Earlier this month we examined SMBs that prefer a “Do it Yourself” model, but that’s only half the story. SMBs that told us they prefer a “Do It With Me” or “Do It For Me” model for their advertising and marketing services are larger (nearly two times the size of DIYers), more urban and spend more annually on advertising, as the infographic above shows. The majority are actively growing and expanding their businesses and the second largest sub group report that they are “maintaining share.” According to Stacey Sedbrook, our Vice President of Strategic Sales Consulting, there are no true DIWM/DIY models in the marketplace; to a large degree they are marketing terms to describe the amount of time, budget or sophistication of the SMB. Companies that go to market with DIY/DIWM products and services are in a win-win situation, as it allows them to meet business needs based on time, budget and/or sophistication of the client. Managed advertising services both traditional and digital are explored including commentary by Stacey Sedbrook, on the principles and best practices for implementing DIWM or DIFM models.

The full report can be viewed and downloaded by clients of BIA/Kelsey here. This report is one of a series of drill-down reports on the findings from Wave 18 of BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor™ survey. Our LCM reports look at where particular SMBs (broken out by size, vertical, etc.) spend the most, as well as the top channels for marketing and advertising. Additionally it provides analysis on the best product and service offers for these highly coveted groups of SMBs. In the coming weeks we will be looking at SMBs by vertical category. To learn more about our LCM survey, click here.

Click here to purchase the SMBs That Prefer “Do It With Me” (DIWM) or “Do It For Me” (DIFM) — LCM Wave 18. To purchase any of our other Local Commerce Monitor drill-down reports, check out our new BIA/Kelsey Shop.

The post Do It For/With Me SMBs Spend More Than DIYers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

What is the hardest stage of growth for SMBs? After examining census and business data for the past decade, BIA/Kelsey has identified the “troubled teens” transition from blossoming small companies (one to nine employees) to medium-sized firms (20 to 49 employees) as the critical stage where tool complexity and pricing, as well as local business models, are misaligned with the needs of growing companies.

Take a moment now to get the free download of our new Sponsored White Paper, Optimizing Local Marketing: SMB Marketing Needs “Do-It-With-Me” Models.” Produced courtesy of Vendasta, which asked BIA/Kelsey to explore the opportunities for aggregated marketing services in local SMB markets, the paper examines the pressing need for consultative marketing services that blend easy-to-use digital presence management tools with hands-on marketing expertise for companies that are too large to continue to market on an ad hoc basis and too small to hire and retain full-time marketers while paying for expensive enterprise tools that are often overkill, and over-priced, relative to the SMB’s needs.”

Specifically, it’s the “troubled teens,” when a company is between 10 and 19 employees, that represent the greatest opportunity for local marketing services players to step into a startling gap in success. Even as smaller and larger firms continue to grow, albeit with very high failure rates among the smallest businesses, it is the teen companies that fail at a rate more than an order of magnitude greater than other businesses of any size.

The U.S. Census has been tracking business birth and death rates on a five-year cycle. During the last cycle, between 2010 and 2011, SMBs of between 10 and 19 employees failed 14 times more often than the next largest group (20 t0 49 employees) and accounted for the only net loss of jobs among all businesses of any size in the United States.

Vendasta talked about its DIWM approach at BIA/Kelsey Interactive Local Media Conference in December and also dug into the idea with Michael Boland during a video interview last fall. We’ve been increasingly struck by the emerging complexity of small business, which we believe is evolving into a “Local On-Demand Economy” (LODE). This takes the aggregation of demand further than Uber, blending new forms of local services with novel employment or contractor arrangements with service providers.

Tools to participate in the LODE economy will need to bridge the gap between limited human, technical and financial resources within growing SMBs and the requirements for digital presence management at a price that supports increasing growth. Too often, teen firms take on high upfront costs to integrate enterprise tools into their workflows, failing to get results because ongoing coaching is needed to build a robust marketing experience. The DIWM model provides expertise and explanations along with technology, helping business to grow organically, building their presence instead of exhausting their budgets upfront and leaving entrepreneurs on their own to use enterprise software designed for teams of marketers when the SMB has only begun to embrace marketing as a practice.

This misalignment in tool complexity, price and service model is a market opportunity for companies such as Vendasta, which provides a digital presence dashboard through resellers, including the Miami Herald, that deliver marketing advice along with the Vedasta’s 10X platform.

Yet we also see Google, Facebook and LODE exemplar Uber, to be expanding into these markets, across many locally delivered services. There is a race on to crack the local logistical and marketing challenges of on-demand goods and service.

______

We’ll be discussing DIWM in depth at BIA/Kelsey’s National Conference, March 24-27 in Dallas.

The post New BIA/Kelsey White Paper: DIWM Unlocks Local Marketing Success appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The post New SMBs Choose Social Media to Advertise, Retain & Acquire Customers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The post New SMBs Choose Social Media to Advertise, Retain & Acquire Customers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey continues to engage market leaders in its coverage areas in order to collaborate on research reports. There’s one currently in the works, about optimizing SMB Marketing Efficacy, sponsored by Vendasta and written by our new associate Mitch Ratcliffe.

To preview the paper’s subject matter, we’ve included a teaser below. Stay tuned for the full release sometime next month. Meanwhile, an extended version of the below summary is available in physical form, if you’re at our Leading in Local conference. Stop by the Vendasta booth for a copy.

Measuring SMB Marketing Efficacy: Logistics and Storytelling Will Reshape Local Business Metrics

SMBs are the new frontier for digital services. They will require a new reseller/marketing services layer in local media to spread digital marketing practices to millions of individual stores and business people. For many digital marketers, small business is suspended in time between the Main Street barbershop familiar from The Andy Griffith Show, where folks stopped in and talked even if they didn’t get a haircut, and the high-speed increasingly personalized digital services based on advanced logistics that characterize major global brands. If he were on TV today, Floyd the barber would be studying his web engagement metrics in addition to providing a friendly haircut.

Digital services for local business are about to catch up with global brand marketing and, as with every business that has crossed the digital divide before, measurement of tool performance and tactics will be critical to success. Measuring web promotions; Providing transactional and support services for complex products and services; Facilitating loyalty and customer engagement programs, all these daily digital chores are poised to become business as usual. The losers in the local goods and services race will wander off-course without solid metrics, spending too much to get poor results as others focus their limited marketing budgets with greater precision. The big story in the enterprise over the past decade, the rise of metrics-driven experimentation and marketing, is about to repeat itself at the grassroots on Main Street.

Technical and economic drivers are already reshaping the local media economy. BIA/Kelsey Local Commerce Monitor reports that SMB plus spenders, business that spends at least $25,000 annually on advertising and promotion, 35.2 percent of ad spending will be allocated to digital in 2015, up from 24.5 percent in 2011. 57.7% of these plus spenders pay an average of $7,238 a year to maintain an online presence. More SMBs are also paying for marketing help to tie together their online messaging across Twitter, Facebook, mobile sites, Google and their own websites, as 40.9% of surveyed small businesses reported hiring agencies and staffing to manage their presence, the “Do It With Me” approach.

Our analysis suggests the “Do It With Me” (DIWM) model, collaboration between an SMB and one or more vendors to build complementary messages, which benefit the individual client business and create network effects, such as qualified participants in shared loyalty programs, cross-promotional campaigns and integrated transactional systems that flag cross-selling opportunities for SMBs, is the most viable approach. This phenomenon is visible in the specialization of digital sales teams in iYP markets, the agreement by YP.com to represent Yelp promotions to its customers, and the emergence of vendors that “sell digital arms,” marketing tools and services, in a consultative relationship with the customer, among others. We expect to see Google and Facebook partnering more extensively in this area in coming months.

“A lot of channel partners sell digital only five percent to 10 percent of the time, which is a sin” said Jeff Tomlin, Senior Vice President of Vendasta, a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based marketing tools vendor that has adopted the DIWM model. Instead of investing in direct sales, Vendasta seeks value-added resellers who can provide on-site services to complement its own reputation monitoring, presence management, social and mobile marketing optimization services, which are presented in a dashboard for the SMB customer. Agencies that bundle Vendasta services share access to their customers’ dashboards and can take on creative and production tasks on behalf of the SMB.

Recall Floyd’s barbershop. There was no “marketing strategy.” There were two chairs, a phone (where an operator waited to connect the call), some magazines and, perhaps, a television for the customers to watch the World Series in some later years of its fictional life. Floyd did not have to compete with other barbers through media. Compared with the communications wave rolling through the economy today, Floyd’s approach to customer engagement grows more fictional and quaint every passing year.

 

The post Upcoming BIA/Kelsey White Paper: Reshaping Local Business Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.