The Campaign

NZME took an in-depth look at New Zealand small business owners and the challenges they face. By talking to business owners themselves, we covered topics that we know impact their lives: - Their health - The effect on family and family-time - Mental stress - Financial strain due to irregular income - Not knowing stuff that can get you in trouble (like finance and HR) From there, we looked at what help is available to take away that stress. We investigated how smart tech-savvy business owners are using technology to give them back some time and freedom and demonstrate how “techifying” your business can actually make you more money. A number of small business owners shared their stories and tips on how to cope with the many challenges they face and how they overcame them. The focus was supporting Kiwi businesses to thrive while living a healthy and balanced life.

Creative Execution

In six weeks, NZME produced every aspect of this content and housed it on its own microsite. We created the story, the videos, the photography and the interactive quiz to test where the reader’s worries actually were. We did the graphic design, we coded the website. We did the lot. It was shared widely via facebook, twitter and Linked In. The piece featured on the front page of the NZ Herald website (one of New Zealand's biggest websites) in a prominent position for four consecutive days and quickly became one of our most-read pieces of branded content ever. It was also the most-read piece of content on the NZ Herald website that day.

We had more than 30,000 unique browsers across the first two days of publication, spending an average of 1.45 minutes on page and significant social sharing largey through business channels. From client: “New Zealand currently has over half a million enterprises and 97% of these businesses have fewer than 20 employees but many have told us they are struggling. Whether the business is draining their finances, health, family time or well-being, we want to help. We think this is a great way to open up the conversation and shine a light on some of the issues business owners face and the digital services we at Spark can help provide to make life that little bit easier. We were excited to partner again with NZME on this important project..." Clive Ormrod – Spark General Manager of Marketing

Our target audience was very specific (B2B/SME owners) and the NZ Herald platform sees 79% of small-medium business owners going to the site in any one week so it was a perfect fit. Our research included talking to many small-medium business owners directly to gauge exactly what their challenges were.