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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Today on episode 70, we're digging into the latest research on the state of small business marketing and Constant Contact's answer to overcoming your top marketing challenges. This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave director of small business success at Constant Contact. And I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you, and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer.
Dave Charest:And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Hello there, Kelsi Carter.
Kelsi Carter:Hello there, Dave. How are you?
Dave Charest:I'm doing fantastic as always. Great to have you here.
Kelsi Carter:Great to be here.
Dave Charest:I'm excited about our conversation today because we have some colleagues of ours joining us for today's episode, which you'll tell us about it here in a second. But I enjoy these episodes because I think it's cool for people to hear from other voices within the company. And this is one of those things that, I mean, as you know, and I'm sure other people listening that, you know, I've always been passionate about helping small businesses and nonprofits succeed. And and one of the things that I think is always great, and one of the reasons, I mean, I'm coming up on 13 years here at Constant Contact, is so many of the people that I work with on a day to day basis, that we both work with on a day to day basis, share that same passion. And so I'm always excited when we can get together with our colleagues and have them share their insights and the things that they've been working on to help our customers succeed.
Dave Charest:And so so I'm kind of excited about today. Who are we talking to, Kelsey?
Kelsi Carter:So, of course. So we were joined by Kate Conway and Michael Wood. Kate is the senior product marketing manager. So she focuses on telling the story of how Constant Contact product enables small businesses and nonprofits to succeed. Michael, he's the manager of North America External Communications.
Kelsi Carter:So he oversees our external voice in Canada in the US to tell stories about everything that's going on at Constant Contact with our customers and partners we're trying to help.
Dave Charest:Now we got together with Kate and Michael to really talk about a couple of things. Right? Number 1, the results of Constant Contact's most recent Small Business Now research that Michael leads the helm on that, and it's about the state of small business marketing. And 2, some of the latest enhancements to the Constant Contact product really designed to solve for the challenges small business marketers are facing when it comes to marketing their businesses today, which is really cool.
Kelsi Carter:Yeah. And Kate mentions large language models in this episode. Mhmm. Can you tell us what that means?
Dave Charest:Yeah. Absolutely. So that just means it's a type of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to kind of analyze and understand text. Now this will make more sense, obviously, as we get into the episode here today, but it's essentially the knowledge the large language model uses to generate the output. And so in this case, we're talking about constant contacts campaign builder, which, again, you're gonna learn more about, but that large language model is incorporating our own proprietary marketing strategies that we've designed and developed over, well, what, almost 30 years in the business that we've seen work for real customers.
Dave Charest:So this is pretty cool stuff that our customers are then really able to tap into. So thank you for bringing that up because I know we didn't necessarily define that as we were talking about it. But before we get into all of that, let's go to Michael on the 2024 state of small business marketing report, and here's some of the key takeaways.
Michael Wood:The real bigger takeaways that we found are that most small businesses have a significant lack of time for marketing, lack of knowledge to some extent, context for what's good. And then, you know, sort of as a result of those two things, a lack of confidence overall when it comes to actually executing on what the marketing tactics or the marketing strategy should be. So couple top challenges that I'm sure listeners can relate to, finding new customers, figuring out what's working. Are my campaigns working? Are they not?
Michael Wood:Who's opening and who's taking action? And then the lack of resources. So that breaks down to a couple of big stats, and I won't get too number heavy here. We won't turn this into a math episode. But more than half of small businesses we polled, about 55, 56%, told us that they have less than an hour a day to spend on marketing.
Michael Wood:So less than 5 hours a week, that's not a lot. We found that about 3 quarters of the survey participants feel kinda iffy about their marketing strategy. Uncertainty is definitely a word I would use to describe it. And I guess as a result of that or maybe feeding into that, about half say that they put their marketing off for later. They procrastinate.
Michael Wood:You know, it's I'll get to it when I can, or I'll get to it when I get to it.
Dave Charest:I just wanna stop on that one there for a second because that was one of those ones that I was like, oh, yeah. That makes sense. Because I often joke with people when we're talking about, like, you know, if a small business owner has the decision to make between taking out the trash and doing some marketing, they're probably gonna take out the trash because they know at least they know their business is gonna smell a little better once they check out the trash. Right? And so, I was like, oh, yeah.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I kinda go to this thing. What are the other things I can kinda do instead? So, yeah, really made a lot of sense there with that.
Michael Wood:Yeah. And lack of time and procrastination is an interesting one. It kinda breaks down in 2 different ways. It's partially at small businesses not having enough hours in the day just because of what you just said, all of their other duties and fulfilling orders and talking with customers and accounting and working on schedules and hiring and just operationally, all the things that they have to be responsible for. But it's also a little bit of not looking for ways to work more efficiently or not having the knowledge of what those things are and where they exist.
Michael Wood:They feel busy, they feel overwhelmed. Marketing seems really hard and sometimes it is, so they put it off for later. Right? And that's where we kinda come to the lack of understanding. If you don't feel great about what you're doing, about how you're executing, you lack some confidence there.
Michael Wood:And that stems from just not knowing what you don't know, really. Yeah. Not knowing what good looks like. You know, is this a good campaign? Are my results good?
Michael Wood:Is my creative good? Is this copy good in my email? Is it gonna make somebody stop and read it? You know, you just don't know. And it makes sense.
Michael Wood:Right? Because most small businesses aren't marketers. And we talk about this all the time. You're experts in your trade or your craft or whatever you do. And you're not necessarily spending your your nights, probably, reading about marketing and trying to understand how to be a marketer.
Michael Wood:So we see that come through in this study. It's tough. It's a really tough cycle to break out of. Right? Because you're you're not really sure what you're supposed to be doing, so you try some things.
Michael Wood:It takes a little bit too long. You don't necessarily see the results maybe that you're hoping for, or you just see results, but you don't know how to translate them. And so you you put it off for later. And the more you do that, the more you put it off. So you give yourself even less time because you accumulate all new responsibilities.
Michael Wood:And so the longer you go in that cycle, it becomes really hard to break out of. But Yeah. At the same time, that's such a huge opportunity.
Dave Charest:Yeah. It really is that cycle too, I think, because it is that constant idea of, okay, you gotta figure out the things that are gonna work, but it's this constant balance between finding the time to do the marketing, which is what we talk a lot about here on this, and get to, like, how people find that. And, also then something new comes along, and then, again, to your point, really not being sure what works, and so it's this constant thing that kind of comes into play. It actually it excites me what we're able to do today, And before we kinda get to some of that stuff with what we're doing specifically with Constant Contact, you know, Kate, from your perspective, I mean, does any of this stuff kinda come to us as a surprise to you?
Kate Conway:Yeah. You know, I'm not that surprised by the lack of time or feeling like I'm gonna put off my marketing. And, really, I guess I'm not even that surprised that, like, folks are feeling a little iffy about the strategy parts because we know small business marketers and nonprofit marketers are often just it's like a one woman show or, like, maybe there's, like, 2 or 3 people in the same office, and they're just performing all of the functions to keep that organization running. I think what does surprise me though is the degree to which people felt iffy about the strategy. Like, 3 quarters of folks feeling like they don't know how to create an efficient marketing strategy, something that actually gets done what they're looking to do, I think that is the part that surprised me.
Kate Conway:So and, I mean, as Michael mentioned, a lot of our small business and nonprofit marketers, they aren't marketers by trade. They didn't go to school for marketing or they don't have a lot of experience. They got into that industry or founded a business because they had a passion about something separate. So not too surprising overall, but, yeah, that 3 quarters of people feeling iffy, that did take me by surprise a little bit.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So, I mean, based on kind of what we're hearing, and I would argue in many instances, I mean, it's interesting to see it kind of large like this, right, as you're saying to, like, oh, wow. You know, 3 quarters of the people, like, really, you know, aren't aren't feeling confident about this stuff. But these are the things that we see time and time again. Right?
Dave Charest:Like, these are the things that are often the challenges for small business owners when it comes to marketing, and so I'm excited to kind of think about the direction that how we're thinking about things. Right? In particular, how do we just make that marketing stuff easier so that businesses can get back to the things that they'd rather be doing, and really, you know, focus on the things that they do best versus having to be amazing marketers for it. And so all of that to get to, Kate, what can you tell us about the campaign builder tool and what work we've been doing there at Constant Contact?
Kate Conway:Definitely. And I feel like the research, the study that, Michael, you and your team have put out has been super valuable for my product marketing team and for our product folks because it really validates that suspicion that we already had that small business and nonprofit marketers, they need help figuring out how to build effective marketing strategies. So often, we're seeing that folks, they know what they want to get done, but they don't know how to get there. And then beyond that, right, like, once they've figured that part out, you gotta find the time to actually go execute. So that's what Campaign Builder is.
Kate Conway:It was built really to address this need. It's a goal based tool that does all the heavy lifting for you. So you simply say, this is my business goal. Say that you're trying to achieve finding new customers or getting the word out, And you share some specifics about your product and service, about your business, and campaign builder will deliver a fully fledged marketing campaign that's designed to achieve that goal. So you're gonna get multiple campaigns across email and social and even SMS and event that will all work together to achieve that business goal and reach your audience where they are.
Dave Charest:So I wanna talk through this a little bit because I wanna make sure that people kinda hear what this is gonna give you. Right? Because what we're talking about here is really thinking about you're going to get, you know, your social posts to help you achieve the goal that you set with that thing, so that doesn't mean just like, okay, here's a thing to post on Facebook. You're actually involving a timeline here for it, too, right, so that might mean, okay. You're gonna post multiple times on a particular social channel, and then we're gonna give suggestions for the content that they may want to use on that.
Dave Charest:Right? And then in this, when do you wanna communicate with your email audience? When might you wanna send an SMS? And so it really it's bigger than, I think, just without seeing it in front of your eyes, it it might just be like, okay. Yeah.
Dave Charest:Like because there's always talk about, like, AI and it being like a generative thing, and there's part of that to this, but it's deeper than that. And I think that's the thing that kind of excites me as I was talking about earlier is that AI, really when I think about our mission to help the small stand tall and how do we help with the marketing bits and make that easier for business owners, is that the AI component of this, and this is people much smarter than me really understand how this works more. Right? Right? Yeah.
Dave Charest:It's like, I've always been as we've been trying to educate and do things, but how do we actually put that into the tool so people can access it in a way? And I think this is getting us so much closer to that, and that's what really excites me about it. So maybe, Kate, you can talk a little bit about how does it incorporate AI into this piece to help develop these plans for people?
Kate Conway:Yep. So you're exactly right. Like, similarly to a lot of the rest of the technology and software industry, we're leveraging a combination of large language models, which if anybody is familiar with kind of the AI discussions in the industry today, like, that's that's what it is. It's a large language model. So we're doing the same thing as lots of the other major players.
Kate Conway:But I think what's unique about the way that we're approaching these customer problems, right, is we're incorporating our own proprietary marketing strategies that we have designed and developed over basically 30 almost 30 years in this industry. And so we've trained those large language models with that information. And the marketing strategies that we're using, we have tried and tested with real customers. So shout out to our professional services team because they are the ones that really helped us train our model with the strategies that we know work. So I think that's what makes, like, our approach to AI really special and focused on what our customers need.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I love that. And I love too that, obviously, most people know us for email, but because we're including these different channels, because as, you know, I often talk about when we're out talking to small business owners, it's about using those channels, the strengths of each of those channels in concert with what you're doing to kinda extend that message and, you know, make sure you're hitting people in all the places that you can. And, you know, Michael, I think also another piece of the study found some things about just using multiple channels as well, didn't we?
Michael Wood:Yeah. That was actually quite a big portion of the study, what was examining the channel mix and what levers are you pulling. Are you getting beyond just an email or just a social media post? Are you are you using multiple channels? How, when, where are you targeting?
Michael Wood:How well, frankly, does the terminology resonate? You know, in channel marketing or multichannel or what have you. So that was a big piece of it. And it comes back to those challenges again that I mentioned earlier, specifically lack of knowledge and lack of confidence in this case. Right?
Michael Wood:Generally, most small businesses understand that marketing is important. Right? And if you've found if you found us, if you've found this show, you're part of that group. So about 40% or so, told us that they plan to increase the number of channels where they do their marketing this year. So they want to do more.
Michael Wood:And they understand that that's what they're supposed to be doing, right? I think it was north of 80% said that they they agree that they get beyond just one channel, an email and a social post, let's say. They'll get better results from their campaign, whatever those results they're trying to get are. But what's really interesting and what was a little bit surprising to us is that less than 20% of the small businesses we polled told us that they felt confident that they were using the right channels. Right?
Michael Wood:So it's not just more is more. The channels that you use matter, and there's a lot of uncertainty about picking the right ones and everything that comes from there.
Dave Charest:So, Kate, I'm curious as, obviously, you've been closely into this and getting this tool out there. What are some of the things that we've been seeing just in terms of the people that have been using it so far?
Kate Conway:Yeah. So still relatively early days, but we have seen a decent uptick in the number of social campaigns or SMS campaigns that have been created. So our users are actually creating campaigns in new channels that they may not have been exposed to before, which that's really exciting for me because, like, as you said, Michael, if multichannel campaigns get better results, like, we're now helping our customers find the opportunity to increase engagement with our audience. So that is super exciting for me. And I think we're also seeing with that same uptick in campaign creation is that they're doing more than they did before.
Kate Conway:Mhmm. So we're saving them a ton of time. They can actually do more marketing with less time and kinda get back to the other things that they wanna be doing, whether it's, you know, taking out the trash or networking or, you know, spending time with their family.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I think that's really great because it does really lean into that time savings piece because for me, I mean, I a lot of times, it's easier to react to something than to have to figure out to create the thing sometimes, and it's like you've got the time savings there. You kind of help overcome that procrastination piece because you don't necessarily wanna do the work as well, but then you're reviewing versus kinda doing, and I think that's always an interesting thing. And so I wanna just wrap up here a little bit and just let people listening know that, 1, don't be afraid to give Campaign Builder a try. I think it's there to assist you in the stuff you're doing and and not replace you in any ways when you start thinking about if you have a marketing title in your role.
Dave Charest:It's really to, again, give you that leg up and save you time so you can, again, get to those other things and those other tasks that you have to do. And it's really also gonna help you maybe see some things that maybe you otherwise haven't found. And I think what's exciting is maybe where we go to in the future with this whole thing. And so, I don't know, Kate. Maybe you can give us a little heads up on, like, what is coming for the future of campaign builder.
Kate Conway:Yeah. So before I talk about what is coming, I just wanted to kind of reiterate what you're getting with campaign builder as it stands today. And the feature that we introduced a couple months ago is, you know, you're getting that fully fledged multichannel marketing campaign. We're also giving you some tidbits about the strategy. So as you're going along and to both of your points earlier, we're not just gonna tell you to send an email right now, but we're gonna tell you, send an email now and then follow it up with a social post.
Kate Conway:And then send an SMS later because it's gonna remind your audience about your product launch, for example. You're also gonna get content. So we recommend with our AI content generator, we give you suggested copy in all of your campaigns. So huge, huge timesaver, and, also, it kind of, like, fixes that, like, blinking cursor problem where you're, like, I don't even know what to write, which I think I have that problem. If you use our brand kit, which is another relatively new exciting feature, you're also gonna see your brand.
Kate Conway:So your look, your feel, your colors, your font, that's all gonna be set up in your campaigns when you use campaign builder. And then, of course, the timeline, we're gonna recommend when you should schedule all of those campaign components in concert, again, to kind of better achieve your goals. So that's what you get today. What we're working on now is overall user experience improvement. So just making it easier for you to understand what we want you to tell us, what we want you to tell the campaign builder to get you a high quality, ready to send campaign.
Kate Conway:So those are and, you know, that's our huge focus right now. And then beyond that, we're working on some smart recommendations. So, like, if you're having trouble answering questions or maybe you've already written a great campaign, we're trying to teach the campaign builder to use that campaign that you've already written to just simplify and streamline the process. Mhmm. And then you can just kinda go in and, like, you edit as you need.
Kate Conway:Right? But, again, like, you're really previewing and just kinda checking the boxes rather than creating from scratch. And then the other thing that I'm super thrilled share is that we're working really hard to open up campaign builder to a lot of our existing customers that haven't gotten to try it yet. So if you are an existing customer and you don't have campaign builder in your plan, pretty soon, you're gonna be able to try campaign builder for free in your current plan and kinda see how it works, see what it does for your business. And if anybody out there has feedback or has used the feature, we want to hear from you because we're incorporating all of that into our future road map and what we're gonna do with the future.
Kate Conway:So lots of hard work left, but we're really excited where we're headed.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Awesome. Michael, what do we got coming up from a research perspective? I know we're well, I mean, what is it? As we're recording this, we're near the end of July here, and that just means what?
Dave Charest:The holidays are coming up after the summer. Right? Like, what have we got going on from a research perspective?
Michael Wood:Yeah. Yeah. It sure does. We're trying to get ahead of that. I think our customers generally appreciate when we can help them get ahead of that period, that crucial period of the year for their businesses.
Michael Wood:Right? So we're in the middle of our next study right now, which is going to look at how small businesses are thinking about all things end of year marketing. So that includes holiday preparations. We're asking a lot of questions about specific tactics that have worked, biggest mistakes you feel like you've made in the past, trying to really just get inside their minds. And then we have some offshoots that that will look at, like, economy, how people are feeling about the economy, inflation, and that big conversation that is continuing a little bit longer than people had hoped, I think.
Michael Wood:Looking towards next year, you know, how you set yourself up at the end of the year to have a strong start in cheese 2025. And we have a couple, I guess, unique questions about, like, the election here in the states and just taking a pulse on some things that are not specifically marketing related. So we're hoping to understand basically just how critical this period is. Yes. But also, like, what you're doing to get ready for it.
Michael Wood:It? How are you behaving during the rest of the year to set yourself up knowing that it's going to be such a busy time? What are your biggest barriers, and how can we help you overcome those?
Dave Charest:Cool. Well, I look forward to sharing that information as we have it. Again, I'll just remind people to definitely get in there and check out the campaign builder if you don't have it yet. As Keith mentioned, it'll be there soon.
Michael Wood:So
Dave Charest:you can try that out. And as always, let us know what you think.
Dave Charest:I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to rate this podcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's rate this podcast.com/bam.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.