Small Biz

Email is still very much an ingrained activity among SMB employees, to the extent that 74% check work email outside of standard work hours, with most of those doing so at least several times a day, according to survey results from GFI. Indeed, almost two-thirds of the respondents overall said they check email outside of standard work hours at least once a day. Separately, a significant chunk of respondents said they've at some point checked their work email on weekends (80.9%) and during a vacation (59.1%), and 5.6% even admitted to having done so while they or their spouse was in labor. Read more »

66% of small businesses are putting mobile technology to use in some way to market and/or operate their businesses, according to survey results from Constant Contact. The most common ways of doing so are to optimize social media marketing (73%) and email marketing (71%) for mobile devices, with far fewer (34%) offering mobile-optimized websites. The results come soon after research from eWayDirect, which similarly found that slightly less than half of B2C marketers were optimizing emails for mobile. Read more »

Small business owners are increasingly finding social media platforms other than Facebook to be effective marketing vehicles for their organizations, per results from a new Constant Contact survey. Among the 8 in 10 respondents surveyed in December 2012 using social media for marketing (a notably higher proportion than other surveys such as this one have found), 29% found LinkedIn to be effective, up from 10% in the May 2012 survey, while one-quarter saw Twitter as effective, up from 7% in the earlier survey. Read more »

26.4% of SMBs cannot be found in online searches because their websites earn a Google Page Rank of zero or have no Google Page Rank, finds vSplash in an audit of 3.9 million US SMB websites. The audit unearthed a series of deficiencies, which the researchers believe translate into a $24.3 billion revenue opportunity for digital media and marketing solutions providers. That's despite a recent report suggesting that 1 in 2 SMB online marketing service dollars are already being spent on web presence. Read more »

96% of small business owners say that technology is extremely (72%) or somewhat (24%) important to them in marketing their organization, per results from a Constant Contact survey. Asked to evaluate which tools are more effective at engaging existing customers and which are better at attracting new customers, respondents were split rather evenly on the effectiveness of social media marketing - with most saying it's equally effective for attracting and engaging customers. Read more »

More than one-third of SMBs say they devote the majority of their marketing budgets to customer acquisition, while just 6% say they devote the majority to customer retention, per results from a new BIA/Kelsey study. The researchers argue that the greater share of spending being devoted to customer acquisition programs may be a result of buying habits rather than preference. Indeed, the study also finds rising interest in loyalty programs, which could cannibalize some dollars from customer acquisition programs. Read more »

Email marketing captures an average 15% of SMB marketing budgets, according to a soon-to-be released study from Vocus, conducted by Edge Research. Email edges events and trade shows (13%) and person-to-person contact (12%) as the top marketing expenditure for SMBs, with traditional media such as outdoor (3%), radio (4%), and TV (5%) ads getting the smallest pieces of the pie. But while email commands the highest share of budgets across all SMB sizes, the extent to which it is relied on varies, most likely due to its cost. Read more »

SinglePlatform from Constant Contact has released a new e-book [download page] containing research pertaining to mobile and local search, with some noteworthy results. In particular, while 85% of respondents believe it's important to be seen on major search, mobile, and directory sites such as Google, Yahoo, Yelp, and Yellow Pages, 49% of small businesses have never updated their online listings, and exactly half have seen listings for their businesses that are not accurate. Read more »

SMBs are putting their customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to work for a range of use cases beyond just management of prospect and customer contact information, finds Scribe Software in a new report. Beyond managing contacts (94%), 65% are using their CRM for lead nurturing, and 59% each for email marketing and sales forecasting. The results lead the researchers to conclude that "the myth that SMBs might need less or are less sophisticated is simply not true any longer." Read more »

A survey of small business owners by the Wall Street Journal and Vistage International has found that LinkedIn is not only the most commonly used social media tool by small businesses, but also the most positively perceived. Asked which social media tool had the greatest potential to help their firms, 41% of respondents chose LinkedIn, compared to 16% who pointed to YouTube, 14% to Facebook, and just 3% to Twitter. In fact, more CEOs chose LinkedIn than did Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest combined. Read more »