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? This is all a moving target.
But as part of that exercise, we sometimes broaden the subject matter beyond traditional SMBs. In the latest Localogy study, done in collaboration with Mono Solutions, we looked specifically at freelancers. Why is this important? The Covid-driven “great resignation” has boosted the freelancer economy.
With that backdrop, who are freelancers and what makes them tick? The report, The Freelance Channel – A Growing Reseller Resource dives in. After examining the channels through which freelancers market themseleves last week, we switch gears to examine how much they do their own marketing.
Breaking down the results, the top channel (61 percent) where freelancers “DIY” their marketing is business social media presence. That’s followed by websites (38 percent), newsletters (35 percent) blogs (34 percent), online booking channels (17 percent) and eCommerce stores (15 percent).
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What Does it All Mean?
Going a bit deeper, a few things jump out at us:
– Social media presence is a logical place for freelancers to do their own content marketing because of its low barriers to entry and ability to reach a wide audience.
– This is especially true of business-oriented social channels like LinkedIn, whose goals are to reduce friction for professionals (including freelancers) to network.
– This channel’s dominance for DIY activity among freelancers underscores this point, given that the next highest result (business websites) was much lower at 38 percent.
– Speaking of business websites, this is likewise an area that has experienced lowered barriers to adoption over the past decade as providers like Squarespace and Wix democratize previously high-end website design.
– Newsletters make sense for the same reason but are amplified by their trending and current momentum as a communication medium in a broader sense.
– Further down the list, blogs performed moderately well for freelancer content. This can be valuable in writing or creative fields, given that blogs can display work in organic and demonstrative ways.
– After the above channels, there’s a steep dropoff in adoption of remaining channels, including online booking sites and e-commerce stores.
– DIY activity for freelancers is also a funciton of age.
– 50 percent of 18 – 34s DIY’d their website, compareed with just 30 percent of those ages 55-64.
–DIY rates were also high among the younger cohort for websites and social media.
Time to Shine
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – website-based 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. There’s a long-tail opportunity at play.
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 and operational functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper into Localogy original survey research. That will include SMB 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.
