As part of the ritual of examining local commerce and SMB Saas strategies, Localogy goes right to the source: SMBs themselves. How do they feel about marketing and operational software? What features do they want? And how has their hunger changed in a pandemic?
Localogy’s latest Pro Perspectives report dives into the social media aspects of the above questions. Entitled, Pro Perspectives: Social is Here to Stay, it examines original SMB sentiments and behavior for social media marketing. We dive in for this week’s Benchmark Bytes.
Specifically, after examining SMBs’ social marketing choices last week, we switch gears this week to look at how satisfied they are with social media marketing. What’s performing and not performing in their eyes? As with all SMB marketing, this is all about perceived ROI and satisfaction.
So what did the survey uncover? 30 percent of SMBs are very satisfied with their social media marketing. That’s followed “satisfied” (33 percent), “unsure” (21 percent), “dissatisfied” (8 percent) and “very dissatisfied” (7 percent). This means that 63 percent are satisfied in some way.
Localogy members can access full charts and SMB survey reports. Non-members can purchase reports.
What Does it All Mean?
Going a bit deeper, a few things jump out at us:
– Like the data points we examined last week, these results are favorable towards social media marketing.
– As noted, the vast majority (63 percent) of SMB respondents reported either being satisfied (33 percent) or very satisfied (30 percent).
– Compare this with the other end of the spectrum where only 15 percent are dissatisfied in some way, including dissatisfied (8 percent) and very dissatisfied (7 percent).
– These figures bode well for social media players, especially Facebook as it has the lion’s share of SMB marketing activity (based on the figures we examined last week.
– As for what drives SMB satisfaction, their main objectives for social media marketing are sales/revenue lifts (61 percent), follower counts (54 percent) post engagement (34 percent) or take-up rate for promotions (33 percent).
– All of the above represents sentiments in normal times. Next week we’ll drill down into SMBs’ feelings on Facebook’s recent system-wide outage, including the impact it had on their business operations.
Time to Shine
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – social or otherwise – continues to grow rapidly. SMB SaaS startups and online services providers are correspondingly thriving as it continues to grow as a leading subsector of the broader SaaS universe.
Meanwhile, new SMB SaaS users could represent permanent adopters – a concept that’s accelerated in the Covid era as SMBs are forced to boost their digital transformation. This sends them into the arms of SaaS providers to accomplish a range of marketing functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper on SMB social marketing behavior. That will include their goals and success factors. Let us know what additional insights jump out at you from the above data, and stay tuned for more breakdowns in our Benchmark Bytes series.
