Looking at Facebook pages specifically, acquiring customers is the main objective for SMBs. Unfortunately, according to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor™, only 21.8 percent of consumers use a company’s Facebook page regularly for local shopping. Not only that, but according to an infographic by Lab42, 46 percent of consumers who like a brand on Facebook have no intention of buying from them.

While a plurality of SMBs still view Facebook as a lead generator, they seem to be inching in the direction of using social more as an engagement platform. In last year’s LCM, 42.7 percent of SMBs said the primary purpose of their Facebook page was to acquire customers as opposed to this year’s 38.1 percent.

Despite not necessarily intending to buy, consumers clearly do want to engage with SMBs on social media. According to the Consumer Commerce Monitor, the average consumer has become a “fan” of, “liked”, “followed”, etc. a local business four times in the last six months.

Given that consumers are looking to engage, SMBs should shift their focus from acquiring customers to building community and awareness. Several companies are experts in assisting SMBs to achieve this, including Main Street Hub, Yodle, and Hootsuite.

The post A Shift in Focus is Necessary for SMB’s Social Media Sites appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Looking at Facebook pages specifically, acquiring customers is the main objective for SMBs. Unfortunately, according to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor?, only 21.8 percent of consumers use a company’s Facebook page regularly for local shopping. Not only that, but according to an infographic by Lab42, 46 percent of consumers who like a brand on Facebook have no intention of buying from them.

While a plurality of SMBs still view Facebook as a lead generator, they seem to be inching in the direction of using social more as an engagement platform. In last year’s LCM, 42.7 percent of SMBs said the primary purpose of their Facebook page was to acquire customers as opposed to this year’s 38.1 percent.

Despite not necessarily intending to buy, consumers clearly do want to engage with SMBs on social media. According to the Consumer Commerce Monitor, the average consumer has become a “fan” of, “liked”, “followed”, etc. a local business four times in the last six months.

Given that consumers are looking to engage, SMBs should shift their focus from acquiring customers to building community and awareness. Several companies are experts in assisting SMBs to achieve this, including Main Street Hub, Yodle, and Hootsuite.

The post A Shift in Focus is Necessary for SMB's Social Media Sites appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The most notable similarity is that both genders make the majority of local purchases in person. According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor™, 66.6 percent of men and 65.2 percent of women purchase products and services in person from local sources.

Because consumers make most purchases at physical locations, reaching them at or near those locations is a good bet; enter mobile marketing. How to reach them on mobile devices, however, is where we see differences by gender.

Women are socially engaged, so social advertising is essential. According to Nielsen, the majority of mobile social network users are female, so it’s understood that a lot of their social network usage is done via mobile device.

Because Facebook is the most used social media site for local shopping by women, it is important for local businesses to establish a Facebook page and form relationships with female consumers. This could include promotional opportunities on Facebook pages that female consumers can redeem at physical business locations.

Men, as we’ve discussed, are more engaged with mobile devices. They also interact more with traditional media than women do. TV in fact is men’s most used source for local shopping (women’s is online search), according to Consumer Commerce Monitor.

To effectively reach men, local businesses should therefore maintain advertising through traditional media. But when doing so, traditional media can be used to drive traffic towards digital opportunities. This is especially true for mobile, given that the data indicate men are highly engaged there.

CCM data also indicate that local businesses can benefit from mobile advertising and innovation at their physical locations. This includes smartphone scan loyalty programs.

(Click image to expand)

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BIA/Kelsey Senior Director of Industry Strategy and Insight Abid Chaudhry has written our latest Leading in Local Insight Paper, Content Marketing: the New SMB Paradigm. In the paper, Chaudhry argues that the growth of content marketing derives from changing consumer purchase behavior. He also describes the new ecosystems that has emerged to create and distribute original SMB content.

BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor survey showed SMB advertisers are more engaged with content related media channels which leads to more involvement with online content marketing. As a result, SMBs are engaging more with their consumer audiences in two-way conversations.

The executive summary for the report is below along with video clip from a recent BIA/Kelsey analyst roundtable we did on the topic. The report is available to BIA/Kelsey clients as well as for individual purchase.

Executive Summary

Content Marketing has always been around in some form. It’s the collection of techniques and practices marketers employ to get relevant content in front of the right audiences. During the pre-internet dark ages content marketing came in the form of direct mailers, brochures, product catalogs all designed to capture audience attention and drive it to some form of call to action (usually to fill out a form or pick up the phone).

The purpose of content marketing hasn’t changed much since then. The way it is created, distributed, and tracked has drastically evolved. The modern content marketing campaign is now multi-channel — combining offline and online media to drive highly targeted messaging to consumers, on whatever screen or device they happen to be on at the moment. SMBs have taken to the new content paradigm with gusto, with 74 percent reporting that they used some method of content marketing to promote themselves online in 2013.

While SMBs have been quick to embrace the content switch over from offline to online, content marketings relative importance within the broader digital marketing mix has taken time to evolve over the years.

Trevor Sumner, co-founder and CTO of LocalVox, noted that there have been multiple factors explaining why SMB content marketing has recently regained important. One is the movement toward original content and media. Suddenly SMBs have direct lines to their customers. What are they going to say?

Other factors, notably the rise of social media and rapidly increasing mobile device usage, have also played key roles in re-establishing the importance of content marketing with both driving massive growth in both content creation as well as consumption.

This BIA/Kelsey Insight Paper dives into SMB content marketing. It examines the market and technological factors that have led to content marketing’s resurging popularity with SMB merchants and the companies, technologies, and products that support them.

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When it comes to local shopping, female consumers interact much more on social media than their male counterparts. According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor™, 49.1% of females interact with or use social media regarding local purchases compared to only 37% of males. Seventy-one percent of women cite Facebook as their preferred social media site for local shopping. Women also strongly value the opinions of the Facebook Friends with 51.9% considering them to be a trustworthy or very trustworthy source of information for local products and services. Men were not as quick to trust their Facebook Friends with only 44% considering them to be a trustworthy or very trust worthy source.

Women are also heavy general users of social media sites. Approximately 77.4% of women actively use Facebook while only 63.3% of men do the same. Pinterest is dominated by females with three times more women actively using it then men.

Social media is not the only way for local businesses to to reach female consumers.  Women are also active on their mobile devices. In my previous blog post I discussed that men were more engaged than women on their mobile devices and are more willing to try the new and exciting technology that is emerging on the local front, but more women use their mobile devices for local shopping more than men in general. About 39.1% of women use smartphones when shopping locally while only 34.8% of men do the same. Women are also using their mobile devices on the go much more than men. Approximately 74.8% of women use smartphones in store as opposed to 58.8% of men, 72% of women use them in public as opposed to 64% of men, and 66.1%  of women use them in transit as opposed to 51.5% of men.

To learn more about women and their shopping habits check out BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor page.

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I attended an intriguing breakout session — “Spreading the Word: Advanced Strategies for Content Distribution” — at the ad:tech conference today in San Francisco’s glistening Moscone Center.

The session  featured a presentation by Alex from Digitas, who walked the audience through the conception and implementation of a social-centric campaign to introduce a new taco at Taco Bell. A new menu offering is a big deal in the QSR world.

To launch the new taco, Digitas went to great lengths to construct a series of “speakeasy” videos, in which the new taco was essentially hidden from taco-starved millennials, and they had to go to great lengths to get one. This contrived scarcity was intended to create a groundswell of consumer demand — which is exactly what it did, propelled by social media.

To make all this happen, Digitas flipped the typical sequence of using “Paid, Earned, Owned” media to “Owned, Earned, Paid.” They used the content of the “speakeasy” videos on their own sites, which generated tremendous interest among their hungry followers who proceeded to post, Tweet, blog, and Instagram about this new taco to all of their followers. Media paid by Taco Bell then picked up both the original vignettes and the first wave of social media, and amplified everything. This became a self-reinforcing cycle, until something like 3 billion impressions were earned. Of tacos.

Key takeaways

— “Paid, Earned, Owned” media can be used in a creative sequence, to maximize the impact of a campaign.

— Content can work across the spectrum, at all points in the purchase funnel.

— When advertising on mobile, the advertiser needs to be “in the content feed” — because most mobile devices don’t support a side column of advertising adjacent to the content.

— If the advertiser comes up with the right message [for its audience], “the message will find the fans.”

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The “click to call” button would allow mobile users to call advertisers directly from a Twitter ad with just a click of a button. Right now Twitter is beta testing the “click to call” button with select brands and no timeline has been given when it will be widely available. Twitter likely hopes the “click to call” will appeal to local SMB advertisers. Local SMB advertisers, such as restaurants, could tweet an ad to followers and include a “click to call” button so consumers can quickly and easily follow up with the SMB.

But how do SMB that use Twitter and other social media for advertising and promotion feel about calls as a leads source? BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor™ survey, Wave 17 asked SMBs to provide a quality assessment of various lead sources, including calls. As you can see in the chart below, calls are a popular source of leads. The 66.4% full sample of SMBs ranked calls as a good or excellent source of leads. This 66.4% is actually the lead source that SMBs value most, ranked number one ahead of online forms (58.2%) and in-person (54.1%).

According to Local Commerce Monitor, Wave 17, 24.3% of SMBs surveyed use Twitter for advertising and promotion. When you dig deeper into the data and look at just those SMBs who reported using Twitter for advertising or promotion, the percentage rating calls as good or excellent drops slightly to 65.9%. For Twitter using SMBs, calls weren’t actually the number one source of leads. Calls came in second behind in-person, which was rated good or excellent by 76.1% of Twitter using SMBs surveyed.

Those SMBs who use a Facebook Page or Facebook ads for advertising or promotion, on the other hand, ranked calls slightly higher than the full sample, with 68.6% and 68.2% respectively rating calls as good or excellent. For SMBs who use a Facebook Page for advertising or promotion, calls were the number one ranked source of leads. But for those using Facebook ads, calls fell to third, behind online form (72.7%), in-person (69.4%), tying with email (68.2%).

My colleague Mike Boland is hosting a free webcast with call monetization provider Ifbyphone entitled “Surviving the Tsunami of Mobile Call Monetization” today at 2:30 PM.

Click here if you’re interested in more information about BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor survey.

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Millennials, those between the ages of 18-34, are making social e-commerce more prevalent than ever. According to our Consumer Commerce Monitor™ survey, 56 % of millennial local consumers said that they have interacted with social media in the past 6 months at some point in the purchase funnel and that 32% of all local purchases made in the last year were made online.

While social media may not have the critical significance of mobile, it is becoming increasingly crucial for ecommerce success. If SMBs are ever going to fully commit to goals of social ecommerce, they must integrate the strategy at all points of the consumer purchase funnel. According to our CCM survey data, 49% of millennial consumers reported using social media more often now than they did in the past year for local shopping.

Social networks are strongest as sources of retail influence and product discovery. Roughly a quarter of U.S. social network users have made a purchase on a retail web site after clicking from a social network in the past year, according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research. According to our CCM survey, 66% of all millennial consumers go to Facebook when they used a social network for local shopping, followed by YouTube (20%), Google+ (16%) and Twitter (14%). Also, 59% of millennial consumers also ranked Facebook as the number one choice for local shopping. Social media was rated the most influential in these top five verticals among millennial local shopping habits:

Source: BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor™ (CCM), 2013.

The future of social e-commerce looks promising for small businesses if they can get it right. Let’s take a look at some quick facts about what SMBs are currently doing to capture millennial shoppers. According to our Local Commerce Monitor survey:

— 52% of all SMBs have a Facebook Business Page utilized for advertising or promotion. Followed by 25% of SMBs using Google+ and 24% using Twitter.

— 38% of SMBs use their Facebook pages to acquire new business and customers. Another 27% use it as an awareness and promotion tool.

— 85% of SMBs listed social media as a future marketing priority.

Many SMBs are still trying to understand how best to deliver content to millennial consumers via their social media and ecommerce channels while also reaching new prospects. Advertising on social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can be the communication channels needed to garner attention. While there is some debate about the overall value of social advertising, it is hard to argue that it offers some of the best targeting available to business owners; especially when their target audience is spending an increasing amount of time on social media.

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One of the more common debates in SMB digital marketing revolves around the DIY vs. DIFM dilemma. Is it realistic for a service provider to hand over its tech platform to a small merchant, or is high-level “done for you” assistance required? Surefire Social CEO Chris Marentis thinks the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

The company recently released SMB Visible, its integrated social media, content marketing and SEO platform that helps SMBs tackle the fast-evolving discoverability challenge, where social signals, “earned backlinks”, fresh content and mobile optimization all have a hand in getting found.

Surefire Social’s proverbial special sauce, however, may be its network of “coaches” spread around the U.S. that work directly with clients to create their full digital footprint and generate a roadmap of editorial that drives engagement and leads. Certainly not DIY, but also different from many of the DIFM platforms that often take control out of the hands of the SMB and produce generic, high-level content that can at times homogenize brand voice and miss opportunities for direct customer engagement.

Marentis envisions building out the coach network to 100+ within two years to scale the SMB Visible platform. Also look for deeper movement into leads-based content.

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Increased investment, a bullseye on customer acquisition, yet unconvincing results. These are the core themes emerging from Manta’s recently-released Q1 SMB Wellness Index, a survey of small business owners focused on social media. They are the very themes called out in BIA/Kelsey’s LCM 16 SMB research. SMBs continue to pour more time and energy into social media activity; they do so to capture new business; their ROI is spotty.

A few highlights from the Wellness Index:

– Nearly 50 percent of SMBs have increased time spent in social media. Only seven percent scaled back. That said, three-quarters of SMBs dedicate fewer than five people to managing social media activities. 53 percent deploy just one.

– SMBs’  investment in social media has two clear (and related) objectives: customer acquisition (36 percent)  and lead generation (19 percent).

– Even with increased investment and clearly-stated goals (albeit perhaps not necessarily the right ones?), SMBs social ROI assessments remain murky, with 61 percent giving the thumbs-down. And Facebook is the hardest to maintain, even as the largest and most widely-used network.

The upshot? SMBs need a clearer path to understanding, engagement and success…perhaps more than ever. As they invest more while still coming up short on ROI, we’re left to ask the “social media insanity” question: are business owners doing the same things they’ve always done, perhaps in greater proportion, while expecting different results?

Something’s gotta give, and change. That’s precisely where Manta sees its role moving forward – not merely as a discovery engine or content forum for small businesses, but as CEO Pam Springer put it, a full-fledged “social hub.” This entails helping SMBs create a following by suggesting who to connect with and how to engage, syndicating content throughout Manta’s network and across the full social spectrum, and building a “feedback loop for them around all social activity” that can produce clearer ROI attribution.

Of the many possible causes of poor social media ROI, Springer spotlighted the attribution problem. No, SMBs don’t create content very easily – and that must come first – but when they do, “how does that impact a customer? Connecting the dots around lead generation is fuzzy.”

Expect Manta to take a more active role in the full spectrum of SMB social activity moving forward, including deep data mining to suggest engagement strategies, syndicated publishing and a more robust content experience within its network to foster social discovery and ROI.

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