Around 40% of SMBs are looking for ways to increase the dollars and time spent on marketing. It’s a struggle.
In the face of economic headwinds, some small-to-medium businesses are devoting increased resources to their marketing efforts. A report from Constant Contact, “Small Business Now,” finds 39% of SMBs increasing their marketing budget while 44% are increasing time spent on marketing.
In addition, 41% are increasing the number of channels used for marketing; 42% estimate they are increasing the number of marketing tactics used. This is based on a survey of more than 1,300 SMB owners and operators in North America, the U.K. and Australia.
Why we care. Two things to note up front: First, Constant Contact has skin in the game here because it offers digital marketing services to SMBs. Second, those statistics obviously represent less than half the the survey sample. Still, numbers around 40% represent a good portion of the sample.
Other takeaways. More than half the survey sample admit to spending less than one hour a day on marketing, most time being devoted to running operations, interacting with customers, fulfilling orders and conducting financial and other administrative tasks.
Marketing tasks tend to be postponed because of the time they occupy. The most time-consuming, according to the report, are posting to social media, managing email campaigns and data entry.
While 49% use more than one marketing channel regularly, only 16% are confident that they are using the right channels. Channel choice is based mainly on guesswork or familiarity.
SMBs “…recognize the need to amplify their voice and attract new customers, but many are uncertain about which channels to leverage, what content resonates, and how to create a strategy
that achieves their goals.”
The full report is available here.
The post SMBs are investing more time and resources in marketing appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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