What The Marketing Unicorns Do To Grow 190% Faster Than Other SMEs

• 9,737 UK SME websites were analysed across 12 factors for their messaging and given a score out of 100 for the strength of their performance in each criterion.

• For each factor, the average growth of the companies that scored 80 or more, was always greater than the average growth for companies scoring less than 40.

• The median 2-year growth of companies that consistently scored 80 or more for each factor (dubbed the Marketing Unicorns) was 20% vs 6.9% for everyone else, a 190% increase.

Quick links

• Introduction
• The Approach
• The Twelve Factors
• Results
• The Impact
• Marketing Unicorns
• An Example
• About The Data

Introduction

Marketing for SMEs is tough. As a small to mid-size company, you likely lack the resources, processes and brand awareness of your larger competitors. You need to make every penny count.

But all too often, this results in SMEs only investing in marketing where a direct return on investment can be measured, such as PPC, SEO, email marketing and exhibiting at events.

That’s not to say that investing in these promotional channels is a bad idea. Far from it. We’ve delivered 10x returns for businesses by doing just that. But, if all you do is invest in these promotional channels and ignore the fundamental building blocks of your marketing, you’re just going to add to the noise of sameness as most of your competitors. At best, you’ll underperform your potential.

However, I’ve also been in board meetings where investors, CEOs and chairmen demand to know exactly what ROI they can expect from investing in some of the “fluffier” areas of marketing. I learned the hard way that the correct answer isn’t “I don’t know”.

This research, covering almost 10,000 UK SMEs, aims to shed light on the impact of getting the marketing fundamentals right for an SME.

The Approach

We analysed the website content and headcount growth rates of 9,737 businesses headquartered in the UK with a headcount of between 6 and 100 employees (inclusive) as at June 2022. We excluded companies with fewer than 6 employees as at June 2022 as it was felt that many of these businesses would be speculative start-ups with little to no traction that marketing activity would be able to affect directly.

Headcount growth was measured using data from LinkedIn between June 2022 and June 2024. Only 35 of the businesses included in the study are publicly traded on stock exchanges. We therefore used headcount as a measure for business growth instead of revenue or profit as the vast majority of the businesses analysed are privately held and therefore public information about their finances is not available.

We used ChatGPT4o to analyse the content on the home pages of these companies’ websites using twelve different criteria. The same prompt was used for each company’s analysis and ChatGPT returned a score out of 100 for how well the copy on the homepage of these websites met each of these criteria. Because the analysis hinges on analysing the copy on the website homepage, we selected businesses operating in industries likely to be B2B oriented. The reasoning for this is you might expect B2C websites to be heavily image based rather than directly communicating to the reader using explicit messages in their copy.

When analysing the data we measured the median headcount growth for companies instead of the mean average. This is because many of the very small businesses were able to achieve headcount growth of multiple hundreds of percent, sometimes over one thousand percent, whereas even the worst performing businesses could only shrink their headcount by a maximum of 100%. Had we used the mean average figures the results would have been too heavily skewed by the minority of the ultra-successful businesses.

To understand whether the impact of the marketing factors changed with organisation size we analysed the performance of these 9,737 companies as a whole, and also in two different clusters. Cluster one represents 6,314 very small businesses and start-ups with a starting headcount of 6 to 20 (inclusive). Cluster two is made up of 3,423 more established businesses with a headcount of 21 to 100 (inclusive).

It is worth noting that there are many reasons unconnected to marketing why the headcount of an individual business may change. Strong performance on one or more of the analysed criteria does not guarantee strong business performance, and poor marketing performance does not guarantee weak business performance. For example, across all companies that scored 80 or more for the criterion of “Character” 32% saw their headcount reduce between June 2022 and June 2024, 11% stayed the same and 57% saw their headcount grow. There is clearly significant variance between individual companies, their scores and their growth rate. However, across such a large number of companies in this analysis it is possible to identify trends that can stack the odds of success in your favour.

To smooth this variance out, when analysing the data, we clustered companies together into score brackets. For ease of comparison we keep the score brackets the same for every criteria, and although in some instances this results in some brackets having low numbers of companies within them, for most factors each score bracket contains at least 10% of the companies analysed.

The Twelve Factors

The twelve factors analysed in this study are listed below and were based on the copy used on the homepage of each companies’ website. While the exact ChatGPT prompt used in this analysis is confidential, a top level summary of the aspects considered is below:

1. Character – How well defined is the customer, including their needs?

2. Problem – Is a single, foundational problem identified and vilified that is preventing the customer from realising their needs? Are they external, internal or philosophical problems?

3. Guide – Does the company present itself as the hero or the guide? Are there signals that communicate empathy and authority?

4. Plan – Is there a clear plan communicated for what the visitor should do next? Once engaged, is there an agreement for what that person can expect from interacting with that business?

5. Call to Action – Is a clear and direct call to action communicated?

6. Success – Are the benefits of success clearly stated?

7. Avoiding Failure – Are the costs of failure clearly communicated without overstating it?

8. Character Transformation – Do they communicate what life was like before working with their business and how it has ended up since working with them?

9. Language Used – Is the language used on the website jargon-heavy? Is it full of meaningless statements or is it clear and easy to understand?

10. Company or Customer Focus – Does the copy focus inwardly on the vendor or does it focus on the customer, regardless of any trust and authority signals?

11. Uniqueness of Position – Does the website communicate a unique position that’s not common in their industry? For example, as a firm of accountants, being able to prepare your company accounts is not a unique position.

12. Brand Archetype – How closely does the website’s communication and language adhere to a single one of Jung’s brand archetypes and portray a consistent and coherent brand style?

The first eight factors in this analysis form the basis of the book Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. While the approach detailed in that book is not revolutionary, it provides a simple and useful framework of the main aspects businesses should consider for how they communicate with their customers and the aspects they should focus on in their marketing.

In addition to these Story Brand factors we also included the language used, whether the copy is company or customer-focused, the uniqueness of the position presented and the strength of any brand archetype that is communicated.

Results

The average (mean) scores for each factor that we analysed are listed in table 1.

Across all companies, the factor with the highest average (mean) score is “Language Used” with a mean score of 70.83. This indicates that of all the factors analysed, using language that’s clear and avoiding jargon was the easiest for companies to achieve.

At the other end of the scale are the factors for “Avoiding Failure” and “Character Transformation”, both with mean average scores in the low 40’s. That “Avoiding Failure” scored the lowest is perhaps unsurprising as guidance in the Story Brand framework is to treat it like a chef uses salt, don’t overdo it. However, as we’ll see later on, companies that scored highly for messaging about avoiding failure, grew significantly more than similar businesses which failed to communicate the risks of failure to their prospective customers.

The fact that Character Transformation scored so low indicates that most companies struggle to articulate the impact of the success they bring to their clients.

The ranking of average scores for each factor is the same across both cohorts of companies analysed (less than 21 employees and 21 or more employees).

Across all factors, companies with 21 or more employees scored slightly higher than their counterparts with fewer than 21 employees. This suggests that as companies grow and mature, they’re more likely to be able to invest in better and more effective marketing messaging.

The Impact

Tables 2, 3 and 4 show the median percentage headcount change between June 2022 and June 2024 for each of the analysed factors broken down by the score bracket each company achieved, separated into all companies (Table 2), companies with 6 to 20 employees (Table 3) and companies with 21 to 100 employees (Table 4). They also summarise the difference between the median headcount change of companies scoring in the highest score bracket vs those in the lowest score bracket, and the percentage increase or decrease that this represents. For example, across all companies, those that scored 80 or more for the language used on their website grew at 8.57% vs just 2.35% for those companies scoring less than 40. This is a difference of 6.22% which means that companies scoring 80 or more grew at a median rate 264.68% greater than their counterparts scoring less than 40.

For every factor analysed across all companies (Table 2), those companies scoring 80 or more always had a median growth rate greater than their counterparts scoring less than 40. This also holds true when looking at companies with between 6 and 20 employees. For the most part it also holds true when looking at companies with a headcount of 21 to 100 employees with the exception of the factor “Character Transformation” which shows a headcount growth of 4.5% for companies scoring 80 or more, which is 32.84% lower than companies scoring less than 40 for this factor. However, it is worth noting that there were only 34 companies with 21 to 100 employees that scored 80 or more so the numbers are very low. When broadening this out to include companies scoring 60 or more (999 companies in total), the median headcount growth was 8.9%, 32.84% more than companies scoring less than 40.

Across all companies, each factor also shows an increase from each score bracket to the next, with the median growth rate achieved by companies in each score bracket being equal to or greater than companies in a lower score bracket. However, this coherence does not hold across all factors when splitting the companies into groups based on their starting headcount (6 to 20 and 21 to 100 employee groups). The factors which show a median headcount change that is equal to or higher than companies in a lower score bracket, regardless of company size, are Uniqueness of Position, Character, Brand Archetype and Plan.

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5 ranks how impactful each criteria is across all companies and for companies depending on their headcount. The ranking is based on the difference in median growth rate achieved by companies scoring 80 or more compared to companies scoring less than 40 for each criteria. While we saw earlier that all factors appear to be correlated with the median growth rate of businesses, there are significant differences between the most impactful factors for different size groups of company.

Table 5

The Marketing Unicorns

Across all 9,737 companies, only 23 managed to score 80 or more across all of the 12 factors. We have termed these companies the Marketing Unicorns due to their rarity (just 0.24% of companies).

For these Marketing Unicorns, the median headcount change between June 2022 and June 2024 was 20%, the mean change was 36.9%.

This compares to a median headcount growth of 6.9%, and a mean change of 18.03% for non-Marketing Unicorns during this period.

The median headcount growth was therefore 190% higher, and the mean headcount growth was 105% higher for Marketing Unicorns than for non-Marketing Unicorns.

For companies with between 6 and 20 employees at June 2022, there were 18 who scored 80 or higher across all factors, representing 0.29% of companies. Of these 18 Marketing Unicorn companies, the median growth rate was 21.8%, vs just 6.25% for non Marketing Unicorns. The Marketing Unicorns with between 6 and 20 employees had a median growth rate 264% higher than non Marketing Unicorns.

For companies with between 21 and 100 employees at June 2022, there were only 5 companies scoring 80 or more, representing 0.14% of companies. This compares to 0.29% of companies with between 6 and 20 employees. This indicates that, while the group of larger SMEs achieved a higher average score for each of the factors,  they found it harder to score consistently highly across all factors. With only 5 companies that had between 21 and 100 employees, scoring 80 or higher across all factors, we expanded the criteria to allow scores of 70 and above. There were 132 companies in this size bracket who achieved a score of 70 or more across all criteria. The median headcount growth rate for this cohort was 17.4%. This compares to 7.7% for other companies who failed to achieve scores consistently above 70, an increase of 126%.

An Example

Ravio is an example of a company doing things well with a combined score of 1,070 across all 12 analysed factors. Ravio are one of the Marketing Unicorns scoring at least 80 in every one of the analysed factors.

In June 2022, Ravio’s headcount was 16 employees. 2 years later, they had grown to 61 employees, a growth of 369%.

About The Data

The below tables show how many of each company scored in each score group for each of the factors analysed.