Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have out-sized marketing power with the range of integrated advertising technology (adtech) and marketing technology (martech) platforms that are affordable for businesses with less than 100 employees.
For any business to benefit from data-driven media campaigns, it must first have a good idea of not only its current customer base, but who are the kinds of “good” customers they’d like to attract more of. Then they need to match these current and target consumer profiles against their paid media advertising strategies.
Competitive SMBs will work with their brands to design and fulfill on the omnichannel consumer expectations and experiences the brand seeks to create and maintain. Finally, they need to assess results to optimize campaigns and determine ROI. This all requires diligence, creativity, data, analytics, and ultimately judgement.
According to BIA Advisory Service’s Local Commerce Monitor, here’s a quick profile of how SMBs that advertise on local TV and MVPDs (local cable avails) use data:
- About 82 percent maintain a customer list, a basic starting point for leveraging adtech and martech platforms. Over three-quarters (77 percent) of these SMBs have maintained a customer list for at least one year.
- The best methods of tracking lead sources were asking customers (53.5 percent), clicks or email (43.9 percent), promotions or direct mail (36.8 percent), and call tracking (32.4 percent).
- The most popular types of analytics by these SMBs include vendor data other than Google (38.8 percent), Google AdWords analytics (38.1 percent), data SMBs generate themselves (34.0 percent) and
some type of paid analysis program (20.9 percent).
- The most popular uses of customer list data by these SMBs include digital promotions (34.6 percent), printed promotions (34.0 percent) and social channel promotions (32.9 percent).
We see opportunities for local TV and MVPD media companies servicing these SMB accounts.
- Data-Driven Campaigns: Starting with the vast majority of SMBs that maintain at least some form of customer list(s), help them analyze these lists to identify “good” customers that they want more of. Explain how your campaign plan can do this and the KPIs to use for assessing the campaign.
- Creative Optimization: Working with SMB local video advertisers looking to reach different segments across Local TV, MVDP network local avails and digital video can pay dividends when the creative is optimized to both the target segments and the platforms. Local video sellers can help their buyers be much more impactful with their media spending.
- Omni-channel marketing: A third (33.2 percent) of SMBs buying local TV also buy digital video advertising from these sellers. For MVPD sellers, 22.7 percent of their local SMB clients also buy digital video advertising from them. Since most of these SMBs are maintaining customer lists but relatively few are doing analytics, this is a place to offer a value-added service.
Helping SMBs better understand their current and target customer segments – and specifically how to find them on your media platforms – can be the basis for sticky relationships and growing media spend, especially when tied to ROI analytics.
Industry Solution Sponsor
2adpro, a global technology enabled marketing services company, providing local media solutions in the following areas: creative production, digital campaign management and adtech workflow consultation.
Questions? Please reach out to Pam Taylor, VP of North America at pam.taylor@2adpro.com.
