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For tech marketers, its an all too familiar story: Youre faced with a staggering number of companies in the SMB space and the daunting task of reaching every last one of them. As a result, your company often goes to great lengths to ensure theyre targeting SMBs. There appears to be a common misstep in how companies have been carrying out their marketing approach: They assume that reaching out to the CIOs of SMBs will do the trick. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but when all is said and done, there are just not enough CIOs of SMBs to warrant spending time and resources on a lengthy marketing campaign.
What actually is an SMB? And who manages their $800B annual IT wallet?
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Since no two companies targeting SMBs define them in the same way, lets clear the air with a simple definition: SMBs are companies having fewer than 1,000 employees. Simple as that! Spiceworks, home to 2M IT pros, has a firm grasp on what that figure means when it comes to purchasing power. This leads us to a few global stats: These 7M are the IT decision makers who are purchasing tech for SMB-size organizations. This means that IT decision makers manage purchasing for over 197M employees inside of 18M companies worldwide. Thats an estimated $800 billion yearly spent on IT and some serious buying clout. Where to begin? Wrapping your brain around the scale of the SMB market is a great starting place for tackling your new marketing game plan. So first things first: lets level set on what we mean by organization size.
A breakdown...
Home Office
Small
Medium
Large
Large Enterprise
Often hard-to-reach, with gatekeepers preventing sales contact. Passes off review and consideration of technology to junior staff .
Most of us ARE decision makers or at least TELL the decision makers what to decide. Thats how it works here.
Marketing to the C-Suite is the move of someone who knows their product isnt any good.
I think what so many vendors fail to realize is that while I, as an IT professional, am not the decision maker, I have two very important roles: decision influencer and gatekeeper. If a vendor doesnt convince me, they dont make it to the decision maker and [I] can make or break most IT decisions.
Ready to talk to the true IT decision makers? Get in touch with us at spiceworks.com/marketing and well make sure youre quickly engaging with over 2M IT pros.
Spiceworks, as an IT management app and a community of over 2M IT professionals, provides a unique view, insight and path to reaching more than 25% of the worlds SMBs.
Visit us at spiceworks.com/marketing to learn more and understand how to optimize your IT marketing with IT buyers.