Tag Archives: business

October 25, 2012 · 10:55 am

Maybe It’s Easy Because It’s Not Effective?

The other day I wrote about how small and medium businesses were thinking of the internet in a way that made it less of a medium.  Another day, another piece of research concerning SMB’s and digital.  Today’s comes from BIA/Kelsey via the good folks at eMarketer and it talks about how 40% of small and midsized firms planned to increase their digital spending budget within the next 12 months.  That’s not a big surprise but the fact that the SMB marketers (probably the owners too!)  are thinking multi-channel.  Smart, but also a little concerning:

Facebook has also emerged as a favored digital channel among these smaller businesses, likely due to its low-cost barriers and ease of use. In fact, 52% of SMBs said they used Facebook for advertising or promotional purposes, making it more popular for marketing than newspapers (31%), community sponsorships (27%) and email marketing (25%).

It’s the “ease of use” thing that has me worried.  Sure, it’s easy as pie to post your latest offer or remind fans that you’re open on Sunday.  However, as we’ve discussed repeatedly here on the screed, many of those “fans” aren’t interested in anything other than discounts and really won’t engage.  Without an understanding of how Facebook works, Edge Rank, and the social graph, the results from Facebook are going to equal the price of entry:  not much.  More importantly  I’m not sure the amount of daily support required  is clear to these folks.

I also find it of interest that social media is compared with three other forms of customer engagement (above) that are completely different from one another and which should be used for very different purposes.  Email should be a lot higher on SMB’s radar than it appears to be.  However, it also requires a lot more support (and can be costlier) than what Facebook appears to be on the surface.  Sponsorships are great ways to build your email list (or social followers) but if the emphasis isn’t on using email, the value of the sponsorship – and the mailing list access it should affords – lessens.

The study concludes with a note that despite all the attention paid to the “social, local, mobile” (SoLoMo) movement, SMBs are failing to recognize the benefits of linking mobile with local, an especially important element for small businesses.  No surprise – that’s a very resource-intensive area to do properly.  The key, as always, is to match the business objectives with the tools and the budgets.  Just as every business is different, so too are the ways in which those factors – objectives, budgets, and tools – combine.  As always, let me know if I can be helpful with that.

Thoughts?

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October 24, 2012 · 10:44 am

Who Has A Reputation Worse Than Politicians? You Do!

We often hear that the professions that have the worst reputations among the public are bankers and politicians.  A study commissioned by Adobe and fielded by research firm Edelman Berland and reported in Ad Age finds that there is a group of professionals held in lower esteem:  marketers.  The study found that while people understand that marketing is an important role in business, they also think very little of those of us who do it and the value we bring to society.  According to the study, the majority of consumers –53%– stated that most marketing is “a bunch of B.S.”

When asked if marketing benefits society, only 13% of consumers agreed. And compared to other professions, the results were grim. Teachers — despite how little they are often compensated — were valued at the top of the list, followed by scientists and engineers. That’s somewhat to be expected. But what was more surprising was that advertising and marketing ranked below nearly every other profession, including bankers (32%), lawyers (34%) and even politicians (18%). Marketing and advertising were tied with the job of an actor or actress in terms of its value.

Ouch.  Then again, we bring these things on ourselves.  Think about what the public experiences with respect to marketing these days.  Spam in their in boxes.  Data being gathered surreptitiously and used without their knowledge or permission.  Those go along with issues that have been there for years – ads that seem (or are) sleazy (way too much fine print to be real), using media as a bullhorn via the “spray and pray” method, and an industry with not enough accountability for results.

Fortunately, we have a chance to change this as the nature of marketing itself has changed.  While consumers don’t like ads in digital (there’s a lot of evidence on that) they DO welcome the opportunity to engage marketers in conversation via these channels.  The study shows that just 2% of respondents believe information about a brand from a company’s social-media site is credible, however, so there is some work that needs to be done there.  As we’ve discussed before, there needs to be a paradigm shift on the part of we who communicate with consumers before the consumers will respond with a similar shift.  It takes time to build trust.

This is not a study that should make anyone engaged in marketing feel good.  It should be a wake-up call for transparency and more respectful  grown-up dialog with our customers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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October 23, 2012 · 9:34 am

When Is A Medium Not A Medium?

An interesting piece of research from the folks at Borrell Associates this morning that concerns how small and medium businesses are using digital channels.  Given that nearly every local business seems to have a website, I wasn’t surprised to read that over half of SMB online marketing dollars are spent supporting what the survey calls “web presence.”  This is their site design and maintenance, hosting, as well as their social media management.  What I hadn’t thought about was the study’s conclusions as summed up in this post:

Digital advertising is yielding the spotlight to digital services. The emerging lesson, concludes the study, is that the Internet is actually not much of an advertising medium after all.

That was an “ah-ha!” moment for me.  Then again, I can’t remember the last time I clicked on a web banner and unless I’m searching with an intent to buy immediately (as opposed to just conducting research), I generally ignore the PPC ads that seem to surround everything.  As it turns out the average U.S. small/medium business spends $17,000 on online services, compared with $6,800 on online advertising, hence the conclusion about it not being a medium.  Then again, there is a big division even within this group since those with fewer than 50 employees will spend less than $500 a year, while a mid-size business with more than 50 employees will spend an average of $63,000.  The little guys spend a higher percentage of their budgets on web hosting and their site (make sense since this is the one indispensable element in my opinion) as well as email and SEO (getting found is always important!).  Once the budgets grow the companies can afford to branch out into other areas (blog management, analytics, etc.).

The report concludes by noting that, as the web becomes more of a basic marketing tool for business, the importance of online support services will grow as well. The midsize and larger companies are likely to internalize services that they once contracted out. Those larger companies will either assign SEO and social media management tasks to existing staff, or hire fulltime experts in digital marketing

I’ve seen that occur with some companies for which I’ve worked.  Here on the screed we probably don’t think about the interwebs as a service-driven space and probably spend too much time on it as a medium   I’m going to rethink that based on this study since many of the folks who contact me fit the small and medium business category.  What do you think?

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