Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) or Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are the economic engine of our communities, driving innovation and employment. As White Paper author and Amplifyo CEO, Julie Lawrie, expertly outlines, globally there are around 400 million SMBs accounting for over 95% of organizations and 70% of employment worldwide. However, these vital entities face significant challenges, especially in navigating the complex, digital landscape.

Bridging the Marketing Gap for Sustainable SMB Growth

In today’s competitive environment, SMBs struggle with finding accessible, trustworthy marketing tools that align with their goals and adhere to data privacy. The “cost of doing business” continues to rise, and while digitalization offers immense potential, budget constraints, a lack of expertise, and time limitations often hinder adoption. A recent survey revealed over 70% of SMBs lacked confidence in their marketing strategies beyond basic social media and email.

The key obstacles for SMB sustainability outlined in the Paper:

• Cash flow and managing overhead costs
• Accessing trustworthy marketing guidance, planning, and activities across channels
• Generating revenue and staying competitive
• Attracting and retaining talent

The Opportunity: Building Marketing Capacity for the Future

This is precisely where marketing capacity and capability building become critical. As Julie’s Paper emphasizes, providing practical, action-oriented marketing solutions empowers SMBs to bridge the competitive gap.

Why Marketing Matters for SMB Sustainability:

Financial Performance: A robust marketing strategy drives revenue growth, market share, and profitability by shifting focus from vanity metrics to a defined lead pipeline.

People Resources: Effective marketing helps attract and retain scarce talent, addressing business continuity and long-term growth. It also offers innovative solutions for business owners managing marketing tasks, utilizing SaaS platforms to streamline guidance, planning, and content creation.

Relevant & Consistent Marketing: Targeted and regular communications foster customer acquisition, retention, and brand visibility. Amplifyo with its AI-driven approach, democratizes marketing access, reducing planning and creation time by ~90%, and acts as a strategic marketing manager to achieve business and financial goals.

Smart Cities Summit North America + Amplifyo

Julie Lawrie will be speaking at the upcoming Smart Cities Summit North America conference in May in San Francisco. Her insights will delve deeper into how smart city & economic development initiatives can support SMBs through enhanced marketing capacity. This is a prime opportunity for B2B professionals seeking to scale their expertise, understand current marketing challenges, and discover streamlined solutions for empowering their clients and businesses.

White Paper: The new role of sustainable business-growth marketing

Date: October 2024

MARKETING & GROWTH POSITIONING

Author: Julie Lawrie

Bachelor of Business Management (Marketing); Assoc. Dip. of Business (Human Resource Management & Industrial Relations); Australian Institute of Company Directors Course (GAICD)

SMBs in our Cities, Suburbs, Counties, and States

Small and Midsize Businesses are pivotal in our local ecosystems. Globally there are around 400 million SMBs and they play an influential role in our communities and cities because of the job creation and employment weight they carry. To quantify their impact, consider that SMBs account for over 95% of organisations (Source) and The International Labour Organisation indicates they account for 70% of employment worldwide. (Source)

With the representation carried within SMBs globally, it is natural then, for Local, State, and National/Federal government bodies to invest in and support initiatives that help these backbone-employers to not just survive, but to kick goals and grow in financial and business sustainability.

The Range of SMB Definitions

In Australia: a small business is defined as having fewer than 20 employees, while a medium-sized business has between 20 and 199 employees. (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS))

In the USA: the Small Business Administration (SBA) defines small businesses based on industry standards, but generally refers to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. (Source: U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA))

In Canada: small businesses are defined as having fewer than 100 employees for goods-producing industries and fewer than 50 employees for service industries. Medium-sized businesses have 100 to 499 employees. (Source: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada)

In the UK: small businesses are defined as having fewer than 50 employees, while medium-sized businesses have between 50 and 249 employees. (Source: UK Government, Companies Act 2006)

The Obstacles & the Opportunities

SMBs face a number of challenges, particularly in today’s increasingly digital landscape, and as competitive pressures escalate, and the ‘cost of doing business’ continues to grow. One significant challenge is the gap in finding price-accessible and trustworthy digital & in-person marketing tools that align with business goals, internal processes, and exercise data privacy.

While digitalization offers enormous potential to boost productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness, SMBs can be slow to adopt these technologies, primarily due to budget constraints, lack of in-house expertise, the burden to implement new systems, and limited time resources. It’s worth noting that digital tools can minimise the competitive divide between SMBs and large companies, yet a reluctance to embrace digitization may widen the competitive gap further. Balancing the globalized access to digital tools, with the overwhelming range of choices then becomes an opportunity for government and communities to empower these crucial employers.

A 2024 survey of SMBs across Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US revealed over 70% lacked confidence with their marketing strategies, and in using more than just social media or email marketing. (Source)

The Business Sustainability Obstacles for SMBs

• cashflow + managing overhead costs
• access to trustworthy marketing guidance, planning and activities across online and offline channels (known as multi channel marketing or omnichannel marketing)
• generating revenue + staying competitive
• access to talent (attraction)
• creating employee job satisfaction (for retention)
• staff with varying experience, and the need to activate the people you already have in place

The Opportunity: Empowering SMBs through Marketing Capacity & Capability Building, for Sustainable Business Growth

It’s clear that enabling SMBs to access effective marketing tools and resources is crucial for their growth and sustainability. This is where capacity & capability building through practical, action-oriented marketing solutions comes in. Think of it as providing the right tools and resources to empower SMBs to navigate the often-complex world of online and offline marketing, to bridge the competitive gap.

Why Marketing Matters for SMB Sustainability

Financial Performance – A strong marketing strategy & plan can drive increased revenue, market share, and profitability by attracting new customers and building lasting brand loyalty. This assumes a mindset that shifts away from common ‘vanity marketing metrics’ toward considering migration through a lead pipeline from point of contact to marketing qualified lead (MQL), to sales qualified lead (SQL), and then a sale, as well as how this all integrates into the business’ financial goals and objectives.

From years of working in business advisory services to SMBs, and from working closely with accounting firms to support their customers, it’s unfortunately an often overlooked workflow, that is proven to deliver stronger financial sustainability, and in fact can simplify new customer acquisition.

People Resources – In addition to marketplace competition for products & services, SMBs are also competing to attract and retain talent—a hurdle in business continuity and long-term growth. Multi-channel marketing talent is scarce at present, but is not often immediately evident at there are many ‘T-shaped’ marketers (i.e. specialists in social media or SEO) without experience in broader marketing strategy & planning. Resourcing this gap is important, especially in helping SMBs to promote their offering across more than one channel.

In other settings, business owners & operators are responsible for marketing tasks. We have found that the lack of perceived or actual experience has an impact on confidence to create content. Procrastination and ‘fear to act’ then become inhibitors, when in fact the business might have an exceptional offering. Revising how this skills gap is filled can be both empowering and a cost-saving activity, for SMBs who are open to thinking beyond traditional staffing models into considering how to utilise SaaS solutions to deliver a complete suite of marketing guidance, planning, and content creation.

Relevant & Consistent Marketing

Targeted and regular marketing communications support customer acquisition & retention and help businesses to stay top-of-mind for decision-makers and influencers in the buying journey. Relevancy and consistency can be one of the simplest ways for SMBs to grow their visibility in a crowded marketplace.

A growing impact on business sustainability is also seen from the high volumes of news & media we encounter on a daily basis. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and inadequacy can flow from this, impacting business owners and operators from releasing regular and relevant content, because of a sense of inadequacy in message creation—what we often refer to as imposter syndrome. To overcome these barriers, a new purpose-built marketing software product is now democratizing access to marketing for SMBs. Improving productivity, reducing 70% of the time spent on marketing planning & message creation, and incorporating Next Step Ideas, Amplifyo acts as a marketing manager for businesses looking for strategic & tactical guidance to reach their business & financial goals through marketing.

Marketing’s Role Across the Customer Journey

Although the traditional marketing funnel of the past is evolving with the advent of AI, data enrichment & signals, hyper-personalized outreach, and automated workflows, the simplify of a funnel marketing / sales funnel is still a useful tool, especially for small businesses to identify stages, processes, and distinctives of each stage as they pursue sustainability and growth.

Amplifyo’s simplified 4 stage view of the marketing => sales funnel

1. Top-of-Funnel: AWARENESS Include messaging that addresses the pain points of your target audience + use channels your target audience frequent. Build Brand Awareness here.
2. Middle-of-Funnel: EVALUATION You’ve piqued your target audience’s interest, now expand on your solution + USP message. Include 1-3 Calls to Action here.
3. Bottom-of-Funnel: CONVERSION They’ve made the purchase, so continue the communications around value and use. Aim to start planting seeds to cultivate retention, recommendation, and repurchase.
4. Customer Relationship Building: RETENTION Communicate customer appreciation (‘surprise & delight’ to create loyalty) + offer ways in which they can advocate for you + recommend + repurchase.

How one local government / economic development organization is applying this thinking

The City of Salisbury’s economic development arm, the Polaris Business Development Centre, is an experienced and innovative resource for over 7,000 SMBs in the northern regions of Adelaide, in South Australia. Working with Amplifyo, the Polaris team facilitated access to one of Amplifyo’s workshops to complement their range of business support activities to equip business owners and operators with:

• 24/7 always-on marketing planning
• responsible AI-driven marketing
• access to Next Step ideas for when a SMB is not sure of what to do next & how to do it
• intuitive, easy to use software that aligns with the research around how SMBs operate & addresses identified needs as recognized in the State Government’s Small Business Strategy 2023-2030

The City of Salisbury’s economic development arm, the Polaris Business Development Centre + Amplifyo partnership – Amp Up Your Marketing Workshop

With a deep understanding of the value of a marketing plan, but also knowing the barriers to starting and implementing traditional planning methods, Polaris is complementing their mix of in-person programs with Amplifyo’s tactical marketing planning, campaign & content creation to truly address SMB pain-points, and set them up with capacity & capability for sustainable business now and into the future.

Supporting SMBs in your local government area / economic development region

The utilization of digital tools for economic, social, and environmental sustainability sit at the heart of future global thinking. This doesn’t diminish the value of offline communications and activity, but rather aims to utilize technology to release businesses to explore innovation, employ soft-skills in culture building, and spend time on areas that fall out of priority when time-pressures mount or resources are limited.

SMBs have a competitive edge in their ability to be agile if they are released from traditionally time-consuming tasks. It’s fair to assume that digitization can support this even further. Strengthening communities includes strengthening our Small to Mid Size Businesses. This represents an opportunity area for Smart Cities to build trust and relationship with business owners, operators, and teams by identifying and reviewing solutions that support gains, in competitiveness, productivity, and efficiency – for sustainable outcomes.

First published in the Smart Cities Council Global Newsletter – November 2024