4IpaUJbnm

interviewed companies were locally active and were sponsoring small events organised by
local associations. The printing and distribution of own print media, i.e. flyers, magazines
and posters is still very popular as well.
Next to that, advertising in (local) print media is common. Mainly because it is affordable,
especially in comparison to advertising on radio and television, and has quite a big reach.
Since we interviewed SMEs who were mainly active locally, only few of them had the
budgets to advertise on radio or television. Other popular marketing efforts were branded
cars, participating in shows and outdoor marketing such as billboards.
Measuring of ROI of all/oflline marketing efforts is exceptionel
The measuring of ROI of marketing was for most companies exceptionel. The majority did
not measure marketing efforts and said they based their marketing decisions mostly on gut
feeling.
Only 10 of the 27 companies tried to measure the outcome of their marketing efforts and
only one, the largest company (in the bakery industry), had a functional and professional
‘return on investment’ tool (which corroborates the statements made by the marketers of
large companies in the previous section). The other 9 companies managed their data in
Excel, but they did not use a clear method or professional tool. Asked for the reason why;
they found it too expensive to develop or purchase an ROI tool and they preferred spending
their budgets on marketing itself.
The companies that measured ROI were the largest ones. Small companies mostly reported
that they did not have neither time, budget nor staff. Although most of the companies
found it hard to measure, or did not measure their offline marketing efforts, they nearly all
measured their online marketing, because it is straightforward and often built-in in the tool
itself. They used Facebook insights, Google analytics, the analytics of Mailchimp and other e-
mail software and by measuring the leads generated by their website. "We will rather
choose for actions on Facebook or on the website because we can measure them." (DM-Line,
company for custom made cabinets)
The criteria on which SMEs based their marketing tools were: gut feeling, previous actions,
costs, sometimes targeted segment and ‘doing what competitors do’.
Quantitative study of 157 B2B SMEs 2
A questionnaire was sent and completed digitally by 181 SMEs. SMEs that were only
directed to B2C were excluded for further analyses. (final N = 157 SMEs; 65% B2B, 35% both
B2B and B2C).
(Marketing) characteristics of the SMEs
The SMEs were of variable sizes (see Table 2, column 1-2). Most of the SMEs had a turnover
in 2014 that was ‘larger than 5 million €’, followed by ‘1-5 million €’ (column 3-4). Most of
the SMEs had no employee responsible for the marketing; most frequently a coworker took
this task in addition to his/her other tasks (see last 2 columns).
2 The survey was conducted by students: Anthonis, M., Cnudde, N., De Waele, S., Raes, L., & Van Damme, N.
(2016). ROI van lokale marketing [bachelor dissertation]. Gent: Arteveldehogeschool.
128