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Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

SMEs are spending too little on digital marketing

Less than US$10,000 a year is a 'big mistake'

Nearly half (47%) of small businesses in the US spent less than $10,000 on digital marketing in 2017, according to a survey by Clutch, a B2B research, ratings, and reviews firm. Social media (54%), website (51%), and email marketing (36%) were key areas of investment.

Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) represent a small but promising digital marketing channel, with 10% of small businesses already early adopters in the space, according to the survey.

Many small businesses may not budget much for digital marketing because they have so few employees and limited resources to invest. More than half (57%) of businesses surveyed reported annual revenue of less than $1 million.

In addition, in-house digital marketing teams may not be "teams" at all: 30% of small businesses (the largest group) only have one employee working on digital marketing. This finding suggests that in-house digital marketers may lack the time and resources they need to market efficiently.

Small businesses' priorities for digital marketing this year include renewed investments in their websites, social media, and email marketing. Over half of small businesses surveyed will improve their websites (54%) and engage consumers through social media (51%), while 36% will direct more resources to email marketing in 2018.

Fewer than 1 in 4 small businesses plan to invest in content marketing in 2018, but experts caution that failing to perform content marketing is a mistake for small businesses.

Creating content - such as blog posts, whitepapers, and videos - is a highly cost-effective way to build brand loyalty and boost a business' ranking in search results.

Small businesses already have what they need to start creating content: They should consider their unique advice and data, and then package that information into useful content. Keith Gutierrez, vice president of marketing at Modgility, reminds small businesses that in developing a content marketing strategy, quality is more important than quantity: "Content just needs to be great, quality stuff you can't find anywhere else."

In an effort to keep up with new technology, some companies (12%) will increase their investment in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) marketing. AR/VR marketing is especially effective for products that benefit from in-person tours such as real estate and travel booking. For example, Derrick Bozkurt, a Colorado realtor at House in Motion, uses VR marketing to create virtual house tours. The technology lets Bozkurt's clients know exactly what kind of home they're considering.

The full report and source survey data has been made available online, here: https://clutch.co

Sources: Clutch / The Marketing Factbook.
Copyright © 2018 - 2025 The Marketing Factbook.

Categorised as:

Customer Experience
Customer Loyalty
Marketing Know-How
Marketing Technology

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)