SMEs - where do you get started with Ad:Tech, Mar:Tech & CX?

I’ve been lucky enough to attend and speak at ad:tech London for a couple of years now. It’s a great event – and one that bucks the trend of people actually going too. There are great companies exhibiting, and some great delegates from major companies networking away and listening to some excellent speakers (and me!). The amazing Olympia venue also never fails to impress. The marketing technology industry moves at an impressive pace as well of course – this year saw a lot more emphasis on my favourite topic Artificial intelligence, 5G and the internet of things – it was also pleasing to see smart cities being mentioned frequently also.

One topic that I think still merits more focus though is recognising the challenges faced by SMEs looking to take advantage of the opportunities presented by mar:tech, ad:tech and CX technology.

To many of us reading this more used working for blue-chip companies and big agencies, ad:tech, big data driven machine learning and AI-driven automation technologies are increasingly ‘business as usual’ in our thoughts and planning. These technologies are allowing us to deliver more relevant and increasingly personalised content (hopefully with the requisite permission to do so!) and reaching prospective customers on an unprecedented scale. As I discussed this week – Entrepreneur.com suggestion that 2019 is a war for our attention seems more-true than ever as we head into peak season. But where are SMEs in this – both in terms of using it and being customers for it?

The SME opportunity

According to a recent 2018 House of Commons briefing paper of the 5.7 million businesses in the UK, over 99% are small or medium-sized businesses (employing 0-249 people), and even more interestingly 5.5 million (96%) businesses are micro-businesses (employing 0-9 people). Every one of these businesses is just like the larger ones – working night and day to attract and retain customers, promote positive word of mouth, and grow profitable revenues. A huge amount of these SME owners will be perfectly digitally-literate of course, and many motoring nicely on a variety of platforms already. But, in my experience consulting 100+ SMEs in my career (and as a micro-business owner and investor myself), when it comes to advertising, the complexity of options is bewildering for many. But why is this?

Mind your language

Let’s start with an obvious – and much stated point – but one that is still not resolved (and in fact getting worse as the ecosystem continues to evolve and change every day!) – the language of ad:tech. Even a cursory experimentation with Google’s advertising suite presents a plethora of new terminologies and patterns to understand, and for many, this is where they start – and end – in that testing. As such SMEs are most likely missing many of the incredible opportunities of advertising technology – so why is this?

Even a cursory search on the topic throws you into the deep end of DMPs, DSPs, SSPs, MSP, ad-networks, digital display, prospecting, retargeting, exchanges, affiliates and data science - never mind best practice for testing the actual ad content itself. These initial barriers are a real shame as grasping the fundamentals of ad:tech is critical to underpin and and all digital marketing activity that an SME undertakes. There is undoubtedly potential for SMEs to succeed with testing this ad:tech- they want to communicate their brand & messages to their target audience in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, but as soon as they take the next steps into the labyrinth of publishers, platforms and inventory, things do get more confusing, and harder to get a clear line back to ROI – and with less ability to burn through money, return on investment is the crucial factor for all SMEs.

Resources are key

Resources are always a challenge of course.. Bigger brands typically have greater internal resource and also the ability to fund working with an external agency to help them deliver their campaigns and handle the complicated logistics of developing and shipping creatives to various (ok, millions!) of publisher websites. Even then, larger brands struggle to make sense of it all and gain meaningful insight into their customer behaviours, preferences, and activities. So what hope for an SME juggling numerous hats when running their business?

What to do next

There is undoubtedly potential for everyone to succeed with ad:tech, so here is my initial advise to any SMEs who are experiencing the challenges I’ve outlined in this article:

1.    Get some training. Cost of training is no longer an excuse. There is a plethora of free, or low-cost training available. Google offers many incredible free courses, as does LinkedIn through its Lynda proposition.

2.    Actually go to events like ad: tech London and just start talking to the companies there – it is amazing how many people walk around these events and do not engage at all, or feel that this is ‘not for them’. It is – who knows, if you deploy it correctly you could well be their next big client – everyone starts somewhere!

3.    Get started for real. In my experience, the only way of taking this training and making it ‘real’ is to do it – really do it; create some basic campaigns, see what happens, refer back to your training notes on what everything means.

4.    Test different types of content as much as possible. Content really is key to successfully deploying ad-tech – once you are into the ‘language of it – try text, image and video variations.

Let me know your thoughts on this and any ideas for others – how have you overcome the challenge of getting started in ad:tech? Share your thoughts, and let’s help everyone take better advantage of this technology.

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