As part of the ritual of examining local commerce and SMB Saas strategies, Localogy goes right to the source: SMBs themselves. How do they feel about marketing and operational software? What features do they want? And how has their hunger changed in a pandemic? This is all a moving target.
Localogy’s Modern Commerce Monitor (MCM) answers these and other questions across the SMB SaaS product set, which we preview in this Benchmark Bytes series. And we recently entered a new chapter of this series, with highlights from the latest wave (8.0) of Modern Commerce Monitor.
After examining how many SMBs use mobile apps to run their businesses last week, we switch gears this week drill down into the average number of apps they use. “Deskless” SMB proprietors will utilize mobile apps to accomplish everything from communications to CRM, fintech, and marketing.
Data Dive
– Diving right in, SMB mobile app penetration quantity currently averages 7.4.
– This figure is up from 7.35 in Wave 7 of the study and 6.35 percent in Wave 6.
– This growing quantity logical, as SMBs now have access to powerful computing devices in their pockets
– Depending on the vertical several are on their feet (think: home services) as opposed to in front of their desktop or laptop computers.
– However, the growth in this figure seems to be plateauing, which could be due to a few factors.
– The Covid software boom is reflected in these figures, in that software saw rapid growth over a few years, which has more recently slowed.
– After Covid-accelerated adoption, SMB needs are mostly met and they could be putting new adoption on hold for a while as they work with the tools they rapidly adopted in the Covid era.
– SMB adoption growth is also approaching a natural ceiling and is decelerating as it reaches that limit.
– All the above means that competition will heat up in the SMB SaaS space, as growth will likely come from market share gains within a zero-sum competitive environment.
– This competition will drive product and feature differentiation among SMB SaaS vendors.
Localogy members can access full charts and SMB survey reports. Non-members can purchase reports.
Long-Tail Opportunity
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – as well as operational and fintech tools – continues to grow rapidly. SMB SaaS startups and online services providers are correspondingly thriving as it continues to grow as a leading subsector of the broader SaaS universe. There’s a long-tail opportunity at play.
Meanwhile, new SMB SaaS users could represent permanent adopters – a concept that accelerated in the Covid era as SMBs were forced to boost their digital transformation. This sends them into the arms of SaaS providers to accomplish a range of marketing and operational functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper into Localogy original survey research. That will include SMB goals and success factors. Let us know what additional insights jump out at you from the above data, and stay tuned for more breakdowns in our Benchmark Bytes series.
