4 Reasons Marketing to Small Business Isn’t Working

The biggest mistakes aren't always the most obvious ones

While it’s always a good idea to celebrate success, good managers should spend more time

learning from their mistakes or, even better, others’ mistakes.

CEB Marketing to Small Business research shows four places in particular where marketers consistently under-perform when it comes to marketing to the small business segment. Non-members can join a free webinar on Thursday, November 13th at 1:00pm ET to learn more (be sure to enter your email address under “reminder settings” to receive details on how to access the event).

1. Stealing small business customers from other suppliers: This is not an effective acquisition strategy; the main reason stealing doesn’t work is because very few owners switch suppliers. In fact, only 7% of owners will switch suppliers for a given product category in a given year. Fully 68% of owners never switch suppliers.
   What’s worse, owners that do switch tend to be “switchy” customers that may switch to you for a price discount, but are equally likely to switch away from you when a better deal comes up somewhere else.
   So, instead of stealing customers, you should aim to be the small business’s first supplier for your product category. This means targeting more startups and early tenure businesses than you have in the past. CEB Marketing to Small Business members can read more in “Small Business Motivations and Milestones: Tapping Key Windows of Opportunity Across the Lifecycle.”
2. Failing to optimize your website: Most companies’  websites are not set-up to provide the information that small business owners need when researching products and services.  Visiting supplier websites is a crucial part of the buying process for almost two-thirds of small business owners, but unfortunately many owners don’t find what they are looking for, leave unsatisfied, and ultimately don’t make a purchase.
   Providing comprehensive information that is easy to access is vitally important to turning online research into sales. The best thing marketers can do is provide the information online and then “get out of the owner’s way.” Owners do not like being forced to talk to a supplier to find out more when they are conducting online research. See “Wooing with Web: Enabling a Successful Buying Process” for more advice.
3. Trying to be a “trusted advisor”: Marketers often say they want to be a trusted advisor to small business owners to improve loyalty and build long-term relationships.  Intuitively it makes sense and owners may even say that they value relationships.
   But, CEB’s behavioral research shows that investing in relationships, dedicated reps, and content marketing won’t drive retention. These investments may be valuable for other outcomes, but they don’t make owners any more likely to stay with you as a supplier or any less likely to leave you.  It turns out that the best way to boost retention is by increasing owners’ comfort with using your product or service.
   This means both reducing the perceived complexity of using products and services and increasing actual usage as much as possible. More detail can be found in “Rethinking the Drivers of Retention: Why Product Comfort—Not Relationships—Drives Small Business Customer Retention.”
4. Trying to boost customer recommendations by making customers happy: Customer advocacy and word-of-mouth are important for acquisition, but the majority of your most satisfied customers are not active advocates.  Happier customers don’t necessarily result in better word-of-mouth recommendations. Marketers, it turns out, have a “silent majority” problem.
   The majority of the happiest small business customers (i.e. “9s” and “10s” on a 10-point scale of “likelihood to recommend”) will not go out of their way to recommend you. Not only are these “9s” and “10s” reticent in providing a recommendation, their recommendations may not even be as powerful as those that come from the “7s” and “8s.”
   In all cases, getting a good recommendation requires a bit more on the part of the marketer than simply making customers happy. “Driving Active Advocates: Boosting Referrals and Recommendations Among Small Business Owners” takes a comprehensive look at the science behind increasing owner word-of-mouth.

source:excecutiveboard