Last year, the whole world changed. As everyone around the globe was impacted by COVID-19, small businesses everywhere had to face the change head-on. They had to mitigate shutdowns, new safety requirements, and a tough economic market.
We conducted a survey-based study to reveal the biggest marketing challenges that small businesses are now facing. In this post, you’ll find the survey results and we will take a look at how one of our agency partners successfully overcame some of these key challenges. Read on to get some actionable tips you can use when building a marketing strategy for your own small business or your SMB clients in 2021.
Survey Methodology
To better understand how recent challenges have impacted how small businesses market and advertise, we launched a multi-platform survey across Twitter and TypeForm.
We had 219 responses on TypeForm and 65 comments in our Twitter and LinkedIn polls. We had a diverse range of participants, giving us a well-rounded look at different types of business structures and how their marketing was impacted.
Twitter Survey
Hey, friends! We need your help again — we are working on a big study and would love to ask you to share your thoughts on this: What are the biggest marketing challenges small businesses face in 2021? Leave your comments to be featured!
— Semrush (@semrush) September 22, 2021
LinkedIn Survey
After compiling all of the data, we grouped all answers into one of 14 different categories. We then followed up with a poll for our SEMrush users, which asked them to identify the five biggest challenges they were impacted by.
Survey Results
Audience breakdown
- 52.5% of our survey’s respondents are small businesses that have fewer than 50 employees, 8.7% defined their businesses as “freelance,” and 21.5% were agencies.
- 34% of respondents said that the business owner is the person running marketing campaigns, 41.2% said they have one or several employees/dedicated in-house team running campaigns, 5.2 % relied on an outside agency, and 2.6 % worked with freelancers.
- The average self-identified marketing proficiency of respondents is 6.8, with “0” being “beginner” and “10” being “advanced.”
Top Challenges Revealed
Our survey showed that there are a handful of challenges impacting small-business marketing. These were the top challenges that small businesses faced, in descending order: