At Engage Comms (an award-winning Yorkshire-based B2B marketing comms agency if you didn’t already know us!), we love working with SMEs (small-medium enterprises) to ‘untap their potential’. They don’t have the ‘baggage’ of large organisations and can therefore often be more agile and innovative, particularly in the face of crisis.

As a small business ourselves, we’ve had to adapt quickly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and all the uncertainty it has brought with, but we’re very fortunate that our clients have not only been open to this rapid change, they’ve also trusted our ‘quality over quantity’ long-term strategic approach to get them through the most turbulent of times. One example is the Money Advice Liaison Group (MALG) whose main offering pre-pandemic was a programme of face-to-face events. With a lean team (which includes us), they were able to not only replace physical meetings with virtual ones, but actually demonstrate even more value from its membership offer (which is based around the aim of ‘working together to improve the lives of people in debt’) as a result of the pandemic. Read more on that here.

It’s safe to say that it’s been tough to keep in good spirits as a small business this year, even now that we’re entering the festive season, but all our clients from local plumbers merchants to national membership organisations have remained positive and that positivity has allowed us – and them – to implement some exciting new ideas and approaches which have put them in the driving seat going into a tough new year. We even persuaded our small niche clients to enter awards against big industry competition and were thrilled that they were all shortlisted. (Harrogate Steel and Allied Glazing were finalists in the Construction Marketing Awards and Nova Tissue was a finalist in the Blue Patch Sustainability Awards).

The confidence amongst our SME clients is also clear to see in the fact that many of them are creating new roles that will help them realise their growth plans. From our steel fabrication client appointing a new General Manager, to our local plumbers merchants client creating a new E-commerce Assistant role to push forward their digital offering, to our toilet roll manufacturer client looking for new Field Sales Representative to tap into new markets, and our not-for-profit monetary judgments client Registry Trust recruiting for a new Director of Operations and Board member to help build on its aim to provide ‘public data for public good’, there is optimism despite the bleak economic outlook.

We firmly believe that from threat comes opportunity and that organisations must constantly evolve to meet the ever-changing demands of their audiences, pandemic or no pandemic. We’re proud of how our clients have embraced the opportunity that has come from having to accelerate plans that were already in place to ‘go digital’ in 2020 without losing the human interaction and personal feel that has become even more important to us all.

There is good news amongst the doom and gloom and we are here to spread it! Let us help you tell your positive stories and make 2021 your best year yet. Get in touch on info@engagecomms.co.uk.