In the late 90s, SMB digital marketing was about cousin and nephew built websites and empty promises from vendors. It ended with the advent of social media. From 2005 to this year, the focus was on digital presence management, review monitoring and new types of customer interactions. We’re now entering what might be called “Phase 3″ of SMB digital marketing.
During last week’s webinar, panelists Greg Sterling of LSA, Lem Lloyd of Clickable and Neal Polachek of BuzzBoard explored this next phase of SMB digital marketing in sufficient detail. Driven by demanding and fast-changing mobile user behavior, with a need to deliver immediate value and transactional opportunities, the next phase is all about big data, marketing automation, fragmentation, greater sophistication and complexity.
Beginning this year, here is what the panelists described as the qualities of Phase 3:
- Continued impact of mobile and digitization of “real world”
- Wholesale vs. retail: marketplace as brand, SMB as fulfillment provider (Uber is model)
- Future of big horizontal marketplaces: G, FB, Amazon, Yelp
- Increasing commerce enablement (on-demand services, payments)
- CRM and automation tools for SMBs
- What is role of local media sales channel (vs. DIY/self-service)
- Automation, simplification of leads/customer acquisition
- From buying leads to buying customers or transactions
- More closed-loop attribution/ROI (O2O tracking/transactions)
Check out the entire webinar below:
For access to all of our past webinars and a look at what’s to come, visit https://bit.ly/LSAwebinars.
