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Dec
09
2011
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Posted 159 days ago ago by John Clark  0 Comments
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1 Wows
In a survey the question was asked, "If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?". The choices are graphed below. As you can see, search engine optimization is the king in the eyes of 2,500 small business owners included in the survey.
Like many, I was not expecting "Traditional media" to rank as well as it did. Apparently newspaper, yellow pages, radio and direct mail still have a strong foot hold. Either because many small business owners can't break away from old habits, whether they work or not, or it's still bringing them the results they expect to see. I'm not sure which is true.
So when going on line to market and do SEO, what is the way those businesses promoted their websites and services?
Keep in mind this survey came from a MerchantCircle's 1.6 million member small business database. Of their respondents, 80% were businesses with less than 4 employees and 63% had a marketing budget of $2,500 or less per year. Just like many of the small businesses we work with, these results may reflect a lot of hit and miss ideas without clear company research and tracking behind it. Many small business like that fly by the seat of their pants in marketing and often do not track results.
A number of questions come to mind out of this, such as:
- Are they simply stuck in their mindset in using traditional media or does it really work?
- SEO is perceived as "free" but do they really do solid SEO, which costs a lot in actual time needed to do it?
- More of them "do nothing" than would choose Social Media. How smart is that?
- The perceived value of Paid search advertising is that it costs to much and therefore not utilized?
- Businesses this size don't have the budget for creating mobile apps or marketing.
- They are using Facebook, but is it bringing results and are they actually using a Business Page?
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