Small and medium businesses failing to grasp digital opportunities Sensis boss warns
The proliferation of smart phones and the frequency with which Australians are accessing the web has not been matched by small and medium enterprises adopting digital strategies to meet them, the head of Sensis has warned.
Dan Gregory (Impossible Institute), Kate Morris (Adorebeauty), Jackson Hewett (The Australian), Justin Dry (Vinomofo) and Naomi Shepherd (Facebook).
And small business has been urged to join emerging platforms early and take advantage of them before bigger rivals arrive.
John Allan, CEO of Sensis, said that adoption of digital by consumers and the reticence of SMEs to follow them was a puzzling contradiction.
The Sensis eBusiness report revealed 73% of adult Australians use their phones to access the internet and the number grew to 91% of people between 18 and 29.
“One of the most interesting contradictions the report exposed is around how many Aussie businesses are connected to the internet – 93%, yet so few have a digital marketing strategy,” Allan told The Australian Digital Marketing Forum on Friday.
“Put your hand up if your business has a digital marketing strategy – so about 20% of you… well that’s close to the official 19% in the report.
“To truly harness the digital landscape the first thing businesses need to do is to engage with it and establish a presence – when we think of digital, we think website – and nearly two thirds of all SMBs now have a website (61%).
“A website might not be the right strategy for your business, and for many having a social media profile is a better option. Just on half of all SMBs now have a social profile. Compare this with 69% of all Aussies though, and there is a clear gap of opportunity.”
Allan also warned that SME’s were failing to keep up with the rapid growth of ecommerce with seven in 10 consumers now regularly making online purchases but little more than half of SMBs making sales online, noting that the failure to embrace mobile was a serious problem that could directly impact their business.
“The smartphone is not just a tool, it should be your best friend,” he said.
“If (customers) go onto your website from their mobile and have a poor experience, are they likely to make a purchase or go somewhere else? We all know the answer, and once you’ve lost them, you’ll struggle to ever get them back to your site.”
Speaking on a panel during the forum, Kate Morris, founder of online beauty retailer Adorebeauty, said business needed to consider carefully the metrics they measured their digital presence with, noting that too many people saw “likes” as a valid metric.
Instead she said the “must see” metric was conversion rates.
“We look at our customer ratings that come through, obviously that’s really important to us and we are rating something like 9.76 out of 10,” Morris said.
“We don’t measure Facebook likes, we measure levels of interaction with the different social media posts that we do. The way we view social media is its partly an inbound channel but its also the different ways that we can broadcast the content that we create out to different sections of people.”
With retargeting now a key strategy for business, Vinomofo founder Justin Dry said it was vital, but the brand had learned some hard lessons on how it should be approached. He also warned that for new entrants the costs of entry was not low and there was less room for mistakes with big business now dominating platforms.
“I think delivering different messages when the frequency is getting to high with the retargeting is super important,” Dry said.
“We made a lot of mistakes early but thankfully it was a lot cheaper back then (and we learned) about too much frequency of retargeting of the same information and you just can’t do that any more, you get destroyed. Whereas in the early days the big guys weren’t on these platforms.”
He said small business should try their hand at emerging platforms early before major players joined so they could reap the benefits of early adoption.
“If you can get in early you can get in cheap and you can make a lot of mistakes – and we had heaps.”
Have you seen the massive amounts of complaints about Sensis on their facebook page. Think this needs further investigation…
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