Small businesses are still in the ‘letterbox marketing era’, says Salmat
Letterboxing remains the most popular marketing tool for Australian small businesses as most of them neglect online media, Salmat has found in a survey on SME marketing behaviour.
While just over half of Australian businesses with up to 25 employees plan to increase their spend, most lack the time or resources to plan and monitor their campaigns, putting them at a disadvantage to bigger and better resourced competitors, the direct marketing company found.
The company’s survey painted a desperate picture of Australian small business marketing – while 51% said they would increase their marketing spend in 2017, only 23% reported that they can afford having a person dedicated to marketing.
The report found not having enough time or knowledge were major barriers to small business owners improving their marketing skills, based on the 250 small business marketing decision makers surveyed in the report.
“Time and resources are the biggest challenges small companies face, meaning that marketing activities sometimes fall by the wayside,” said Salmat head of marketing, Ben Hillman. “It’s impossible to do everything, so small businesses should focus their energies on planning and evaluating their current marketing activities so they know what is and isn’t working.”
Of the channels small businesses plan to invest in for the first time this year, the survey found letterbox drops comes out on top (13.9%), followed by events or trade shows (12.7%) and websites (12.3%).
“It is not surprising to see small businesses turning to letterbox as a new channel, as most small businesses rely on the local community for sales. Letterbox is an effective way of engaging a highly targeted local audience through the use of targeting tools that enable granular targeting based on more than 50 variables ,” said Hillman.
The survey also found a gap between investments in websites and search engine marketing or optimisation. While small companies spent most of their budget on their websites in 2016 (57.5%), only 7.1% and 2.4% respectively invested in SEO and SEM.
“SEO and SEM is often viewed as complex by small businesses, which stops them from using these tools,” observed Hillman.
Measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is also a challenge many are facing with only 52% of small businesses saying they measure their campaigns often against 75% for mid-tier businesses. The two main barriers were the lack of time (44%) or knowledge (18%).
“To get the most out of their marketing, small businesses must understand their target audiences to craft relevant campaigns. When planning a campaign, be sure to consider what your competitors are doing, and what data you can access about your customers and potential customers,” said Hillman.
“250 of our customers say letterbox marketing is still their favourite” says letterbox marketing company.
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Something fishy about a survey run by a direct mail marketing company that unsurprisingly concludes direct marketing is conclusively beneficial. If it arrived in my letterbox I think I’d mark it return to sender.
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I searched high and low for the quote “250 of our customers say letterbox marketing is still their favourite” and couldn’t find it.
What I could find was “based on the 250 small business marketing decision makers surveyed in the report”.
Indeed if the survey was only of SMEs on Salmat’s data base then it wasn’t worth reporting on. If it was a genuine unbiased survey of SME’s then it is of interest and the above comment is harsh at best.
But shouldn’t we ask/know how and who was surveyed and allow benefit of the doubt for the moment?
Over to you Salmat. How did you conduct the survey?
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Who cares what the survey said?
The letterbox is without doubt, the least cluttered and most targeted channel to market (done well).
Put a name on it and if the name is correct and up to date it will get opened and read.
If relevant messaging and if interest you may likely get a response/sale!
Anybody want to disagree or skeptical about that? No agenda here… just still a. It old school ?
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Many small businesses are going bust, because they are not progressive. – Fact
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I’m all for old school realism, but why the need for a suspect survey if the best argument for the very wares they are peddling can be made in three sentences?
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