Just like in society where we have a class divide — The Have More’s, The Have’s, and the Have Not’s — there is a class divide in marketing between large enterprises and small to mid-size businesses.

Digital technology and the Internet have totally transformed every aspect of marketing from content creation to analytics. And, each marketing function has multiple skill sets required for effective implementation. This complexity is confronted and mastered with glaring success by large enterprises. But for mid-size and small businesses this complexity makes ROI virtually unattainable.

The real bad news for smaller enterprises is that they are offered limited tools that are sold as marketing solutions. The classic example is in the email marketing arena. Literally dozens of services offer “email marketing” that’s “easy-to-use.” But they tout their ability to tell their users who read their emails, or who clicked on a link as marketing. It’s not.

Every client I’ve ever worked with uses email marketing primarily to either entice a sale or promote attendance at an event. So I ask if they can tell who made a purchase or attended an event based on their email marketing I get the same pause for consideration, followed by a resigned “no” response.

The truth is that email marketing is very effective at enticing sales and promoting events, and you can measure the effectiveness including who actually takes the desired action. But it requires planning, proper configuration of email systems, and personal data collection to happen. These are the things not included in the monthly fee.

I look forward to the emergence of new offerings that fuse professional services with tools and technologies to enable the little guys to step up their marketing game.