Making Your Small Business Stand Out
A recent (12/10/11) report from lead generating firm MerchantCircle/Reply.com states that in a survey of 2,500 US small business owners, SEO is the way they would go. The way they would go, that is, If they only had one choice on which to focus their marketing.
The survey asked, “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?” The participants were then given 6 choices of marketing channels: SEO, paid search, traditional media, social media, mobile marketing, or none of the above. Nearly 33% of the respondents chose SEO as their marketing channel of choice, if that’s all they had available. The closest second was traditional media, garnering 19% of the responses. Traditional media was defined for the purposes of the survey as radio/television, newspaper ads, Yellow pages listings, and direct mail. Newspaper advertising space and direct mail were the two traditional marketing channels identified in the survey as the most used by the small businesses participating.
Another surprising result of the survey was to see that Facebook, not Facebook ads, was the number one choice for social media marketing. It beat out Google by 15%, LinkedIn by 18%, Twitter by 38% and YouTube by a whopping 50%. (There were a host of other media sites to choose from, including Bing, Yelp, and Foursquare.)
So what does all this mean for you? Well, if you are a small business (just under 80% of the survey’s participants had 4 or fewer employees, so we’re talking small business here) and you’re not using SEO strategies in your marketing campaign, you may want to rethink that for the coming year. It would appear that your competition has already figured out that SEO marketing is the way to go for their small businesses across the country. You may want to consider adding a bit of social media marketing next year, as well. You don’t want to be the only shop on Main Street without a Facebook business page, do you?
I think this survey also shows that SEO marketing and social media marketing aren’t just for the big firms anymore, and need to be taken seriously by the small business owner. Granted, the ROI in both SEO marketing and SM marketing can’t always immediately be registered. Nor can you typically find good SEO marketing and SM marketing providers right around the corner like you can your local newspaper or print shop. It takes some time to find a SEO marketing firm that you’re comfortable working with. It takes some research and effort to find a good SEO marketing firm you can afford and see the results from their efforts. It also takes a real investment of money – you can’t get something for nothing, not even on the Internet. By looking at the results of this survey from November, it would appear that the savvy, strategic small business owner can’t afford to NOT invest some time, money and energy into SEO marketing and a social media presence. His competition already has.
SEO is extremely important, don’t get us wrong, but the market is swiftly changing to social. Google and Facebook have blurred the fine line between social media and SEO, especially with the recent launch of Search Plus Your World. Small businesses must adapt to these changes, ensuring that they are on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. engaging with their audiences more so than just creating content. Rather than marketing to an audience, we must now market to a network of relationships.
Lets face it.. SEO doesn’t cost us much! That s the reason why it is so well suited for small businesses.
I completely agree with the fact that SEO is not restricted to big enterprises any more. Many small business are also resorting to SEO because of the fact that it is readily affordable. But choosing the right firm to handle your business’s SEO is extremely important and ultimately that matters most.
@DragonSearch, I think you hit the nail right on the head. Basically, SEO essentially has a word of mouth factor in it. I personally think that this is great because relationships (like links) are very hard to easily manipulate. Probably even more so. However, I am still a little urked on how Google came out with Google+ and kinda said “By the way, this will have an effect on your rankings…thus if you want better SERPS, you better use our social media network” LOL