Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMB) Market Specialization

When Rob Burns first started thinking about gnooko’s services, and eventually the gnooko website, he wanted to appeal to the two typical business audiences or personas that he feels he can help the most. The small business owner who wants a diverse growth strategy for their business, and the marketing or business development influencer within a company whose mandate is to increase the volume of quality leads and convert those leads when they are ready.

This market segment is often called the Small Business Owner (SBO), Small-Mid Sized Business (SMB) or Small Mid-Sized Enterprise, I am sure there are others. For the most part, I will refer to this segment as Small and Medium-Sized Business.

Why does Rob focus on these two demographics or personas? It has been reported that almost half of small business owners still do not have a website (Entrepreneur blog post “It’s 2016, But Nearly Half of U.S. Small businesses Still Don’t Have a Website, Clutch report).

To complement the findings of this report, Rob’s own observations with small mid-sized owners appear to support this report. Rob’s discussions with clients has lead him to believe that there is an experience, expertise or knowledge gap in this segment.

What is the gap? It’s that small business owners find that many website or digital marketing providers focus far too much time on the website and/or digital technology and not enough time on the business drivers for digital or the website.

Perhaps they do not have the business knowledge, experience or expertise to bridge that knowledge gap to the business drivers or they are not inclined to invest the time to understand the client’s business in much greater detail.  And, this is why, Rob prefers to focus on understanding a client’s business first, their goals, needs, requirements, culture, environment and much more before talking about a solution or digital marketing tactics or technology.

Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMB) Digital Marketing Services

Based upon Rob’s many discussions about their business with these two persona groups, his experience, background and research in this Small and Medium-Sized Business sector, gnooko digital marketing focuses on the following solution areas that are most pertinent to them:

  1. Digital Marketing Strategy
  2. Persona Development and Audience Segmentation
  3. Content Marketing
  4. Website Design and Development
  5. Search Marketing
  6. Social Media
  7. Marketing Technology

One of Rob’s objectives with gnooko is to offer a diverse service offering from a single source. A central point of contact, who has both extensive business and digital marketing experience, and who could discuss and relate how digital marketing services would support a client’s overall objectives and the effect of solutions on other lines of business, or identify or mitigate risk where possible.

This is very difficult to accomplish if a digital marketing provider doesn’t have tenured and diverse business experience and if they only focus only digital technology or offer a single line of service (web design/development only, for example).