As ambitious SME owners with healthy marketing budgets, I am sure you’re no stranger to ambitious targets and trying to break through sector paradigms in order to get your service message across, but large-scale campaigns to achieve this can often be daunting.
Big media spend, fine-tuning market propositions and creating engaging campaigns is what excites me, but that is probably born out of learning my trade from arguably some of the UK’s best brand strategists like Jeremy Bullmore, John Hegarty, David Bernstein.
Get it right and big campaign ideas can really drive brand awareness and challenge market leaders, but they can also carry significant risks that can undermine ROI and profitability if not executed with precision.
To maximise the impact of your media spend, it is crucial to remain laser-focused on your customer base and avoid being lured by broad media buys and media moguls that don’t align with your business objectives.
I have worked with many clients now to refocus media ROAS (return on ad spend) from top to bottom of the sales funnel. Finding the right media and influencer partners and in some cases, optimising the media channel after the deal has been done and the proverbial ‘horse has bolted’.
Unlocking bottom of the funnel: Invest Where It Counts
Today, SMEs are increasingly adept at leveraging paid digital channels to convert high-intent customers.
- Paid Search: Smart keyword analysis is crucial in determining where to allocate the bulk of your budget, ensuring that you spend directly targets those most likely to convert.
- CRM: Similarly, most businesses have invested in sophisticated CRM platforms to efficiently facilitate the qualification and nurturing of customers, converting ‘hot leads’ in two clicks or via a slick salesperson. Alternatively, they target buyer motivations and channel them through a bespoke and engaging email sequence to empower and guide them through the buying journey.
However, the missing link all too often, is the sales training. Furthermore, the sales team of today is dominated by the under 30 years. How do we train technophile Generation Z salespeople working from home to close a sale in a way they feel comfortable and utilizes all the AI and online testimonial touch points? Clients that embrace this challenge and appoint energised Sales Directors who are focused on the end goal not the journey will win the race.
My experience has shown that clients really turn a profitable corner with CRM systems delivering significant scale-up after 1-2 years of embedding the system.
Social: Let us not forget organic social channels. Challenger brands that are habitually working to amplify competitive advantage, or create solutions that customers often don't realise they need, see real benefit in social story telling. They require stellar value propositions and campaigns - great visual content, the right media environment and time to 'nurture'. Finding skilled content creators and social strategists is not easy in the days of AI but it can be the difference between ‘background noise’ and award-winning viral campaigns. After all, social channels can be cost-free, and all companies should strive for 50:50 traffic paid vs organically sourced.
Establishing an annual plan with 2-3 months rolling content to be scheduled is hard work - Gymshark and Trinny London’s social departments are testament to that. Social media is not something to be tagged onto the job description of a marketing manager or customer service manager.
So, what happens when the bottom of the sales lead funnel runs dry and needs topping up!
Top of the funnel optimisation for Maximum ROI
Once you’ve fine-tuned the lower half of your sales funnel, it’s time to bolster the top with targeted brand awareness efforts. This stage often sees the most significant mistakes by the 'inexperienced', especially when higher budgets and brand reputation are at stake.
I have seen companies turning to agencies and media partners for support which whilst that can be a smart move, the management team become overly reliant on this new agency relationship and are too trusting. Your employees, especially sales and marketing, know your customers really well, but are you affording them the opportunity to bring that base knowledge of customer motivators, triggers, buying environment to the table when ‘The Boss’ is doing a big media deal?
My experience suggest, often not! Sales and marketing teams should be engaged in the process and ensure that every media pound spent aligns with their audience’s needs, buyer behaviour and consumption habits.
Avoiding the Trap of ‘Hungry Agencies’
Many agencies focus on mass impression shares rather than diving deep into the specific behaviours and triggers of your ideal customers. This broad approach can dilute your media impact, resulting in poor ROI and missed revenue opportunities.
While it’s not important to understand every nuance of media jargon, I am frequently invited to support SME owners to be ‘razor-sharp’ in their media strategies ensuring customer-centricity and positive ROI-outcomes, before committing significant funds.
The Risk of Broad Media Channels
Whether B2C or B2B markets, advertising and broader media channels (or in old money “above-the-line” media), are powerful for creating brand recognition. Digital channels like TikTok and YouTube can appear more cost effective and more powerful than TV or radio, but we shouldn’t let the creative product relax as a consequence.
Broadcast media can be wasteful if not aligned carefully with your target audience’s behaviour. The key to profitable media spend is matching your campaign environment with your customers’ actual consumption patterns and purchase triggers. Otherwise, you risk reaching audiences who aren’t ready to buy, draining your budget without driving returns.
Let me share a couple of client scenarios where I joined just after a big media deal had been signed. Excited by the prospects and their ability to afford such a deal, the sales expectations were scary. It was pretty obvious very early on to me that the media marriage was not a profitable one.
Case Study: Football Sponsorship and Missed ROI
Consider an SME automotive company that signed a lucrative football sponsorship with national TV exposure. They achieved a great deal as a they saved the sponsors from a recent deal collapse right at start of the season. Given the speed of the deal, and despite its broad reach, the campaign failed to generate meaningful ROI due to critical mismatches.
- Audience Misalignment: The sponsorship targeted fans of a community-level club of grandparents and young boys, a poor match for their car market, which appealed more to the 30-55-year-old target audience of office professionals and Young Dads seeking style and status in their vehicle choices.
- Behavioural Disconnect: Game-day ads reached fans preoccupied with the match, whose focus was on the game, betting, and socialising - not making a considered decision about leasing a car, a process that typically unfolds over several months.
As ROI remained stagnant for a year, I helped the company with the very hard task of negotiating out of the sponsorship commitment – Covid was a blessing in this instance. I later refocused the advertising investment to SkyAdsmart, aligning their spend with high-earning, hybrid-working households. This strategic pivot resulted in substantial growth, proving that precise targeting can significantly enhance media impact and profitability. Advertising spend increased over another year.
I am pleased to say that the legacy of working with this team in this manner resulted in a second football sponsorship deal – this time, a climbing Premier Division Club with a great reputation for nurturing junior colts - Dads United!
Case Study: The Perils of Airtime-for-Equity Deals
In response to declining advertising revenue, many TV networks now offer SMEs enticing airtime-for-equity deals. However, these arrangements can often sideline media agencies, leaving SMEs without critical negotiation power and the expertise to measure the true value of media fit.
I was appointed by an on-demand grocery company that fell into this trap, just after the ‘deal was sealed’. After a string of rejections from Investment houses for series A funding to scale the business pre COVID, they were super excited to receive a UKTV deal that offered £1m of airtime providing awareness and exposure.
However, the management had not explored the customer data closely enough. After an initial uplift in sales, ultimately the returns from TV airtime flatlined and failed to connect with its core audience of young parents and students, resulting in stagnant ROI. We reduced the spend to maintain a low-level awareness and I conducted a deep data dive into customer spend and frequency to explore the lifetime value of this emerging “young family” shopper. Mid Covid these early adopters of on-demand convenience shopping proved to represent 65% of the growth.
We swiftly adapted the programme schedule to focus on popular family TV channels resulting in 300% increase in sales.
Continuous RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) modelling drove the lifetime value of the customer database. Alongside a reduced cost per acquisition (CPA), this provided the critical KPI’s and measures for a due diligence paper to embark upon a Series B funding round.
Conclusion
In summary, I believe all ambitious SMEs should be commended for their boldness when investing heavily in paid media and brand-building initiatives. However, “Buyer beware,” to ensure your efforts translate into profitability, it’s essential to develop a clear strategy, backed by expert advice, precise targeting, and a commitment to ongoing optimisation. Media spend isn’t just a budget line—it’s an investment that, when managed carefully, can drive significant ROI and enhance overall business profitability.
