Recently, I had the pleasure of kicking off the new year as a guest on Act Local Marketing for Small Business with host Kalynn Amadio. Each week, Kalynn shares information and actionable tips to help inspire and motivate small and medium businesses (SMBs) reach their business goals. On this episode, Kalynn and I discussed SMB Group’s 2015 Top Technology Trends for SMBs and what they mean to the marketing and running of your business. The third of a five-part series, this post summarizes our discussion of “SMBs reinvent marketing for the new buyer journey.”
Kalynn: Talk to me a little bit about marketing, small, midsize businesses and marketing for the new buyer journey.
Laurie: I know this topic is near and dear to your heart. Basically this one came out, we just did a report, about a 50 something odd page report looking at about eight different marketing automation vendors and how they’re seeing marketing change, the techniques and tactics and strategies, what’s changing and why is it changing, what do SMBs need to be paying attention to so they stay ahead of the curve. A lot of things that go into this big bucket of what’s changing in marketing. I think to me the umbrella is really the way people buy stuff, whether it’s a B2B world, business to business buying, or B2C, business to consumer buying experience it’s really changing. I don’t have specific statistics in here but basically what is happening is between the internet and social media and mobile and everything else we are looking at and getting input from so many more sources along the way before we decide what to buy and where than every before.
Kalynn: The consumer is so far down the funnel before they ever actually talk to the business that they end up buying from.
Laurie: Exactly, so there’s all these touch points. What does that mean for small and medium business? Well it really means that by the time that buyer gets you, whether it’s a consumer or business buyer they’re already pretty well-educated, they have a lot more information and they’re coming in at different points. It’s very important for you to get them as a business the right information at the right time in that journey. For instance, originally for some customers you may have very low awareness with some of the customers you’re trying to target. You have to figure out how do I raise awareness and what channels do I need to be in to raise that awareness. For others they’re further along so what are the things you need to do for them and where and how do you need to market to them? Even when people are customers what should you be doing to make sure that they continue to see you as a place to buy whatever goods and services you offer and come back, and then hopefully eventually become customer advocates for your business.
Kalynn: All of that sounds overwhelming for a lot of small businesses, but there are methods that you can put in place to do some of the work for you so that you’re not physically having to stay on top of all that.
Laurie: Exactly. Traditionally each of us in small and medium businesses we’ve relied on point solutions, like maybe we have an email marketing solution, maybe we’re using a social dashboard like HootSuite. We’ve been doing probably a few things and trying to piece them together to address this, like what you said is a very complicated and more complicated every day kind of challenge. What we see is that SMBs that say gee, I need to take a more integrated approach to marketing and look at how they can move from the point solutions to the solutions that really help you monitor and manage and create content along every stage of the marketing funnel. Those companies are going to get tremendous benefit because they’ll be able to automate a lot of manual processes, have the information integrated so they can be smarter about the customer experience and how they may need to adjust. Basically be well positioned to take advantage of things as mobile and social and other kinds of technologies like analytics continue to be available to help them do a better job marketing.
Kalynn: Yes, and while it’ll be a lot of work upfront, and you won’t get it all right, you’ll get some of it right and you’ll get feedback, you’ll discover things along the way, but the more of that work you do upfront the more it’ll seem like magic for your customer. They’ll really appreciate that.
Laurie: Exactly, and I know most of your audience is small business, right?
Kalynn: Yes.
Laurie: One of the other things in this report, a lot of vendors say they focus on small and medium businesses, well that can run the gamut from companies that focus, they have marketing automation solutions and they try to focus on companies with under 25 employees, like an InfusionSoft or ReachLocal to companies like SMB and that can go up to companies with 2,500 employees. So you don’t get intimidated you really want to do a little homework and figure out which ones are really in my wheelhouse because SMB is used pretty indiscriminately by vendors, there’s no one standard definition.
Kalynn: Yeah, that’s true.
Laurie: Before you spend a lot of time investigating the solution, time is money for all of us, make sure the ones you are looking at are really designed for a true small business.
Kalynn: That’s a very good point.
You can listen to the complete podcast discussion here.
You can listen to the complete podcast discussion here.