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’ satisfaction with social marketing, we switch gears this week to see how they were impacted by Facebook’s recent high-profile outage. Though it saw much handwringing in tech & media circles, did it diminish SMB advertiser sentiments towards Facebook?
The short answer is no. 77 percent of SMBs report that the outage didn’t materially impact their business. That compares with 13 percent who report that it did, and 11 percent who weren’t sure. 80 percent report that the outage didn’t cause them to think differently about advertising strategies.
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 (77 percent) of SMB respondents say that Facebook’s outage didn’t impact them
– Compare this with the other end of the spectrum where only 13 percent were affected and 11 percent weren’t sure.
– These figures bode well for Facebook despite media attention and doomsday characterization of the event.
– Furthermore, within the 11 percent of affected SMBs, only 20 percent were prompted to rethink their advertising strategy in some way.
— This further diminishes any real impact of the event on SMB ad spending.
— Overall, these figures are further evidence that the media’s schadenfreude coverage of Facebook isn’t translating to an exodus of advertisers, especially among SMBs. They’re largely insulated from the tech news cycle.
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.
