Business Bullets - Marketing

With the amount of business that can be generated from having an online presence, it's not only in a small businesses' best interest to have a website and social media accounts, it's increasingly vital to a company's survival. However, a large proportion of small businesses still don't even have a website and thereby ignore the most obvious choice to utilise their small business internet marketing potential.

Here are some of the facts and statistics behind how small businesses are failing to utilise Internet marketing, what consumers expect of the companies they're interested in and the difference that Internet marketing strategies can make towards a business' bottom line:

52% of small-business owners don't have a website.

If your business doesn't have a website how do you honestly think new customers are people going to find you? Ask yourself, when was the last time you tried to find a product, service, address, telephone, number etc. and you didn't use the internet to find the answer. Your website is available 24/7, with good SEO it's being found by people who have never met you or seen your business card. Websites reach more people and offer them the opportunity to interact with you more easily than business traditional stationery ever will so why wouldn't you have a website?

70% of the small-business websites studied had no 'call to action' on their websites.

When we walk into a supermarket we are bombarded with offers, "2 for 1", "Save 50%", etc. and how often are we persuaded by them to make a purchase? Whilst I don't suggest people fill their websites with such garish offers, we do all like something for nothing. So if we have a call to action of "Sign up to our mailing list and receive 15% off your next purchase" or "Complete a quick survey and receive our 10 page guide on awesome business", then people will most likely sign up.

93.3 percent of small business websites are not mobile compatible and will not render successfully on mobile devices or smartphones.

There is no getting away from the fact that we live in a mobile world, 20% (1 in 5) people in the UK primarily surf via a mobile device but if your site is not responsive to my device I'm not going to hang around. 

68 percent don't have an email address on their home pages and 27% don't include their phone number.

Visitors may be searching for your business solely to make contact. So having your email and telephone number on the home page is always a good idea. If you have a contact page which lists lots of people, numbers and emails it may not be easy to discern who I need to speak to. So the default number and email address for information should always be obvious on the home page.

When you have addressed the points above within your company's website you may also want to look at how you can further meet your customers' expectations:

• 80% of traffic to a website begins with search query.
• 61% of searchers consider local results to be more relevant than standard search results.
• 85% of customers expect businesses to be active in social media.
• Companies with active blogs receive 97% more leads.
• Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.

Statistics were sourced from this article and this article.