Digital marketing use among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is poised for significant growth in the coming years as SMBs are looking for ways to compete with big businesses, a survey by Vocus has found.
The top three tools or solutions used by SMBs for digital marketing were websites, social media and email marketing.
The survey found that 86.6% of SMBs use websites, 77.3% use social media and 65.8% use email marketing to execute their digital marketing strategy.
According to the survey, the digital marketing tools were also deemed the three most effective tools in the same order, with 33.9% reporting success with websites, followed by social media with 24.9% and then email with 19.6%.
Vocus product marketing manager Brendon O’Donovan said that large organisations are accustomed to digital marketing – they’ve been doing it for years.
"However, small and medium businesses during that time have continued with traditional marketing," O’Donovan said.
The survey also found that SMBs were often assigning no more than one full-time employee to digital marketing duties, with more than one-third of firms staffing at that level.
Almost three in 10 firms tasked between two and five full-time employees with digital marketing work, with much smaller numbers of companies staffing above that level.
According to the survey, for SMBs lacking staff and other resources, social media seems like a no-brainer.
The back-end infrastructure is taken care of by someone else at little or no cost to the business, although properly maintaining a social media presence requires an investment of time.
A January 2013 survey from online magazine Social Media Examiner found that social media helped 89% of SMB marketers to gain exposure, and also increase their web traffic.
