How we got you to help us to help you.
Here at JSEO, we’re committed to providing the best and most effective service for our clients at every turn. Always looking to remain ahead of our competitors, we commissioned a nationwide telephone survey of small businesses in order to find out their opinions on the techniques and changing trends in the world of online marketing.
The poll, carried out by ForeFront Market Research on our behalf, was made up of a total of 12 questions and covered everything from the techniques employed by small businesses to improve their online presence, to the importance they place on online marketing when it comes to bringing in new customers.
The results we got have been great at helping us work out exactly what small businesses expect and more crucially, what they want, from their online marketing campaigns.
The Importance of Online Marketing
There has always been a fairly long-standing and widely held view among sceptics in the SEO community that small businesses tend to see online marketing as a waste of time and money; a myth that our survey goes some way to dispelling.
While there is still a small contingency of small businesses looking who do share this view, we found that 70.1% of those asked agreed with the statement “year on year, online marketing is becoming more important to your company’s growth”.
Following this we were pleased, though not hugely surprised, to hear that 76.3% said that they expected their online marketing budget to increase in 2016.
Online Marketing Techniques
While this confirmed that more and more smaller businesses are becoming aware of the importance of online marketing when it comes to growing and cementing a customer base, we found that there was a lot more uncertainty with regards to the actual implementation of the relevant techniques.
When it came to specifics, we asked the businesses if they had made use of any of the following: SEO, Pay Per Click or Display Advertising. And indeed almost a third of those surveyed didn’t actually know whether they had or not!
70.3% of businesses asked agreed that they had been facing difficulties when it came to upskilling employees in order to keep up with the ever changing world of online marketing and the techniques involved. It was no surprise to hear then, that 68% said that they had outsourced their online marketing campaign to an external agency.
Overall, our results showed a positive trend: small businesses all over the country are aware of the important of online marketing as a great way of reaching a wide range of customers without having their voices drowned out by the competition. And while there is still uncertainty with regards to the exact techniques that should be employed, this will hopefully be cleared up as time goes on.
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