| By :
Jeff Schuman
Being aware of how consumers find local business information is important for all small business owners to know. This will be very helpful information to be aware of when determining the advertising budget. To cut to the chase, if you don't currently have a professional website for your business, you will miss out on potential sales. Furthermore, even with a great website, if you don't know how to promote it you'll still miss out on business. According to research from Webvisible and Nielsen, 63% of consumers and small business owners find local business information first via the internet (this statistic varies from survey to survey and the percentage seems to be higher if small business owners aren't included). In addition, 82% use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to obtain the needed information. Those are huge numbers of people looking for local business information. But the kicker is this- only 44% of small businesses have a website. That's near-business-suicide in this day of internet business. And even worse, half of those who do have a website don't even spend 10% of their marketing budget to promote their site. Webvisible has coined the term phrase "the great divide." This is in reference to the difference between how small business owners act as consumers vs. how they market their businesses via the internet. It seems that many tend to expect one thing as consumers but don't do the same thing as business owners. Small local business owners need to reverse their thinking as owners and think more like consumers. Being aware of these statistics will be helpful. These are the most popular sources for finding local information: -Search engines, 82% find information this way. -Yellow Pages directory, 57% (and falling). -Local newspapers, 53%. -Internet Yellow Pages, 49%. -TV, 49% -Direct Mail, 38%. -White Pages directories, 32%. And keep in mind that this survey involved small business owners who still tend to use the traditional sources much more than the average consumer. Obviously, there is no doubt what small businesses need to do: Put in place a good website and invest a much higher percentage of their advertising budget to promote it. If you're a small business owner looking to grow, it would behoove you to get started right now with implementing an online business strategy. Why? Take a look at these statistics: - Only 7% of small business owners say that a top priority of theirs is to get visitors to their website. - 61% spend less 3 hours per week devoting time to promoting their website. - 91% are less than satisfied with their efforts to market their site online. - 78% spend less than 10% of their advertising dollars to promote their business online. - 30% do not advertise online at all. Here's the bottom line: You know how many people search online to find local business. You now know that many of your competitors don't take online advertising seriously. It is now time to set yourself apart from them by taking advantage of your knowledge. Doing so can vault you to the front of the pack.
|
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.articlesbacklink.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
