A few weeks ago, Thryv added an analytics tool to its arsenal of SMB SaaS offerings. Known as the Thryv Reporting Center, it “ties everything together” with performance data and insights to SMBs to help them optimize their marketing and operations. This represents a few key trends in SMB Saas.
Backing up for those unfamiliar, Thryv is a SaaS growth engine used by 100K+ SMBs globally for marketing and operational support. In addition to this core offering, Thryv also has several legacy media products, such as regional Yellow Pages throughout the U.S. But SMB SaaS is where the growth lies.
Back to the latest launch, the Reporting Center offers charts and graphs that clarify business performance. But rather than raw data, the Reporting Center emphasizes prescriptive insights for SMBs – which is what they need – to enable actions like pivoting the marketing mix amidst shifting variables.
“We all know knowledge and data is key to the effective operation of a small business,” Thryve President Grant Freeman told Localogy Insider. “Our new Thryv Reporting Center provides actionable insights so small businesses can assess efforts in areas like sales and marketing and understand what is working. They can then make decisions on how and where to move investments.”
Customizable & Mobile
So what does this look like in practice? The Reporting Center zeroes in on a few functional areas that make it easy to follow and functional out of the box. SMBs can also create customized reports that build from a template library, and can access all the above on a mobile app – key for “deskless” SMBs.
According to Thryv, the Reporting Center’s overarching areas of focus include:
Sales: a review of the sales process can help address bottlenecks, ensure timely payments, and identify new ways to generate revenue.
Know Your Customer: a visual depiction of the end-to-end customer journey to gain insights into customer preferences and determine the most profitable ones.
Team Activity: measurement of team performance helps identify both high-performers and areas for improvement.
Appointments: identifying peak or high traffic times can help balance workloads and improve business performance.
SMS and Email Marketing: with a clear picture of campaign performance, SMBs can optimize what is working and move on from what isn’t.
Advantages & Adjacency
Back to SMB SaaS trends, teased in the intro, one thing that jumps out from the above is an ongoing expansion towards operational functions. In other words, the local media & advertising sector for decades focused on SMB marketing. Now it’s a more varied mix of marketing and adjacent functions.
That adjacency makes sense for a few reasons. One, marketing should operate in step with other back-office functions like bookkeeping and reservation/appointment systems. That cohesion creates a more holistic view of performance and attribution – and thus an ability to extract insights, per all the above.
Other advantages include greater ARPU and retention for players like Thryv. It’s easy for SMBs to turn off a marketing campaign… but not as seamless to turn off payroll or appointment booking systems. That makes players like Thryv all the more embedded and critical to daily SMB operations.
“Reporting Center is easy to use as we provide graphs and charts so a business owner can make smart decisions,” said Freeman. “We know Reporting Center helps to tie all of our Centers together into a cohesive whole to help businesses grow.”
