Small businesses that use programmatic advertising are optimistic about the future, with more than two thirds of them planning to increase their annual ad budget spend in 2018, according to the newly released data from BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor™ (LCM) survey of small businesses. Programmatic advertising is an automated channel that can find and place ads among target audiences. While a majority of programmatic spend is done by national and larger companies, small businesses use programmatic to compete due to the low cost and consumer targeting capabilities. In our survey 20% of small businesses say they use programmatic advertising. Financial services and professional services small businesses show larger current use of programmatic advertising with retail and financial services showing the biggest future adoption. Another caveat of small businesses that use programmatic is that they are engaging ad agencies or other third parties for all their digital advertising. Sellers should look to offer more than programmatic to their small business clients (especially those in financial, professional services and retail), other digital products from websites to social and mobile ads can increase their account spend.From our survey small businesses that use programmatic advertising we see larger small businesses, which we call Plus Spenders (>$25K average annual ad spend), increase their overall annual ad budgets from $66k to $76K. Nearly 2/3 of their annual ad budget goes to digital, mobile or social advertising.
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