Advertising to SMBs

People often think about B2B ads as advertising to enterprise businesses. What if your target market is small businesses, freelancers or even just employees?

What we know about B2SMB Advertising

At Right Percent we have a special love for B2SMB. We’ve ran campaigns for:

• DoorDash to acquire restaurants and other merchants.

• Thumbtack and Houzz to acquire contractors.

• MainStreet to acquire start-ups.

• Womply to acquire all SMBs looking for PPP loans.

• Brightwheel to acquire preschools

• Boulevard to acquire salons.

And way more. It’s a great category where advertising can really make a difference to the bottom line.

What’s different between B2SMB and B2Enterprise?

There’s three things that make advertising to SMBs easier than advertising to Enterprises.

1) Number of Decision Makers

The nice thing about B2SMB (or B2MicroSMB, like freelancers and employees) is that you have a lot of decision makers you can reach with ads.

There are 6m businesses out there with at least once employee. There’s another 34m with no employees. Even the smallest business niches tend to have 150k+ individual business owners.

Compare this to enterprise targeting, where any given category might have only 10,000 decision makers in US.

Advertising is a medium that works better with larger audiences, so advertising works better for B2SMB than B2Enterprise.

2) Important conversion events happen faster and are easier to track.

In B2SMB, the time to close is still longer than consumer but its much shorter than enterprise. Getting this signal faster makes it easier to optimize your ad campaigns.

Further, attribution is simpler. Often, B2SMB leads convert with only one content download. As opposed to enterprise, which have many touches over along period time.

Knowing all of the above, which ad channels are best for B2SMB?

First, check out our ad channels chart.

Taken a look? Great!

For digital advertising to small businesses, which is the focus of this article, there’s two channels that we find work at scale:

Google - Google works best for B2B companies in a market where customers have intent already and are searching for a product like yours. Google is the most competitive ad channel. It’s often hard for challenger companies to get a good ROI in a well established business niche. The more value you can capture per click, the more likely you are to do well on search. In addition, the better your business holds up against direct comparison to your competitors, the better you’ll do.

See our full guide to testing Google for B2B ads here.

Facebook - Facebook is a fantastic channel for B2SMB. The large number of decision makers means that the FB algorithm can work well for you to find customers. Our rule of thumb is that if there are 200k unique decision makers in the US that could buy your product, FB will work for you.

See our full guide to testing Facebook for B2B ads here.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn does not generally work for B2SMB - in general, they don’t use the platform often enough. Ad campaigns that do work tend to fatigue quickly.

See our full guide to testing LinkedIn Ads here.

Other Ad Channels - This can be Youtube, TikTok, Quora, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. If you have a really broad audience of freelancers or employees, these channels can work, especially TikTok. It’s very hard to make any of these work for true brick and mortar SMBs with employees. Youtube can work if the product you’re selling is fundamentally video based.

What’s the core of B2SMB ad strategy?

1) Of the three types of targeting, manual, third party, and algorithmic, algorithmic works best for B2SMB, especially on Facebook. The high number of decision makers and faster close cycle means you can train the algorithm to drive qualified leads. More on targeting here.

2) Creative is important as always. For a full guide to creative, click here.

3) Content ads that drive ad clickers to downloadable assets like eBooks, templates, guides, etc., instead of directly to your demo form or free trial, work really well. BUT - you should use content ads if you have a sales team that can follow-up on leads. They won’t convert on their own.

Otherwise, follow normal B2B best practices from our guides to Facebook and Google.

That’s the 1000 foot view of what works! We hope you enjoyed this guide.

Spend more than $30k a month on ads, and want a free audit of your B2SMB ad accounts? Fill out the form on our homepage.