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Table 2. Numbers and percentages of the categories within SME Size, Revenue (in 2014) and Marketing
responsible(s).
Most SMEs make their marketing plan once a year (33%, N=59), followed by a group of
SMEs that never make a marketing plan (29%, N=53). A minority, 12% of the SMEs, has a
“long-term” planning (less than 1x per year) and an equally small group (12%) has meetings
for marketing planning several times a year.
The larger the SME (more employees) and/or the larger the revenue (in 2014) of the SME,
the more manpower is assigned to marketing. Not surprisingly, there is also a positive linear
relation between the number of marketers in a SME and the frequency with which a
marketing plan is developed (ranging from ‘never’ to ‘multiple times a year’). Correlations
are shown in Table 3.
Table 3. 2-tailed correlation coefficients and significances of SME-size, Revenue (2014), Marketing
responsible(s) and Marketing plan(s).
Furthermore, SMEs (only!) spend 2% (in average) of their revenue on marketing. This figure
might seem low, especially in comparison with B2C and larger companies (where this rate
goes up to 15%), but the current research focused on B2B companies, which might explain
this lower percentage.
Next, it seems that a SME with a marketing plan spends more money in marketing than one
without a marketing plan, at least, expressed as a percentage of the overall turnover. And
finally, larger SMEs (both in size as in revenue) spent relatively less money (% of the
revenue) on marketing, than smaller SMEs. This probably means that the same marketing
expenses for the same marketing actions take out a bigger bite of the (smaller) budget in
small SMEs rather than that smaller SMEs actually invest more in marketing.
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