Measuring Up:
Making up around 90% of businesses and 50% of employment worldwide, small-to-mid sized businesses (SMBs) represent the true backbone of the global economy
But when it comes to digital marketing, these organizations are in a challenging predicament. SMBs are keen to take advantage of new channels and new content formats to maximize their reach and drive growth. But they also want to preserve the uniquely personal and human relationships they have with their customer base.
That, however, is easier said than done. And that’s why TikTok has partnered with National Research Group to spotlight the needs of a critical but often underserved enterprise category. In this article, we’ll explore the marketing opportunities and challenges facing SMBs—defined as organizations with 500 or fewer global employees. And we’ll unpack the steps that platforms can take to better serve and support decision-makers within these businesses.
It's imperative, then, that SMBs leverage digital channels in a way that feels like an authentic extension of their core brand, while ensuring they have something truly relevant to say to existing and potential customers. Ultimately, SMBs are looking to deeply embed themselves within the zeitgeist of online content platforms—and, by doing so, encourage users to see them as active participants in a cultural conversation, rather than as faceless brands trying to sell something.
That, however, is easier said than done. And that’s why TikTok has partnered with National Research Group to spotlight the needs of a critical but often underserved enterprise category. In this article, we’ll explore the marketing opportunities and challenges facing SMBs—defined as organizations with 500 or fewer global employees. And we’ll unpack the steps that platforms can take to better serve and support decision-makers within these businesses.
Our data suggests that there are four key drivers that keep users engaged with social video platforms: comfort, curation, comedy, and connection
Today’s SMBs are highly growth-oriented, and their marketing strategies need to serve this agenda
Right now, SMBs are in growth mode. Whether through customer acquisition and retention, or indirectly through investment in brand-building, SMBs are prioritizing new business opportunities: over a third identified revenue and profitability growth as a critical priority for 2025.
Conversely, relatively few SMBs are prioritizing activities, such as partnership building or internal streamlining, that lack a clear and immediate throughline to revenue growth. Compared to larger organizations, SMBs are more likely to be constrained by their cash flows or to be operating under resource and expertise constraints—and also tend to be more exposed to economic uncertainty.
This all means that the marketing teams of SMBs are under immense pressure, as senior leaders look to them as the engines that power their growth goals. Today’s SMBs are highly attuned to the need to maximize the value of their spend at every point along the marketing funnel.
Marketers within SMBs, therefore, find themselves in an extremely tough situation. On the one hand, they’re facing pressure from leadership teams to act as the tip of the spear for customer acquisition, charged with highly aggressive growth goals. However, actually identifying and finding the audiences they need to reach to achieve those goals is harder than it's ever been.
In our current digital landscape, however, many SMBs are struggling to find their target audiences
From TV and streaming to podcasts, from video games to social media, consumers today are dividing their time and their attention between an ever-growing number of media formats and entertainment options. Even just within the social media and social video landscape, the rise of new platforms and content formats creates a steep barrier to entry for marketers looking to engage new audiences.
So it's easy to see why audience targeting was identified by SMBs as the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of realizing their marketing ambitions. Factor in the budgetary constraints that SMBs are operating under, and the problem becomes even more daunting.
For many SMB marketers, it feels like they’re swimming upstream: constantly trying to figure out which platforms they need to be on to reach their target audiences, learning and re-learning the rules of engagement as platforms wax and wane in popularity and audience behaviors and cultural norms evolve.
Given these challenges and constraints, SMBs have, by and large, chosen to prioritize total audience size when selecting marketing channels for their time and resources. Ultimately, they’re looking for the platforms that are truly at the heart of today's digital culture—the ones that will offer the largest possible reach balanced against the lowest possible barrier to entry.
Accessibility and ease of use are critical. Given the pace of change within today’s digital ecosystem, marketers within SMBs don’t want to have to overcome steep learning curves before they start seeing a return on their efforts. By the same token, they value the ability to flex and refocus their marketing strategies in response to audience trends; they don’t want to feel “locked in” to a specific platform because of the sunk costs associated with learning how to get value out of it.
In practice, this means that the majority of SMBs have chosen to focus their marketing efforts on three channels in particular: social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; SEO and paid placement within search engines such as Google; and social video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.
All three of these channels are used by approximately two-thirds or more of today’s SMB—and all of them offer a compelling balance between reach, ease of use, and cost effectiveness.
Marketers, therefore, are looking for platforms where they can drive full funnel goals in a way that feels culturally relevant to their target audiences
While paid advertising on these platforms is certainly a critical component of SMBs' digital marketing mix, these businesses are increasingly cognizant of the need to accompany that investment with efforts to organically grow their digital audience. That’s especially true in the US, where 76% of such businesses view organic content as being at least equally as important as paid content.
Partly, this may be a matter of cost-effectiveness: a high-impact organic post can provide SMBs with a means of reaching their audience without breaking the bank.
But it also reflects the deeply personal and authentic bond that many SMBs enjoy with their customers. Organic content can represent an extension of that relationship: a way to engage existing and potential customers that feels honest, conversational, and not overly “sales-y.”
Organic and paid content need to reinforce and amplify each other
Measuring marketing success remains a major hurdle for SMBs, with little consensus around the metrics that matter
SMBs' top business priorities for 2025
Social video is the future
So how is social video shifting behaviors?
To answer this, TikTok collaborated with NRG to leverage insights from their Future of Social Video report—an annual study that surveys 1,000 social video viewers. We wanted to explore the long tail opportunities and the alchemy of elements that capture users’ attention, engagement, and trust— ingredients advertisers cannot ignore if they want to succeed in this ever-changing digital landscape.
COMFORT
CURATION
COMEDY
CONNECTION
Channels used by SMBs to achieve marketing objectives
SMBs' views on organic vs. paid content
The average number of marketing platforms used by SMBs
More effective
As effective
Less effective
Audience targeting
Budget constraints
Market saturation
Keeping up with trends
Creative volume needed
Data privacy concerns
Platform changes
Ad fatigue
Measuring ROI
Attribution changes
Legal issues
SMBs' top reasons for using marketing platforms
Specifically, the SMB ad ecosystem in the US and the UK is dominated by Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Video-driven platforms, in particular, are a crucial component of SMBs' marketing strategies. And short-form video, especially, is increasingly at the leading edge of online culture, and provides businesses a unique opportunity to engage audiences with content that feels truly relevant to their lives and identities.
Given the comparative accessibility of the format, coupled with the depth and quality of engagement it offers, it’s easy to see why so many SMBs are now embracing the marketing opportunities made possible by short-form video.
One of the biggest geographical differences in the marketing strategies of SMBs is the relative importance of WhatsApp. In Brazil—as is the case in many emerging markets—the social messaging platform plays a highly significant role in the media diets of everyday consumers. And we see this reflected in the priorities of SMBs in that market, with almost seven in ten leaning on WhatsApp as a marketing platform.
Top ten marketing platforms among SMBs
48%
Audience reach
46%
Ease of use
42%
Cost effectiveness
39%
Engagement rates
37%
Analytics and insights
36%
Creative tools and features
36%
Community building
35%
Brand alignment
35%
Content creation support
34%
Data privacy features
Social networking platforms
Search engines
Social video platforms
74%
65%
65%
46%
Email newsletters
46%
In-person industry events, trade shows, etc.
40%
Online industry events, webinars, etc.
37%
Advertising agencies
37%
Influencer marketing
37%
Print media
36%
Affiliate marketing
35%
Direct mail
32%
Traditional media
25%
Podcasts
One of the biggest geographical differences in the marketing strategies of SMBs is the relative importance of WhatsApp. In Brazil—as is the case in many emerging markets—the social messaging platform plays a highly significant role in the media diets of everyday consumers. And we see this reflected in the priorities of SMBs in that market, with almost seven in ten leaning on WhatsApp as a marketing platform.
5.5
76%
74%
65%
57%
7
43%
41%
38%
38%
26%
18%
However, creating content that can consistently and organically reach its target audience is easier said than done. Content quality represents the single biggest obstacle for SMBs when it comes to organic content—with many of them lacking the time, the resources, or the know-how to develop content capable of standing out from the crowd and generating sustained audience engagement.
Moreover, many SMBs say that they struggle to understand how to fully leverage platforms’ algorithms to maximize the reach and the engagement of this sort of content. Knowing what sort of material a platform’s algorithm is likely to look favourably on is critical for the success of SMBs’ content strategies. As such, marketers are looking for more effective guidance as to how these algorithms work and how they can get the most out of them, so they can develop campaigns in which organic and paid content work side-by-side to effectively amplify and enhance each other.
Creating quality content, however, is only half the battle. Marketers within SMBs need the ability to accurately measure the return on investment from their spend and to reliably and consistently measure the performance of their content—and this is another area where many firms are currently running into difficulties.
Presently, there are at least 11 different metrics in widespread use by SMBs to measure the success of digital marketing initiatives. And while engagement rate is, by a narrow margin, seen as the most important of these, there is otherwise little consensus around how these different metrics ought to be prioritized and interpreted.
Of course, measuring ROI has always been a challenge for marketers. But for SMBs—who are often operating under tight resource constraints with little room for error in their marketing spend—this challenge is a particularly acute one.
So, given the marketing challenges currently faced by SMBs, what steps can platforms take to better support marketers and decision makers within these organizations?
For one thing, platforms can help alleviate the creative pressure on SMBs by providing them with better support for creating and editing content—such as content templates, filters, and other in-app tools.
To better support SMBs, platforms need to offer expanded creative tools and more effective ways of measuring success
At the same time, platforms also need to prioritize the provision of improved analytics for SMB customers. Ideally, platforms should be providing SMBs with real-time analytics that allow for a direct mapping of marketing spend to business impact—and the ability to synthesize meaningful insights from the many different metrics available to them.
70%
68%
61%
57%
7
45%
44%
40%
34%
34%
88%
77%
75%
69%
7
63%
50%
36%
24%
24%
Strengthen brand awareness / reputation
27%
26%
Increase customer loyalty and retention
23%
Enhance customer experience
21%
Leverage AI to enhance decision-making
19%
Develop new products or services
19%
Expand market share within industry or niche
17%
Reduce expenses
15%
Optimize operations and streamline workflows
14%
Build strategic partnerships and collaborations
Increase revenue and profitability
35%
Respondents were asked to select top three priorities
Metrics used by SMBs to track marketing success
Engagement rate
87%
84%
Click-through rate
83%
Revenue generated
78%
Return on ad spend
76%
Impressions
76%
Average time on site
74%
Cost per acquisition
71%
Customer lifetime value
69%
Bounce rate
66%
Share of voice
76%
Conversion rate
Looking ahead to the future, SMBs see AI as a tool that could turbocharge their marketing efforts
Fortunately, there are positive signs on the horizon that the ongoing AI revolution could go a long way towards addressing both the creative and measurement challenges faced by SMB marketers. Already, platforms are embracing AI to give creators more tools for building content—as well as making their analytics dashboards more responsive and easier to navigate.
For their part, SMBs have been eager to embrace the marketing possibilities opened up by AI tools. Indeed, investment in AI and automation is the single biggest medium-term priority for today’s SMB marketers: 62% in the US, as well as over half in the UK and Brazil, point to greater reliance on AI and automation as a critical business objective.
While AI products and services have enormous potential to revolutionize SMB marketing, it’s far from guaranteed that all businesses in this category will be able to take full advantage of them. Many SMBs are likely to find themselves at the mercy of both expertise and budgetary constraints—and, as a result, may struggle to incorporate AI tools into their marketing operations as easily as their larger competitors.
In particular, there’s a danger that the advent of these new tools could exacerbate the impact of the considerable “expertise gap” that exists within the SMB landscape. Many of the smallest businesses within the SMB category already feel as if they lack the in-house digital marketing expertise necessary to keep up with the competition. Without the ability to rely on dedicated digital marketers to stay abreast of new developments within the field of AI, such businesses may find themselves struggling to make truly effective use of the technology.
And then there’s the cost issue to consider. For SMBs, budgetary constraints are the single biggest factor holding back their ability to incorporate new technologies into their marketing operations.
While AI solutions certainly have the potential, in the long-run, to facilitate substantial cost-savings for SMBs, many may be put off by the initial upfront investment required to access these tools and to smoothly integrate them with existing processes and platforms. As a result, there's a danger that SMBs end up outflanked by larger competitors who can more easily eat the cost of AI investment.
However, budgetary constraints and a lack of expertise could hamper SMBs' ability to take advantage of the AI revolution
41%
Better creative tools
36%
Improved analytics
35%
Success stories from competitors
35%
Enhanced targeting options
34%
Free ad credits
34%
Audience insights
33%
Customer support
31%
Data security guarantees
30%
Simplified ad management
21%
Case studies
I can't tell
21%
39%
37%
2%
36%
35%
25%
5%
40%
36%
19%
5%
32%
37%
28%
4%
BR
UK
US
TOTAL
35%
Content quality
34%
Engagement levels
32%
Platform algorithms
31%
Content quantity
31%
Time constraints
Keeping up with trends
29%
Measuring effectiveness
26%
Creative blocks
24%
23%
Budget limitations
18%
Lack of tools and features
14%
Difficulty using tools and features
SMBs' challenges when creating organic content
62%
52%
49%
47%
7
31%
53%
49%
49%
42%
7
28%
Greater reliance on AI and automation
Significant increase in digital spend
Shift toward more data-driven decision-making
Focus on sustainability and social impact
Continued use of traditional methods
Greater reliance on AI and automation
Significant increase in digital spend
Shift toward more data-driven decision-making
Focus on sustainability and social impact
Continued use of traditional methods
Shift toward more data-driven decision-making
Greater reliance on AI and automation
Significant increase in digital spend
Focus on sustainability and social impact
Continued use of traditional methods
If platforms want to ensure a truly level playing field for SMBs, they cannot afford to simply deploy new AI features and leave marketers to figure out for themselves how to get sustained value from them. Rather, platforms need to ensure that their AI tools make commercial sense for an SMB audience—and ought to be providing hands-on training and upskilling support for marketers looking to take advantage of them.
In the face of these challenges and opportunities, SMBs are finding creative new ways to connect with their audiences
Increasingly, SMBs are recognizing the need for creative marketing solutions to meet the needs of our current moment—and many of them are looking to short-form video on TikTok to find those solutions. The platform’s reach and ease of use, combined with the potential for exciting and innovative creator collaborations, has made it an invaluable tool for connecting with audiences in a culturally relevant way.
Today’s SMBs are leveraging short-form content on TikTok to achieve their marketing ambitions at every stage of the funnel: building brand awareness, launching new products, and driving website and app traffic to expand their reach and fuel international sales.
It’s not just their size that sets SMBs apart from their competitors. These businesses have a wholly unique set of marketing needs and priorities—informed both by the constraints under which they’re required to operate, and by the nature of their relationships with their end customers.
In today's high-stakes environment, SMBs can’t afford marketing missteps. Businesses in this category need to be allocating their resources towards the platforms that matter the most—and platforms, for their part, need to understand the unique pressures that SMBs are under, and provide actionable, tailored support that empowers these vital businesses to succeed.
For SMBs, digital marketing has never been more important—or more challenging to get right
50%
Budget constraints
43%
Integration with existing systems
39%
Lack of expertise
30%
Regulatory concerns
29%
Resistance to change
SMBs' top constraints for adopting new digital marketing tools and technologies
Murci
This UK-based fashion brand was able to use retargeting on TikTok to fuel its growth and sales ambitions, driving conversion by prioritizing engagement with consumers who’d previously interacted with their TikTok content or visited their website.
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By leveraging TikTok’s carousel format, this US-based skincare brand was able to showcase multiple SKUs within the context of a single ad, crafting a consistent and compelling product story that felt culturally relevant to its target audience.
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Vitamasques
Using TikTok’s Promote feature, this Brazilian coffee brand was able to amplify the power of their organic content. Through targeted ads, they were able to generate 40,000 new followers while driving footfall to their physical locations.
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We Coffee
By experimenting with bid caps and testing different creatives, this personal finance brand was able to address their measurement challenges and quantify the impact of their digital campaigns.
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AdvantageAutoLoans
Through TikTok’s Smart+ Web Campaign solution, this personalized gift company harnessed the power of AI to streamline their campaign optimization process, freeing up their team’s time and resources while slashing CPA by 35%.
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Hooray Heroes
Five examples of how brands across the globe have been unlocking the power of short-form video
1
Right now, revenue growth and brand building are the key objectives for SMBs. Consequently, marketing teams are under immense pressure to deliver at every stage of the funnel. relaxation, entertainment, or a bit of both.
THE GROWTH AGENDA
Alongside content creation, accurate and meaningful measurement is the other major challenge facing today’s SMB marketers. Right now, there’s little consensus among SMBs around the metrics that truly matter, or how to accurately tie them to revenue growth.
4
3
For SMBs, organic content is every bit as important as paid. However, many struggle to consistently create content of the quality necessary to organically reach its target audience.groups through humor, memes, and viral moments.
2
experiences via social video
In an increasingly fragmented digital landscape, SMBs’ marketing teams are struggling to reach the audiences that truly matter to them. As a result, they’re prioritizing investment in the platforms that are most culturally relevant to their target audiences; those which provide access to the highest number of consumers with the lowest possible barrier to entry.their home, blending content and commerce effortlessly.
PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
PLATFORM PRIORITIES
CONTENT EFFECTIVENESS
5
SMBs see investment in AI as a critical priority for actualizing their marketing ambitions, but may lack the expertise and budgets necessary to take full advantage of these tools.
AI OUTLOOK
In today's high-stakes environment, SMBs can’t afford marketing missteps. Businesses in this category need to be allocating their resources towards the platforms that matter the most—and platforms, for their part, need to understand the unique pressures that SMBs are under, and provide actionable, tailored support that empowers these vital businesses to succeed.
Methodology:
Unless otherwise specified, data featured in this article has been drawn from a study of 1,500 decision-makers within SMBs (businesses with 500 or fewer global employees) across the US, UK, and Brazil. This study was conducted online in October 2024, and featured participants drawn from a wide range of industries.
BACK TO TOP
56%
55%
48%
44%
24%
At a glance: Five key trends defining SMB marketing
Compared to paid content, organic content is...
SMBs' strategies for marketing evolution over the next 3-5 years
Marketing and advertising challenges among SMBs
SMBs' confidence in digital marketing tools and platforms
Advanced + expert
Very small business
Small business
Mid-market
43%
41%
39%
37%
33%
30%
29%
27%
25%
14%
13%
Factors that would convince SMBs to start advertising on a new platform
Understanding the digital marketing needs and priorities of small-to-mid sized businesses
29%
61%
75%
30%
Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
SEO and paid placement within search engines such as Google
Social video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube
Given these challenges and constraints, SMBs have, by and large, chosen to prioritize total audience size when selecting marketing channels for their time and resources. Ultimately, they’re looking for the platforms that are truly at the heart of today's digital culture—the ones that will offer the largest possible reach balanced against the lowest possible barrier to entry.
Accessibility and ease of use are critical. Given the pace of change within today’s digital ecosystem, marketers within SMBs don’t want to have to overcome steep learning curves before they start seeing a return on their efforts. By the same token, they value the ability to flex and refocus their marketing strategies in response to audience trends; they don’t want to feel “locked in” to a specific platform because of the sunk costs associated with learning how to get value out of it.
In practice, this means that the majority of SMBs have chosen to focus their marketing efforts on three channels in particular:
All three of these channels are used by approximately two-thirds or more of today’s SMBs—and all of them offer a compelling balance between reach, ease of use, and cost effectiveness.
23%
