2011 Digital Marketing Trends: The Small Business Perspective

Most trend predictions offered by industry experts don’t take into account the perspective of small business owners, who don’t have the time, expertise or resources to keep up with marketing initiatives that might be expected from large corporations. Web visiblity set out to provide a reality check, offering the perspective of small businesses and what to expect — or not expect — from them in digital marketing in 2011.

Don’t forget YouTube!

YouTube! is a popular channel, but a video on a small business’s landing page or web site is also effective at driving new business. According to the a very recent report 26 percent of all advertisers included video on their landing pages, up from 19 percent a year ago. Viewing video was the second most popular conversion action after clicking through to the advertiser’s web site. Other studies have shown that search landing pages with video convert visitors into leads 8.3 percent more, on average, than those without video. For some verticals (e.g., physicians) the conversion was 40 percent higher.

Mobile will finally take off

Mobile has already gone mainstream for consumers, but small businesses are lagging behind. The report found that almost 40 percent of small businesses still don’t have a mobile web site or app. While larger companies may be allocating advertising budget to mobile this year, small businesses are still in the early stages of making sense of all the digital marketing options available to them. Another interesting highlight from the study was that about half of all mobile search is local in nature.

Social media marketing will come of age in 2011

While there’s value in engaging consumers via social media, the reality for small businesses is that there are few people on staff to do the “engaging.” One of the key messages delivered at Internet Summit was that social media is only as effective as it is interactive. Until small businesses have easy and affordable services available to manage that interaction, their marketing opportunity via social media is severely limited.

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