What’s inhibiting small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) from getting more digital?
That’s what G/O Digital, a leader in local, integrated marketing wanted to know. So it partnered with Entrepreneur magazine to find out. The results of their investigation have just been released in a new research report entitled “Crossing the Digital Divide.”
The report queried about 600 U.S. SMB owners.
“According to the study, only 4 percent of respondents have dedicated marketing employees and lack in-house skills and industry knowledge when it comes to digital marketing,” according to the report summary shared with MMW.
on the study. “Almost 80 percent of small businesses spend 5 percent or less of their annual revenue on digital marketing, despite recognizing they need to leverage strategies like PPC and SEO.”
Much of the problem for SMBs are the dearth of staff both qualified and available to take on the digital components of business marketing.
“Small businesses want to maximize their online visibility and it’s evident that without dedicated marketing teams and budgets allocated outside of marketing, every digital marketing action counts,” said Raghav Mathur, VP of Strategy and Business Development at G/O Digital.
Other takeaways?
No surprise here: small businesses are doing more with less. About 76 percent of SMBs have fewer than 10 full-time employees. That cuts down on time and resources for advancing digital marketing agendas.
But SMBs are mobile themselves.
“Small Businesses are increasingly using mobile,” notes PRNewswire. “When asked which device small business owners use when accessing business-related content, mobile/smartphones were on par with the use of laptop computers.”
