BIA/Kelsey Report Shows SMB Poised to Adopt Business Marketing Services

BIA/Kelsey recently published a report on the use of various business marketing services by SMBs. LCM is BIA/Kelsey’s long-running study of how U.S. small business advertisers are evolving their advertising and marketing practices.

This Spotlight reports focuses on the use of an array of marketing services, including: analytics, CRM, email, online surveys, reputation monitoring and video production.

The LCM data shows:

— For many of these services uptake by SMBs is still only at moderate levels, at the 25 percent to 35 percent penetration level (across the overall SMB population).

— However, the service market is growing rapidly. The LCM survey reveals SMBs intend to increase their use of many services in the next 12 months.

— The third party business marketing services category remains highly fragmented, with almost no dominant players in the marketing service categories we surveyed.

–The way the data skew to low price points (and for some services, DIY platforms) is perhaps the biggest challenge in developing this market.

BIA/Kelsey recently completed the fielding of the 17th Wave of LCM and will be publishing highlight of the new data in the coming weeks. In addition, highlights and key insights from Wave 17 will be presented at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing, coming up Sept. 11-13 in Austin, Texas.