Is Your Target Market Small to Medium Sized NZ Businesses? How to Choose Advertising That Reaches Them

This article answers 2 questions:

1. Where can you find stats about your target market (if you are B2B)?
2. How effective is your advertising at reaching this target market?

1. Where can you find stats about your target market (if you are B2B)?

The ministry of Economic Development released the following report in July 09:

Small – Medium Sized Enterprises (SME’s) in New Zealand: Structure and Dynamics – July 09 (1.48Mb .pdf)

Essentially it is a very pretty version of what has been available from the Stats.govt.nz website for about 6 months.

A Quick Summary of My Favourite Statistics From the Report:

• An SME (Small – Medium Sized Enterprise) is defined as 0-19 employees (97% of all NZ enterprises)
• 67.8% of New Zealand businesses have zero employees
• How can an enterprise have zero employees?
  • “could be working proprietor-only, or self-employed, businesses or of enterprises that may require no labour input, such as asset and property investment”
• How many SME’s in the top 5 major centres?
  1. Auckland 147,622
  2. Canterbury 58,457
  3. Waikato 48,427
  4. Wellington 46,606
  5. Bay of Plenty 31,115

What can we do with these statistics?

Actually not much.  We have to dig a bit deeper using the “Table Viewer” on the stats.govt.nz website to really find out what’s going on.  (It’s a bit tricky at first, but you’ll get used to it, and then it becomes very powerful)

If your business is B2B (Business to Business), we can determine the size of your target market.

For example, the target market for my business (Marketing Consulting) is Tauranga businesses with 1-19 employees.

• Total number of NZ businesses: 507,800 (with 1,970,000 employees)
• Total Tauranga businesses: 13,600 (with 51,200 employees)
• Proportion of NZ businesses with 1-19 employees: 29.3%
• Estimated SME’s in Tauranga (0.293 x 13,600) = 3,985

So there are 4,000 local businesses in my target market.  More than I could reach one at a time with phone calls or knocking on doors, so perhaps some advertising could serve to filter these business and determine which ones are in need of my services.

But what types of advertising can reach this target market?

This brings us to the next question:

2. How effective is your advertising at reaching this target market?

What are your favourite methods of advertising?

• Community newspapers?
• Daily Newspapers?
• PO Box Drops?
• Direct Mail? (i.e. using purchased mailing lists)

Let’s look at the Business PO Box Drops as an example.  I am asking “How many of the businesses in my Tauranga target market can a Business PO Box drop reach?”.

The first step is to ask Reach Media how many business PO Boxes they have in Tauranga: 2500.

They can’t tell me which of those are owned by SME’s, so that number includes all size businesses, so:

• Total business PO Boxes in Tauranga: 2500
• Guess of the % of those with 1-19 employees: 50%
• Reach: (0.5 x 2500) = 1250
• % of target market reached by PO Box: (1250/4000) = 31%

So 31% of my target market can be reached by PO Box drop.

This indicates that using this method of advertising in isolation will only reach a third of my target market.  Therefore, to reach more of my target market I would need to build in other forms of advertising into my campaign.

Would you like me to crunch the numbers on your business?

Are you wondering about the answers to some of the questions listed above?

I can help. Call me on (07) 575 8799 today or email me.