For small-business marketers, are fewer channels better?
May 23, 2011
As small businesses have expanded their use of online marketing, respondents in 2011 indicated they were much less satisfied with the effectiveness of these channels. Website, email and search were rated most effective for customer acquisition, but even these had dropped since the prior year.
Finding new customers is the greatest business challenge for small businesses, according to a February 2011 survey by Bredin Business Information, and small businesses are turning to a wide variety of online marketing channels to do so.
Small-business owners were most likely to say they used websites to find new customers (85.8%), followed by email and search marketing, each used by about three-quarters of respondents. Notably, every online marketing channel showed a dramatic increase in usage between 2010 and 2011.
With a confidence interval of ±5%, the survey results can be used directionally to indicate a great level of experimentation among small businesses using digital marketing, according to Bredin.
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