VerticalResponse recently did a survey to find out how small businesses planned on spending their marketing dollars in 2010. Over 800 small businesses were surveyed, each business having less than 500 employees. There were some vast differences between how money will be spent on email marketing and social media versus spending on banner advertising and search engine marketing (SEM).
From the survey, 74.1% of the survey participants are planning on increasing their use of email marketing while 68.3% plan on increasing their use of social media in 2010. These numbers are not that surprising since social media is a hot topic at the moment, and many companies are investigating ways to make use of social media like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter among others. Email marketing continues to be a strong way to market products even for small businesses. Only 3.8% of the survey respondents stated that they did not plan to use email marketing at all in 2010, thus showing how valuable email marketing continues to be for the small business sector. The survey results for future usage of search engine marketing (SEM), and online banner advertising reflected an opposing future trend.
Future usage of online banner advertising for small businesses was not as promising with 54.2% of all survey respondents stating that they will not be doing online banner advertising in 2010. Of course, the survey results that showed only 23.8% stated that they did not wish to use search engine marketing (SEM) in 2010 are better numbers than those regarding banner advertising, but each set of of marketing data both reflect the idea that small businesses do not strongly view banner advertising, and SEM as prominant ways to promote their business. VerticleResponse stated that it is important for marketers to show how banner advertising, and SEM can be useful for small businesses.
From the look of things, one of the best ways to show small businesses the usefulness of banner advertising, and SEM is to point out that these advertising mediums can help drive traffic to their websites, and also help generate strong brand recognition within their prospective markets.
On a side note, 79.6% of the small businesses stated that they will not be using television marketing in 2010, while 72.7% do not plan on using radio advertising.