July 11, 2007 | Wednesday
Internet most important marketing tool for SMEs, too
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |Online Sales
A new survey reveals that while many entrepreneurs seem to realise that there is much to be gained online for their businesses, many are not quite sure how exactly to go about getting it.
The Capital Access Network Small Business Barometer, a quarterly poll of 250 business owners nationwide who accept credit cards from customers as a method of payment, found that small companies ranked an Internet presence or website as the number one method for business marketing, over such traditional tools as networking, public relations and print and radio advertising...Business owners are making efforts to increase their Internet presence. Forty-four percent say they plan on spending more on Internet tools this year compared to 2006, while 27 percent plan to spend the same amount as last year.
Let’s ponder what this tells us.
As the piece points out, it is human nature - especially if capital is limited - to stick with what is known. For many business owners, especially those whose companies are more modest in size than the mega-brands that invest large sums of cash in the web without much worry, the mysterious nature of how to gain sales through use of the web can be so daunting that it renders them almost paralysed in this area.
The survey shows that 46 per cent of the responding entrepreneurs said that at least some of their business comes from the internet. If asked if they knew exactly how or with what ROI, I suspect many of them would not be able to answer confidently.
This is where a service like Latitude White could prove an extremely lucrative investment for the savvy SME. I’m not about to turn this blog post into a cheesy sales spiel, but this survey clearly shows that there is a large need for a solution that bridges the gap between trying to cobble together a search strategy in-house (cross fingers, close eyes, and hope for the best) and the intense attention and vast resources required by companies that have more to spend.
Entrepreneurs generally eat, breathe, and sleep their businesses. I really don’t know how much sleeping a business owner could get done if he or she had no idea how many sales were being lost due to inactivity online. For that is how this situation needs to be approached: It’s not “How many more sales could we make?” but “How many sales are we losing unnecessarily?”
What is called for is not merely extending onto the internet by using a few tools to get active online, but a strong, informed, decisive move onto the web and into the wallets of those who, for all intents and purposes, live there. For ideas on how to get started, please do get in touch.
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