Report reveals key digital marketing trends, goals and pain points for SMBs in 2024.

Hi, my job with this newsletter is to find the best info out there about digital marketing and bring it to you in an actionable way, so you can use it to grow your business.

A report released by Intero Digital “Revolutionizing Reach: The 2024 Digital Marketing Landscape You Can’t Ignore” covers a wide digital landscape and includes the results of their Small and Medium Business (SMB) client survey, as well as insights and strategies for addressing the pain points and goals marketers face this year.

Let’s look at a few highlights and key insights from the report and see how you can use them in your business.

Key digital marketing priorities for SMBs in 2024

The first finding should not be a surprise whether you are “B2C” or “B2B”. The most important thing on digital marketer’s minds in 2024 is revenue growth, prioritized as the top goal by 79% of respondents. 

Great. Let's get it first thing out of the way. You want growth for your business, as in more sales. And this is more than a given or stating the obvious. Saying it out loud helps us focus on the digital marketing strategies and activities that actually drive it.

It seems SMB businesses aren’t backing down this year in their quest for growth, with 46.2% planning to increase spending, zero percent decreasing and 53.8% planning to stay the same.

Did you see that? Zero decrease,  it's keeping it or increasing. 

Since marketing is the precursor to sales this makes sense. More marketing should bring more sales.

How are you doing with your marketing strategy so far this year?

The biggest digital marketing pain points for 2024

Revenue growth and lead generation is not without challenges, this is what the survey respondents said:

Aside from revenue, which is a goal and not a pain point (stay with me here, more on this coming), the top pain points were lead generation, budget constraints, competition and changing algorithms and SEO best practices. 

Competition is fierce everywhere and it doesn’t appear things will settle down any time soon. When competition is fierce, more investment is often needed to be competitive, be it paid or earned media. This leads to the need of effectively measuring digital marketing ROI.

Budget constraints often stem from ineffective measurement and tracking systems. What’s crucial for this is having a comprehensive and well-executed digital marketing strategy and tactical plan.

Up to 7.7% of respondents had branding as a pain point. Interesting that it was ranked last.

Is it because it's not important? That was a trick question, of course it is important, very.

But maybe the survey responders don't realize this. Why is it important? Well that's a longer conversation, reply to this email and we can get into it.

But suffice it to say that branding is not your logo or name. Branding is the relationship that a business has with its clients. 

Get branding right, or at least knowing your ideal client deeply, and you are going to jump ahead off the competition.

The top digital marketing goals for 2024

“Revenue growth” again topped the list at 79.5%, then dropped a bit for each of the supporting goals. Second is “More web traffic” and “Higher positioning in the SERPs” (each at 38.5%)". SERP is search engine results page.

As both a business owner and previous COO I see this as misguided. Revenue growth is a business goal, not a marketing one. The rest, described as supporting goals, are the real marketing goals, which of course drive towards the business goal. Other activities outside digital marketing should also drive to this goal.

Interestingly, lead generation was the number two biggest pain point (33.3%), but here it came in fifth place as a goal (30.8%). Even if the ranking seems not aligned, the very close percentages actually show it is a consistent priority.

Brand awareness and thought leadership is prominent in this goal list (33.3%), but branding was not a pain point? They must have branding dialed in, I hope.

The thing about brand awareness and thought leadership is that it's difficult to attribute to revenue. But it should still be done, think of it this way, it's like an ocean current, you only see the waves on top, but below them is where all the force and push happens. Brand awareness and thought leadership may be hard to see, but it's a current that pushes and drives your ideal clients to you.

Content marketing insights

Another interesting part of this study was a review of over 100,00 pieces of content. In their analysis, Intero found that the “most-shared” content had an average word count of 552, down considerably from the previous year’s analysis of 792 words. 

So prioritize the message over being wordy.

What are SMB marketers doing in 2024 beyond the written word?

Top choices are video (41% of marketers utilizing), podcasts (41%) but the leader still uses word, newsletters (47%).

Takeaways

Small and Medium Businesses has a clear goal: revenue growth. And they are using digital marketing to push and drive for it. Increasing it in 2024.

With lead generation, budgets and competition being the top pain points, it is imperative to have clear goals and great tracking KPIs for them.

This report shows the main marketing goals are more web traffic, higher ranking in search results, and brand awareness & thought leadership. 

The top two of those clearly require SEO. What are you doing for your SEO?

The third is doable through social media for many businesses. How confident are you with your social media strategy?

Let me know if you share these pain points and goals, let's talk about it to make sure you win in 2024.