How small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are marketing online and how many are using the social media? How much they spend on social media marketing? In which social networks and in which tactics exactly? I will try to answer all those questions here, assisting a recent report from eMarketer that combines few studies.
Marketing Methods By SMBs
The most common method for marketing by SMBs is simply to have a company website (54%). Many are also using email newsletter marketing campaigns (51%), while only 44% are using the social media- Although its an increase of about 10% from last year, it still pretty low percentage considering the ease and almost effortless process of starting a business page on social networks.
All in all, we can see that marketing online is much more popular than marketing offline- The top 3 are online methods and only 3 out of the top 8 are offline, two of them are at the bottom.
Social Media Marketing Spending
About two thirds out of the 44% SMBs that are using the social media, are spending less than $250 each month on social media marketing and 42% don’t spend nothing at all. At the moment, it seems that SMBs prefer allocating their funds elsewhere while marketing on social networks for free.
Top Social Networks For SMBs
Not surprisingly, Facebook is the most popular social network for marketing (86%), similar to the findings of the social media report by Nielsen. However, the second most popular social network for marketing is LinkedIn (41%)- Looks like SMBs prefer this business-oriented social network over others. Twitter is third with 33% and fourth is Google+ (17%) that gaining momentum slowly.
Most Effective Facebook Marketing Tactics
Among the SMBs that market on Facebook, 51% found that most effective tactic is wall posting and 20% found direct messages as effective. What surprised me is that only 6% found “Likes” as effective, although it has the highest potential of reaching to new crowds.
