The results of the survey reinforced some of our thinking with regards to online marketing for small businesses and also brought some new activities into the limelight.
As expected 100% of the respondents have a web site and 84.2% indicated that the web site was either very important or essential for the marketing of your company.
The two most requested items in response to the question “If you could make one major change to your web site to make it more effective, what would it be?” were video in the site and search engine optimisation. The search engine optimisation requirement has long been high on the agenda but video is creeping in more and more, plus video can have an effect on the search engine rankings – remember YouTube is the second largest search engine.
63.2% of you update your web site content on a regular basis and the reasons for updating content were all for the right reasons:-
- Improves SEO
- Refresh rankings
- Keeps interest in the site
- Keeps the web site fresh for return visitors
- Up to date information leads to better credibility and trust
Question 8 regarding email marketing provided a mixed set of answers as to the use of email marketing in promoting your business.
The results were as follows as a percentage:-
- News – 47.4%
- Case Histories – 36.8%
- Newsletters and Special Offers were equal third – 31.6%
- Technical Bulletins – 5.3%
On the social media questions 73.7% were actively engaged in social media activities with LinkedIn leading the way (63.2%) followed by Twitter (52.6%) and FaceBook (42.1%)
When it came to blogging the results surprised us as only 31.6% of businesses used a blog for promoting their business. This was surprising as we see a blog as being a big part of SEO and easier to maintain than a web site. Over half of the respondents realised that a blog was important for promotion – 52.9%.
The most overwhelming resonse was to the question “What do you see as the main barrier to promoting your business online? The leading answer here by a long way was – “I don’t have enough time” – with a whopping 72.2% and not understanding the technology was next with 11.1%.
In conclusion
It seems like small businesses are well onboard with online marketing and social media but blogging has yet to catch on. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is still a favourite for improving your online marketing but we feel that this activity doesn’t stand on it’s own anymore, especially with social media coming to the fore front of marketing recently. Although not many businesses are doing it yet it seems there is a real interest in video for the web.
To help us further please comment on these results and let us know what you would like more information about in Online Marketing Today – it might be more information about “How to” articles on blogging, social media or video. Whatever it is let us know.
