SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Despite the substantial benefits of collecting and using social media data, less than one-third of marketers targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) mine social media to identify new opportunities, and only 4% use it to gather highly valuable SMB owner data to enrich leads.
Those findings and more come from a new survey of CEB Research on behalf of Radius, Inc., the business-to-business marketing intelligence company. Additional findings from the research on 880 SMBs across North America indicate:
- Over 80% of small business owners use social media for business purposes, but primarily use it to market their own businesses, not to interact with suppliers.
- When owners do interact with suppliers, they primarily look for easy-to-access deals and promotional offers.
- Facebook remains the top social media site SMB owners use to promote their businesses. They use Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter to interact with suppliers.
- Yelp is the top social media site used by SMB owners in the food and accommodation industries.
The study is part of a larger report titled Social Media 2014 Update: Three Use Cases for Marketing to Small Business Owners, which was conducted by CEB on behalf of Radius during June 2014. A webinar and full results are available here.
“Amazingly, SMB owners’ use of social media as a marketing channel is still an untapped gold mine,” said Jonathan Dietrich, senior director of CEB’s Marketing to Small Business Leadership Council. “It generates tremendous amounts of data that marketers should leverage to create new business opportunities and significantly improve sales performance.”
The new CEB study also indicates social media marketing that targets SMBs can be money well spent:
- SMB owners are increasingly more aware of suppliers on social media, growing from 38% in 2012 to 50% today.
- Among SMB owners that have seen social media messages from their supplier, almost 40% report feeling more positive about the supplier’s brand.
- Information about small businesses and issues related to vertical industries are the most popular types of content with SMB owners.
However, owners complain that suppliers often over-advertise, and that suppliers advertise items that do not relate to them and that invade their personal social media feeds.
“With social media analytics, marketers can add a marketing intelligence layer to their small business marketing strategy,” said Peter Tait, vice president of Marketing for Radius. “With the right tools, it’s extremely easy to use social media data to generate new leads that match the profiles of a company’s most successful customers. Sales reps can also use social media data to conduct advance research and improve personalization of their outreach campaigns. It’s all there for the taking.”
About CEB
CEB, the leading member-based advisory company, equips more than 10,000 organizations around the globe with insights, tools and actionable solutions to transform enterprise performance. By combining advanced research and analytics with best practices from member companies, CEB helps leaders realize outsized returns by more effectively managing talent, information, customers and risk. Member companies include nearly 90% of the Fortune 500, more than 75% of the Dow Jones Asian Titans, and 85% of the FTSE 100. More at cebglobal.com.
About Radius
Fueled by data science, Radius’ real-time marketing intelligence platform empowers marketers to better understand their customers and grow their business. Hundreds of marketers – including Fortune 500 leaders – use Radius’ cloud-based software to deliver the insights and data they need to make scientific marketing decisions. Customers connect their CRM to the Radius Index, a proprietary machine-generated data set of 20+ million US businesses, to reveal real-time analytics on their customers, identify their best prospects, run laser-targeted campaigns, and measure marketing performance. See what the power of data science can do for your business at www.radius.com.
