Experts discussed the role of the media industry in SME development at SPIEF 2023 pitch session

I don’t shy away from saying that SME Corporation is a tool, with entrepreneurs on one side, and the Government on the other side. All of us speak about support. Huge thanks to the media, which have started to pay, and for a long while have been paying attention to entrepreneurship, its popularization, and its image. As for our company, we have learned to work with 78 banks. And we have learned to work with 89 regions. Well, let’s think it over together and set the framework for delivering relevant tools to entrepreneurs through accelerators, through filters that we will make open and transparent.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are eager to find solutions that deliver quick results. They are reluctant to switch to traditional media, which multiply the visibility of the business, and which yield results in terms of reach. This is something unfamiliar to them, and they must be encouraged to do it. This is exactly what Gazprom-Media does with the use of reach tools and sponsorship. The existing media environment we are talking about is fully oriented towards providing and finding ways to finance small and medium-sized entrepreneurship.

We have developed a dashboard on our loyalty platform, where small and medium businesses can run their own campaigns based on big transactional data. The analytics available there are presented in various contexts, including region, gender, age, and, of course, how and where people spend their money. Right now, our mission is to promote and popularize small and medium-sized businesses as much as possible to help them. The second project, and a smaller task, is the Faster Payments System. We also actively promote this tool for small and medium-sized businesses. It has the dual advantage of a low acquisition fee and no equipment costs.

Currently, small and medium-sized businesses account for 95% of the advertising market. Moreover, even the largest companies that have existed and continue to exist in Russia now belong to Russian entrepreneurs as well. My guess is that this new paradigm will be our driving force. We keep saying that our entrepreneurs lack sufficient knowledge about marketing and running a business. However, I can say that even seasoned marketing experts do not always have sufficient knowledge when it comes to designing and launching new brands. This is because we would often operate in a market where Western headquarters would communicate brands, strategies, and practices. Everything would be adapted and refined. But, frankly speaking, neither we nor our Western counterparts are used to building brands from the ground up. This is because in the West they have long since passed through all the stages of brand establishment. And now we have to reinvent everything from scratch. It is very important to share knowledge and experience, and to present our best cases to the audience.

Alina Efimova

Deputy CEO of Sales and Business Development, Gazprom-Media Sales House

What’s even more interesting is that radio now earns a quarter of its income from medium and small businesses. This tool is quite affordable and convenient for the advertiser and in some ways much more intuitive than CPP- or CPM-based purchases. The price lists are clear and understandable, the payback through sales and release to the air are reasonably fast.

Radio advertising and regional television advertising are the most effective tools in terms of a company’s right to its own brand, adding that in order to grow, one needs to go through a series of iterations. Obviously, branding is necessary to become a large or at least medium-sized business. No amount of good performance can turn a company into an actual asset. This can be said with all due respect to targeting and its effectiveness.

The key to success is that you need to have a clear understanding of what you want in order to make an informed decision. Do you want to promote instant sales and get your products off the shelves today? There are tools like performance, campaigns, bloggers, BTL, shelf price—all these challenges can be solved. Or, perhaps, you want to build a corporation 5–7 years later? At the time when some Western corporations with huge budgets were flooding our media with television, radio, and outdoor advertising, an average entrepreneur or any other advertiser could not break through all that advertising noise. Now is the time when sales houses support Russian companies, realizing that this is the future.

We didn’t have the idea of building a factory, and we had no idea whether the whole thing would even take off. In theory, it’s very easy to build a factory in Russia. It’s all about the hardware and the people. However, we started with building a strong brand. So we ended up spending $100,000 on brand building. It took us two months and eight broadcasts. And by the third month, our monthly sales reached 100,000 packages.

It is well within our power to share our advertising experience and skills, and to provide insights into more convenient and effective practices in this line of business. That is why we have established the Advertiser School for small and medium businesses here in St. Petersburg. We invite everyone to learn together with us. We invite industry experts to tell us about working more effectively with the radio. Notably, our curriculum is designed in such a way that it’s 50% theory and 50% practice. In this way, our students can practice and learn how to present themselves and behave in front of a microphone, what to speak about, and what products they could launch.