audience demographics,  such as marital status, children, income, gender, age, residential address, and LinkedIn profile, on top of B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics, and job title.

This more complete view gives you increased clarity about your prospects, allowing you to target and engage them more effectively and provide greater relevance across B2B and B2C omni-channel points, including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic. Go here for more information.

2. SMBs Value Quality Over Price

As you tailor your offerings, remember that SMB decision-makers prioritize efficiency and high-quality solutions over cost alone, according to Accenture. They wear many hats and have limited time available for sales calls. They would prefer to save time by purchasing the best solution for their business rather than the cheapest solution, and when researching their options, they want plenty of online self-help resources that enable informed and expedited decisions.

SMBs seek products designed specifically for their scale and needs, rather than stripped-down enterprise solutions, and they prioritize ease of use. This underscores the importance of delivering SMB-focused innovation that drives real results.

3. Peer Trust Drives SMB Decision-Making

When looking for the best solution, as many as 58% of SMB decision-makers consult their peers before making a purchase. This makes reviews, testimonials, and case studies extremely valuable. Highlighting success stories from SMB clients can significantly improve trust and accelerate your sales funnel.

4. Reaching SMBs Can Be Challenging

SMBs tend to have shorter sales cycles than larger enterprises. Still, for marketers, the challenge is reaching them because they often change personnel and email addresses more frequently than larger organizations. That’s why we continuously monitor and cleanse our SMB database to ensure it’s up to date and we offer a 95% email validity guarantee for 30 days.

When creating a custom SMB audience segment for client campaigns, we drill down into industry segments using firmographics, with manager-, director-, and professional-level and above titles that fuel precision targeting and improved personalization. You'll receive a full B2B2C data record with every file, including corporate emails and residential addresses.

Go here for a case study highlighting a leading telecom provider’s success using OMI’s SMB data.

5. Privacy Matters to SMBs

Like other prospects, SMBs value data privacy. With new regulations reshaping marketing strategies and the removal of third-party tracking cookies on the horizon, alternative privacy solutions should be considered. For example, larger brands are now building their own identity graphs, aiming to gain better control of their data while supporting privacy regulations, with profiles anonymized at the execution interface.

They are pulling together data from multiple quality resources to get their graphs where they need to be. Many are working with specialized third-party data providers like OMI to add scale and fill in any data gaps about their prospects’ personal and professional identifiers. After using the identity graph to build a custom SMB audience, marketers can then take the anonymized IDs from the graph to a demand-side platform (DSP) to deliver the ads.

Whether through our comprehensive SMB database or thought leadership like our podcast, we're here to help you make meaningful connections that drive results. We invite you to subscribe to the podcast and contact our team to discuss new ways to elevate your impact with SMBs.