The How and Why of SMBs and Interactive Marketing

As we audit marketing plans for our SMB clients, we are excited to see interactive marketing taking a more prominent position in the marketing mix. For companies that are on a limited budget, a digital marketing company named King Kong mentioned that there are many effective ways of putting email, social and search to use that bring value far beyond their traditional counterparts.

This spring, American Express OPEN published the results of its “Small Business Search Marketing Survey,” reporting on how small businesses are currently utilizing some type of online marketing, and revealed the following:

• Three quarters of small businesses plan to add some form of online marketing in 2011. Roughly three-in-ten will add a company website (36%) or social media (29%). About one-in-five plan to add search engine optimization (23%), mass email (22%) or search advertising (16%).

• The most common online marketing techniques currently being utilized by small businesses are a company website (86%) followed by social media (44%). One-in-five (21%) small businesses report that they are utilizing search advertising.

• Among small businesses who conduct some form of online marketing, two-thirds (66%) say that new customers find them through search engines/Internet, compared to 82% who say word of mouth is still the main source where new customers find them.

The American Express survey echoes what Forrester reported in August 2010. Their report “Interactive Marketing Priorities for SMBs” gives insight into how SMBs are allocating their budgets and perhaps more importantly, why.

The biggest takeaway for us is that SMBs are finally using interactive marketing to provide a key focus on customer care both in acquisition and retention. Forrester stats to support this include:

• SMBs weigh lead quality, partnerships, and understanding buyer behavior more heavily than do enterprise firms, in part because smaller companies have fewer key clients to lose.

• For SMBs, the most important business objective when determining how to invest in interactive marketing is NEW CUSTOMER SALES, followed by overall sales, brand awareness, and leads.

And because of their size and flexibility, SMBs can respond with the timeliness required to maintain an effective interactive campaign. Becoming more responsive to their customer’s voice in real-time, SMBs can make an impact that is more powerful, more quickly, than in traditional marketing.

Although marketers should heed this warning: going interactive requires manpower (even recruiting key players from the rest of the organization to implement effectively). To do this is challenging, so much so, that even at the enterprise level marketers complain they do not have enough staff dedicated to interactive marketing, Forrester reports.