Selling Marketing Services to Small Businesses

Targeting small business is big business for many industries. That's because there are 23 million small businesses in the U.S. and they account for 54% of all U.S. sales. Plus, they provide 55% of all jobs and occupy 30-50% of all commercial space, an estimated 20-34 billion square feet (Source: US Small Business Administration).

Small businesses also do a lot of marketing. A survey by Borrell Associates revealed that SMBs have a median spend target of $8,000 per year for marketing, with 34% to be spent on marketing services and 19% to be spent on online/digital. This means there is a target opportunity of $4,240 per SMB per year for marketing services providers.

When asked about the services they would like to buy, small businesses answered: website design and hosting 32%, social networking support 29%, lead generation 20%, email solutions support 18%, graphic design services 18% and video production 11%, among others (Borrell and Associates, 2013).

For newspaper publishers, creating an in-house digital ad agency to serve these local companies is perhaps the most promising new trend in the industry today, according to the Local Media Association (The Local Digital Ad Agency, 12/22/11). Early adopters are having success because they are diversifying their revenue streams and growing the digital side of their businesses.

There are also numerous companies in a range of industries—Deluxe, American Express, Staples and many more—that are trying to build on existing advertising or other offerings to create broader packages of services and leverage their sales teams to reach local small businesses with marketing products and services.

So we decided to build this infographic to give you more detail on small businesses and what you need to know about their marketing in 2013.

As the Local Media Association notes, the revenue potential of providing digital and print marketing to small businesses outweighs some of the other emerging opportunities such as mobile right now. For that reason, the organization recommended every local media company consider the addition of digital agency services.

Now that you've seen this infographic, what do you think of the small business opportunity? Are you offering advertising and marketing services to local business? If so, in which categories are you experiencing the most success?

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