Marketing to SMEs: Insights from our breakfast roundtable with Toyota

At a recent roundtable hosted by True and Jo Ross from Toyota’s Brand Strategy team, we asked a roomful of Senior Marketers how to be successful in marketing to SMEs.

How do you segment the SME market?

There's a common tension in SME marketing: you know you can't speak to everyone, but nor can you realistically produce hundreds of tailored messages. The answer isn't to avoid segmentation - it's to find the right basis for it. Size and sector are the obvious starting points, but they're not always the most useful ones. What really matters is understanding where the commonalities in buying behaviour lie. How do different groups of SMEs actually make decisions about your product? Where do their needs, triggers and barriers align? Get that foundation right and every decision that follows - messaging, channels, objectives - works harder for your bottom line.

Brand salience is key

There are lots of reasons brand salience is key to winning with SMEs, and many hold true across B2B more broadly. The 95-5 rule tells us that 95% of your audience aren't in market right now - but they should still be part of your targeting strategy, because 90% of sales go to a brand that makes the day-one consideration list. Brand familiarity builds trust long before a buying conversation begins.

But for the famously time-poor SME audience, there's another factor at play. Once an SME identifies a need, decisions happen quickly. That means brand awareness isn't just a nice-to-have - it's doing essential pre-work. If your brand isn't already lodged in memory before the buying window opens, you're too late.

Customer-first, market orientated strategies win

Just as understanding how your audience buys is key to segmentation, it's equally key to cutting through with messaging and media. The brands that cut through lead with benefits — not features, not technical detail, and definitely not just price. SME owners buy on value, weighing the broader business impact — downtime avoided, efficiency gained, risk reduced — alongside the upfront cost.

That same customer-first thinking should shape how you manage your output. Keep messaging simple and consistent. Don't overcomplicate the number of messages you're putting out, and don't overcomplicate the messages themselves. Simplicity and consistency do more work than variety.

Objectives, objectives, objectives

It might seem obvious, but making sure your business is aligned behind what success looks like is essential. There are nearly 1.4 million businesses with under 50 employees in the UK, which makes this a market of real opportunity - but opportunity only converts if you're clear on what you're chasing. Consider whether volume of leads matters more than value of leads, and make sure marketing and sales are working from the same definition. If a marketing qualified lead isn't the same as a sales accepted lead, find out why - that gap is worth closing before you scale anything.

Once you've agreed what success looks like, use it as a filter. Does this campaign, this channel, this message serve that objective? If not, question it.

The bottom line

Segmentation, brand salience, customer-first messaging, clear objectives — these aren't four separate challenges. They're four parts of the same problem: how do you build a brand that SMEs actually choose? Get all four working together and you're not just marketing more effectively, you're building a sustainable commercial advantage in one of the most competitive audiences in B2B.

If you're marketing to SMEs and would like to attend our next roundtable event, do get in touch with us.