Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit featured a range of seminal panels on the intersection between finance and advertising. In a session moderated by The Royals’ managing partner Andrew Siwka, three experienced finance marketers dissected the unique challenges of finance marketing to SMEs in periods of uncertainty.
Siwka was joined by a panel of marketers, including Peter Thomas, chief people and customer officer at Smartpay, Deborah Kytic, director of marketing at Prospa and Jane Betschel, head of marketing & digital at MYOB.
The presentation began with a series of emotional videos from Australian small business owners, commenting on the hardships and struggles they encountered keeping their businesses afloat through the black swan events of the last few years, and the current macroeconomic malaise of steep inflation and high interest rates.
Siwka noted Australian SME’s are facing a period of severe instability, and prompted the panel to discuss “the opportunities (that) exist to leverage off the challenges that they have been facing and continue to face everyday”.
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Betschel placed a focus on helping small businesses maintain their “continuity” – noting MYOB was centred on helping businesses retain their cash flow, people and workplaces. She said that in the throes of the pandemic, most of the focus was concentrated on enabling businesses to simply survive, with ‘most businesses at the time probably not having continuity plans.’
Kytic said traditional providers and lenders were not providing enough of a ‘human touch’ to SME’s, particularly during a time of turmoil when businesses wanted more personalised, caring, human communication from their merchants and lenders.
Shifts in consumer behaviour were also pegged as an added difficulty for SME’s.
“What we’ve noticed is driven by consumers, an increase in contactless payments, using digital wallets, which is great for consumers but they don’t realise is that there’s higher costs for SME’s, sometimes up to 15%. One thing we’ve noticed in the industry is that merchants are trying to save costs as much as possible, and trying out non traditional lenders.” Thomas said.
Kytic noted despite efforts in communication and messaging, businesses were still in need of reassurance and were more likely to reach out to brands they ‘trusted’ to get it.
“Businesses owners are asking the same 2-3 questions over and over, they just want reassurance that ‘no one is taking this money away from me’, ‘am I filling in forms correctly’ – that’s why they look to brands they trust to get the comfort and reassurance they need,” Kytic said.
“We haven’t told them anything that wasn’t in the public domain, but we use language they can more easily understand.”
Thomas said: “What they’re looking for is simplicity in product and things like T&Cs. Merchants need to be more agile and simplify their messaging and T&C’s because businesses are time poor. Having education available for people to watch on demand is important.”
While businesses were in dire need of support over the last few years, Betschel noted that over “72% said they don’t ask for help”.
“The resilience of small business is really what’s astounding us over the last couple of years,” said Kytic – which, she noted, was not a reason to hold back on support initiatives.
Referral programs, leveraging social platforms were also pinned as tools for brands to foster deeper community engagement during a time of turmoil.
“Social proof is really powerful – brands being able to tell their stories in a beautiful way for us to share, for others to share is really critical for brand success,” Kytic said.
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