A note from our CEO:

Wow! We asked for your insight and boy, did you give it! We received 570 responses to our Small Business Marketing Survey! Thank you for jumping in and helping us all recover together!

Good news – based on the marketing tools you’re already using, we can help! We’ll take this next month and really dive deep into the data (full disclosure – marketing people LOVE data!) and, as promised, we’ll send you our best recommendations for your business.

We’ll also talk about how our client, Feeding Pets of the Homeless®, improved productivity AND increased donations throughout the pandemic, simply by outsourcing their marketing.

By focusing on what they do best and letting us do what we do best, together, we came through the worst of the pandemic better than before.

That’s the power of collaboration!

The results are in! We are overwhelmed with the response you gave us. Thank you all for your time and energy, and congratulations to Bill Driscoll at CalNeva Realty for winning our $50 VISA gift card in the survey drawing.

We received 570 responses! For the report, click here.

Thank you for taking our survey!

Renee Plain, CEO

Here’s what you told us

Here’s what we learned on the first pass of the Small Business Marketing Survey (you’ll get more of our insights after we’ve worked with the data a bit!):

Small businesses struggle with targeting their ideal audiences and want some help with messaging about your products and services. Many of you struggle with finding the time to do it right, and the rules keep changing, so it’s hard to keep up!

Two-thirds of you reported your marketing was successful in 2020. That’s great news!

Pie chart with top 3 marketing goals for 2021Top three marketing goals for 2021

You’ve indicated your top three small business marketing goals for 2021 are:

  • Lead generation (finding potential customers)
  • Growing brand awareness
  • Lead conversion (closing the sale)

Social media seems to be your go-to for building brand awareness, followed by email marketing and content marketing; and many of you are looking to do some digital marketing in 2021.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the social platforms you most regularly use, and you’ll offer discounts and promotions to get people to give you their contact information.

We asked you which marketing tactics you wanted to know more about, and next to social media and content marketing, tracking your results and your return on investment were most important to you.

Your marketing budget

When it comes to marketing spend, most of you spend anywhere from 6 to 12% of revenue, and well over half of you plan to increase your 2021 marketing budget.

We asked you where you spent the most of your marketing money, and almost half you said Facebook and email marketing. But your results were mixed on which marketing tactic brought you the biggest return on your investment, with Facebook leading with 21% over Twitter at 18%, followed by email marketing and traditional advertising at 15% each.

But how do you really feel?

And when it comes to your current marketing situation, here’s how you feel:

  • I don’t have the skills to do it by myself
  • I don’t know where to start or what marketing I should do
  • I don’t have enough budget

We’ve got you!

Here’s where you’re in luck! We’re going to give you some help.

Give us a month for our deep dive into these analytics, and we’ll send you our best recommendations on how you can stretch your skills, what you can start with, and how to do it on a budget. Marketing is an ever-changing, ever-evolving science. We spend a ton of time – and money! – to be sure we can understand and respond quickly to changes in all the various platforms and how they interact together to give you the best results.

Thanks again for your participation!