SME marketing teams face numerous challenges in today’s competitive business landscape. Some of these challenges include having limited resources, a lack of brand awareness, customer acquisition and retention as well as keeping up with technology. Many of these struggles can be addressed through the implementation of a strategic marketing mix.
Often, SMEs view marketing mix as a tool intended for enterprise companies with sizeable budgets, large teams and investments in numerous channels. Let’s discuss how automated mix modeling can help teams of all sizes, including SMEs.
Introduction to Marketing Mix Modeling for SMEs
Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a contemporary statistical tool that empowers marketers to quantify the impact of several marketing inputs on sales or market share. With MMM, a brand can streamline its marketing efforts and direct them towards the right audience at the right time and investment level.
MMM is an accessible, predictive marketing analytics tool for companies of all sizes. MMM has historically been viewed as a tool used by large enterprise companies due to its high cost and large team size needed for implementation. In this guide, we will discuss why Keen’s MMM platform is accessible for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and how it is revolutionizing marketing teams within these companies.
How SMEs can gain a competitive edge through automated marketing mix modeling
The true benefits of marketing mix modeling for SMEs can be realized in achieving a significant competitive advantage. By understanding the varying components and their interplay, a brand can make its marketing activities more effective.
1. More targeted and effective marketing efforts
Comprehending the interactions among different components of the MMM strategy enables a targeted approach. For example, to better allocate your budget, a model will identify where and when money should be spent for maximum impact. Or, if you are looking to forecast revenue, the model will provide an understanding of how the impact of different variables can help in anticipating future market behavior.
Keep learning: How to develop a marketing mix strategy
2. Higher returns that justify initial investment
Keen’s marketing mix models show advertisers and marketers how to achieve increased efficiency and return on investment, potentially contributing to substantial business growth—all of which justify the initial investment required.
3. Automation of data collection
Automated data collection has become a cornerstone for efficient data-driven marketing and insightful analysis. It’s a critical component of marketing mix modeling that helps to understand and manipulate multiple marketing variables.
Automation significantly lightens the workload and reduces time spent on manual data collection, minimizing the need for extensive team involvement. It also decreases the potential for human error. This efficient system ensures that businesses can focus on key aspects that demand strategic attention, like cross-channel marketing spend optimization, rather than data gathering. This marketing efficiency improvement results in both time and cost savings.
4. Accurate predictions with Bayesian modeling
Keen’s utilizes Bayesian marketing mix modeling techniques. These methods leverage prior estimates of tactic elasticity and continuously learn from new data. This approach results in a model that adapts and evolves over time, ensuring relevance and accuracy.
Additional benefits of Bayesian modeling for small to medium enterprise companies include:
- Incorporation of prior knowledge: Bayesian modeling allows marketers to incorporate prior knowledge or beliefs into the analysis. Prior knowledge can include ROIs from previous campaigns, results of brand studies or any other data you think is relevant to help understand your business. This is especially useful when there is existing information about the effectiveness of certain marketing channels or when there are strong assumptions based on industry expertise.
- Handling of small sample sizes: MMM may face challenges when dealing with limited data. Bayesian methods can handle small sample sizes more effectively by incorporating prior distributions, helping to provide more stable estimates even with limited data.
- Accounting for uncertainty: Bayesian models naturally provide a framework for expressing and quantifying uncertainty. This is particularly important in MMM, where there can be various sources of uncertainty, such as seasonal marketing, changing market dynamics, and external factors. Bayesian models provide credible intervals that give a range of likely values for the model parameters, providing a more nuanced understanding of the results.
- Flexibility in model complexity: Bayesian marketing mix model allows for the incorporation of complex relationships between variables. This flexibility is beneficial when dealing with a diverse set of marketing channels and intricate interactions between them. The model can be adjusted to capture nonlinearities and interactions more accurately.
- Dynamic updates: Bayesian models can be easily updated as new data becomes available, creating a test-calibrated MMM. This is crucial in marketing, where the effectiveness of channels and campaigns can change over time. Bayesian methods allow for adaptive learning and continuous improvement of the model as new information is gathered.
- Probabilistic outputs: Bayesian modeling provides probabilistic outputs, enabling marketing decisions based on the likelihood of various scenarios. This can be valuable for risk assessment and decision-making in marketing strategies.
Ideal for teams with limited resources
These efficiencies make it an excellent fit for marketing teams with limited resources. Marketers can extract maximum insights from their existing data, fostering smarter, data-driven marketing strategies and decision-making without the need for extensive data collections or complex infrastructures.
In addition to this technique, we also bring our patent-pending Marketing Elasticity Engine as our knowledge estate. This acts as our custom priors for your brand, which can be influenced through the regression model when we load in your knowledge estate (time series spend, clicks, impressions, COGS, etc).
Top SME marketing strategies
There are several strategies that are required to make marketing for SMEs successful. Some strategies include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Digital marketing strategies: Pay-per-click (PPC), website, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, email marketing
- Traditional marketing strategies: Networking at industry events, referral programs, cross-promotions with other local businesses
- Customer centric strategies: Develop a strong value proposition, create buyer personas, customer loyalty programs
- Branding strategies: Develop a consistent brand voice across all channels, create visually appealing and branded content and tell your brand’s story through various mediums.
Factors to consider when selecting a marketing tool for SME businesses
There are several factors SMEs must consider when selecting a marketing tool to help them grow their business. SMEs must first assess their business needs, then consider the following:
1. Scalability
Scaling your brand to new heights requires a flexible marketing technique – one that transforms as your business objectives grow. Marketing mix modeling is scalable and dynamic in nature. It proves to be immensely beneficial for SME businesses focused on escalating their market presence.
2. Adaptability
An automated marketing mix model flexibly adapts to your budget and team’s capacity. Whether you have a big marketing budget or you’re operating with less, marketing mix modeling:
- Customizes your SME digital marketing strategies based on budget constraints
- Efficiently executes these strategies with a fluctuating team size
- Optimizes your efforts, ensuring maximum marketing ROI
3. Cost effectiveness
Cost effectiveness is the focus of companies, regardless of size. Marketing technology for SMEs must be cost-effective because it is imperative that an investment in a marketing mix modeling solution will show a return in efficiency and effectiveness.
Keen’s affordable pricing structure is designed to provide SMEs with a cost-effective marketing analytics tool with a variety of purchasing options to meet their needs.
The benefits of marketing mix modeling for all business sizes
With Keen, automated marketing mix modeling (MMM) is now available for companies of all sizes, including SMEs.
| Benefits of Keen’s automated marketing mix modeling solution for SMEs | |
| Platform feature | Marketing benefit to SMEs |
| Automated data collection | Less internal resources required |
| Uses Bayesian methodologies | Provides accurate results with limited data |
| Scalable | Adjusts to the team’s size, budget, and aligns with growth objectives |
| Makes marketing more targetable and effective | Allows you to gain a competitive advantage |
| Cost-effective solution | Affordable and allows teams to work more efficiently and effectively |
Ready to elevate your SME marketing efforts? Schedule a demo today!
FAQs
How is marketing for SME businesses different from an enterprise approach?
Marketing for SMEs differs significantly from enterprise-level marketing due to various factors such as resources, scale, and organizational structure. Some additional key differences include:
- Resource availability
- Flexibility and agility
- Market focus
- Marketing channels
- Brand building
- Data and analytics
- Innovation and experimentation
What are the types of marketing small businesses can implement?
Small businesses have a variety of marketing options available to them, each with its own strengths and potential for reaching target audiences. Tactics include:
- Digital Marketing: Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
- Traditional Marketing: Print Advertising, Networking and Events, Referral Marketing
- Innovative Marketing approaches: Influencer Marketing, Video Marketing, Podcast Marketing
What are the most common SME marketing challenges?
Some of the most common SME marketing challenges include:
- Keeping up with digital trends: Adapting new technologies and measuring marketing effectiveness
- Limited resources: Budget limitations, time constraints and lack of expertise
- Strategic challenges: Content creation, social media marketing and email marketing
- Brand visibility and differentiation: Increasing brand visibility and consistent brand messaging
