You may focus on selling or marketing to small and midsize businesses (SMBs), but how often do you get firsthand insight or feedback from them? If the answer is “not often,” you may be missing an opportunity to improve your offerings and outreach.

The payoff of keeping in touch

Having a process to get regular SMB insight allows you to gauge their satisfaction with your offerings, perception of your brand, reactions to ads or other marketing materials, purchase intent, susceptibility to competitive offers and many other aspects of their mindset. The insights you gain can help you refine your products and services to better meet market needs; improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing outreach; and ultimately improve customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

You can also use your SMB research data in PR campaigns – interesting survey findings can be a very effective way to get the attention of reporters on the small business beat. This tactic can be particularly effective if you’ve identified trends by conducting periodic surveys.

Your research insights can also become the basis of high-value content such as articles, blog posts, infographics and videos. Unique data can help improve engagement among current customers and attract new ones, as well as enhance your position as a trusted resource.

How to stay in touch with SMBs

The good news is that there are many ways to stay in touch with SMBs. Used in tandem, they can complement and reinforce each other:

• Social media. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are not only great ways to promote your message to SMBs, but to monitor your followers to learn about their concerns and stay current on the terminology they use so you can communicate with them more effectively.
• Real-time content marketing or RTCM takes monitoring social media a step further. RTCM means providing helpful advice in an authentic way to SMBs as they discuss topics relevant to your brand and offerings in the “watering holes” where they congregate online. Properly executed, RTCM can build trust in your brand and drive traffic to your site or social media programs.
• Feedback from your service and sales teams. Your customer service team can provide tremendous insight into the needs and concerns of current customers, and your sales team can provide a perspective on the preferences and objections of prospects.
• Research. Finally, of course, custom qualitative or quantitative research – in person, by phone or online – is a great way to stay on top of SMB needs and preferences. An omnibus survey, which pools questions from multiple marketers, is a great way to get quick, low-cost feedback. The speed and affordability of omnibus surveys make them effective for ongoing tracking surveys, for example to monitor changes in brand awareness and perception.
  

  Making the most of feedback

  If you go to the trouble of creating a process to gather market insight, be sure to create a process to use it. According to Gartner, many companies collect customer feedback without ever acting on it. Ideally, the learnings you gather on SMB attitudes and preferences will inform all aspects of your go-to-market strategy such as targeting, positioning, media planning, messaging, distribution, partnerships, sales support, offers, pricing and product enhancement strategies.Let Bredin help you find ways to stay in touch with SMBs through custom research, the SMB Pulse omnibus survey or real-time content marketing. Contact us to learn more.