What are the top challenges that SMBs face in the modern marketing landscape, and how are they adapting to the latest developments in digital marketing technology?
That’s what LocaliQ sought to find out with its latest Small Business Marketing Trends report, which explores various key topics related to SMB growth, and how business owners are looking to overcome key challenges.
The team from LocaliQ surveyed 730 small businesses to glean more insight into their key challenges, their top promotional platforms of focus, their use of AI, and more.
You can check out the full report here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key notes.
First off, the data shows that social media marketing is the top medium for SMB promotion, beating out SEO and email outreach.
Which could be a missed opportunity, in terms of maximizing your focus on discovery via search engines, while video marketing is also well down the list.
Of course, SMBs don’t always have the resources to focus on these elements, so leaning on social platforms makes sense. But there could be more value in these expanded means of discovery, alongside your social marketing efforts.
In terms of specific platforms, Facebook is the leading marketing vehicle of choice for SMBs.
Facebook has by far the most users, so this makes sense, though LinkedIn being so high on the list does make me question the make-up of the participants in this survey.
In terms of marketing performance, the data shows that SMBs are most satisfied with the performance of their search ads.
Interestingly, video ads came in second, despite them only being used by 29% of SMBs, while social media marketing is well down the list.
That likely points to the shift in platform algorithms to penalize links off-site, which has made it harder for SMBs to measure the effectiveness of their social campaigns. Yet, even so, all digital marketing options rank higher than “traditional media” promotions.
Video promotions are also the format that the most SMBs are interested in, with the rise in popularity of short-form content clearly driving more interest.
Again, this is likely a resource issue, with SMBs having less capacity to create video content, but the latest developments in AI ad tools will provide more options on this front.
And speaking of AI:
The data shows that the majority of SMBs are now using generative AI tools in their regular process, primarily for content creation and social media management.
There’s a range of ways in which the latest generation of AI tools can assist SMBs, and it’s worth exploring these as a means to save time and money in development. And eventually, you’ll also be able to create video promotions via AI tools too. Which could look weird, but as the quality improves, that’ll provide another path for SMBs to create video content.
These are some interesting insights into the latest SMB trends, and where they’re focusing their marketing spend. Again, I would question the popularity of LinkedIn as an SMB marketing tool, and/or the specific SMBs included in this group, but the overall trends provide some valuable notes on where brands are focusing their efforts.
You can check out LocaliQ’s full SMB report here.
