Nine is doubling down on securing more advertising dollars from small-to-medium enterprises (SMBs) as businesses ramp up marketing activity coming out of COVID-19.
The media company has launched a multimillion dollar consumer-facing campaign, Your Wingman to Success, targeting SMBs across Australia.
The campaign, running on Nine’s TV, digital, radio and print assets, aims to show the value and accessibility of advertising across its platforms through its direct sales division Nine Plus.
Speaking to AdNews, Nine Plus director of sales Tim Rose says now is the right time to target SMBs as they look to recover from the COVID-19 slump.
“We're not seeing that small businesses don't have marketing budgets at the moment, we just feel our revenue is coming from somewhat different categories than it may have traditionally come from,” Rose says.
“So part of the reason for this campaign is to educate the SMB market that while Nine is a very large business there are many different opportunities and ways of reaching different audiences on different levels.
“In the past, television advertising was expensive and out of reach for the small business sector but now with all of the different formats that we have, the small business sector is an area that Nine is really focused on growing now.”
The push to draw in smaller businesses comes after a tough year for the advertising sector, with media agency bookings showing record falls across the industry. In May last year, TV was down 35.6%, radio 55.8%, and digital 26.4%, according to SMI figures. At the same time, businesses were increasingly turning to digital platforms, particularly social media, because of its low price point and flexibility.
Rose says Nine will be out in the market making a case for SMBs to put their dollars with the multi platform media company.
“We know that there's around 50,000 small to medium enterprises who spend on above-the-line media in a direct capacity every year and we’re currently dealing with around 5,000 of those,” Rose says.
“So the opportunities for us to grow this sector is really significant.
“On top of that, there's another two million small businesses who are spending on digital platforms like Facebook and Google and aren’t spending on traditional above-the-line advertising. We see an opportunity to provide them with a way of engaging with Nine’s audiences as well.”
Nine Plus is also showcasing the results of campaigns it's already run for smaller businesses on its website. For example, a four-week print campaign in the Australia Financial Review for fund management firm Avari Capital, with a budget of $40,000, increased the brand’s web traffic five-fold, and delivered hundreds of relevant enquiries from investors to the sales team.
Another campaign for Jamberoo Action Park helped increase the park’s attendance and ticket sales by 35% from last season, giving it its strongest result in five years, while a campaign for Musson Jewellers which ran on 2GB to promote the sale of the Arcadia Diamond resulted with more than 10 groups coming into the Chatswood store to ask for the piece on the same day.
“We launched the website with 10 case studies,” Rose says. “The intention is to grow that number of success stories to close to a hundred over the next year or so.”
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