Brands Small Business Owners Recommend and Some They Don’t

To trust or not to trust. That is a question small and medium-sized business owners often find themselves asking when it comes to relying on certain brands for day to day business operations and other needs.

Keeping their interests in mind, Alignable, a Boston-based platform for local businesses, has launched the SMB Trust Index. It measures companies based on an assigned Net Promoter Score, submitted by contributors on the Alignable platform.

The SMB Trust Index identifies brands that small to medium-sized businesses trust the most and would recommend to their peers. With the help of this index, companies for the first time will be able to use a Net Promoter Score as a benchmark when measuring themselves against competitors. The index also aims to create a network of trust between businesses that may now get a better idea of the  kinds of companies with which they wish to do business.

Small business tools like the SMB Index give technology providers a clearer picture of how they are being perceived by their users too. More than 20 small business service providers are ranked in the Q4 2015 Index.

Based on the results, the brand most trusted by small businesses was WordPress, with a Net Promoter Index of 73. Battling at the bottom of the list were Yelp and Groupon, with a Net Promoter Index of -66 and -65 respectively. Facebook fell out of the Top 10.

MailChimp and Square, however both saw their scores go up by 3 points compared to previous quarters.

All 25 national brands that made up the list for the survey, represent companies, products and services that small business owners use. Each brand was ranked on a siding scale of 0-10 by Alignable members. The Net Promoter Index was then calculated by subtracting percentage of detractors (those rated 0 to 6) from percentage of percentage of promoters (those rated 7 to 10). The result was a range in which 100 represents the highest rank of trust and  -100 the lowest.

In a release announcing the results of the Index, Eric Groves, the CEO and co-founder of Alignable, said, “There is certainly huge opportunity for brands in this market, but in selling to small businesses, success revolves around gaining a disproportionate share of the available market. To claim this share, brands must be both present and trusted among the small business community. These net promoter scores reflect just how well some brands are and aren’t doing that.”

This quarter, the SMB index showed WordPress followed by Authorize with a Net Promoter Score of 58, MailChimp with a Net Promoter score of 50 and so on. WordPress’s score gave it the highest rank out of 25 nationally recognized brands used by small business owners.

GoDaddy fell one point in positioning and Wix and Weebly fell 4 and 8 points, respectively.

A 2-year old company co-founded by Groves and Venkat Krishnamurthy, Alignable is a social network for local business owners. The platform allows local businesses to connect with each other, share information and post to a communal news feed. It can also be used for marketing.

The scores for the index were based on ratings and reviews from more than 6,000 small business owners and managers across 7,000 communities in North America.

Check out the full infographic to see how your favorite brands ranks:

Images: Alignable

This article, "Brands Small Business Owners Recommend and Some They Don’t" was first published on Small Business Trends