Small Business 'fearful' of Internet marketing

Microsoft have recently conducted a survey of small businesses Internet Marketing behaviour. It seems that the majority of the small businesses interviewed are totally ignoring Internet marketing. Not because they don't realise it is important to their marketing strategy, but mainly, it seems, because of fear.

In fact, they are so fearful of IM, that 70% of those surveyed would rather do their taxes than try to start a paid search marketing campaign. Although the majority of small businesses do set up an online presence eg a website, they don't then use internet marketing to capitalise on that presence. Interestingly though, 86% of these businesses felt they might just be missing out on opportunities and benefits that IM could bring to their business.

59% of the respondents who had a website do not use paid search eg PPC, and 90% of those had never even tried it. And yet 3/4 of them believed that their potential customers could well be searching online for their products and services.

Those who were using paid search advertising were more than satisfied - 72% reported an increase in sales enquiries, and 68% consider their paid search campaigns successful.

"Among the participants' chief concerns, most cited the common
misconceptions of cost, time and complexity as major hurdles to conducting
search marketing campaigns for their businesses. Other key insights included
the following:
-- Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too
expensive.
-- Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use
of their marketing budgets.
-- One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too
complex.
-- Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
-- Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a
search marketing campaign."

So, fear - of wasting money, time or become mired with complex systems and failing to understand how to get best value from the process - were the main reasons given for not doing search marketing.

How sad. PPC is not rocket science. It seems though that your average small business, whose marketing budget may only be £500-£2000 per year, is failing to spend even a proportion of that on what is a proven quality traffic strategy.

There is a great free guide on how to set up a successful PPC campaign which you can download here. If all you did as one of your New Year's resolutions is pick 5 keywords that sum up your business and run a trial PPC campaign, you will haver gained by doing so. And managed to break the cycle of fear that PPC is difficult, costly and time-consuming.

In fact, why not enter this PPC competition and see how you do? What have you got to lose by giving it a go? And you may find that the benefits it brings to your business are several fold. Which during an economic downturn can only be good!!