A new report from Mono Solutions and Localogy takes a deep dive into two key small businesses verticals. Because after all, there is really no such thing as a small business. There are small contractors. Small law firms. Small HVAC repair companies. And so on. And each industry has its own business rules, culture, degree of complexity, demand characteristics, and more.
Mie Bilberg, Director, Marketing, Bauer Media SME Services, Mono’s parent company, said the impetus for the report was to understand how small businesses operated. But not at an aggregate level. She wanted to understand how key verticals thought about and made decisions surrounding their use of digital marketing tools.
“When I joined the small business industry in 2020, I noticed that we mostly talk about small businesses as if they were all the same. There was no vertical-specific research available…and I had lots of questions,” Mie said. “How are SMBs operating their business? What marketing are they using? And what works and what stops them?”
So Mono and Localogy teamed up once again. We fielded a survey of small businesses in two categories — Home and Professional services. And we sampled more than 700 small businesses across three European markets, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Mono Solutions is based in Denmark and provides website-building services to partners around the globe.
Surveying these three unique European markets provided us with a variety of dimensions to compare these two important vertical categories — nation vs nation, sector vs sector, younger vs older businesses, and so on.
Key Findings
The survey sought insights into what marketing channels these businesses value, how much of the work they are doing themselves vs. outsourcing, and where they need the most help. Here are some of the more notable findings from the survey.
Hello Labor Trouble. Acquiring and retaining customers faces competition for the most vexing small business challenge, with 38% citing customer acquisition as a key challenge and 34% highlighting their difficulties with finding good employees.
Marketing Matters, Right? A full 52% of SMEs across both categories describe marketing as either “key” or “critical” to their business success. Only 7% describe marketing as essentially worthless.
Let’s Spread the Word. Businesses in these two categories overwhelmingly (88%) use “word of mouth” and 50% refer to it as their most important advertising channel.
Living in a DIY World? Many SMEs in these two categories rely on DIY platforms, with 31% indicating they built their own websites on DIY platforms, for example. Yet, many say, if given a do-over, they’d have someone else do the work.
Oops, I Didn’t Do It Again. SMEs across home and professional services understand the importance of frequent content updates, yet fail to keep up. A full 40%, for example, say they update their websites twice a year or less.
Fresh Out of Ideas. Not surprisingly a lack of time is the main reason (73%) home and professional services SMEs don’t update their content. But “lack of creativity/ideas” was surprisingly prominent at 32%.
You can access the full report here.
