I am always amused, and sometimes horrified, by cognitive dissonance. It’s the tension generated by holding two contradictory thoughts in your head simultaneously. The most recent online case I found has to do with small business owners’ use of the internet to market their own businesses.
According to recent research from Webvisible and Nielsen, while 63% of small business owners turn to search engines first when looking for information about local businesses, only 44% of these same owners have their own websites and half of them spend less than 10% of their budgets marketing online.
When I speak to business groups or other organizations, I often talk about how online and offline behavior really should not be all that different. This, however, is the rare case where we’re talking about online behavior and online behavior! What the study is showing is that most business owners use they web when THEY’RE looking for something, but they don’t think anyone else would bother with that internet thingy to seek them out. I realize the idea of putting up and/or maintaining a website or blog can seem daunting, but the cost of inaction and inertia is pretty darn high. As in, going-out-of-business high.
2 Responses to “Small businesses not using the full potential of the internet”
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Matthew Chamberlin is a social media marketer, experienced video producer, blogger and speaker at industry conferences, keynotes and corporate events.
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Very good point! I am always amazed and frustrated when a small business has no info. on the web other than a yellow page address. As a consumer, how am I supposed to make a decision without a website to look at and at least 10 reviews of said business!
Being a promotional whore I’m always amazed when someone doesn’t have a website. I think often it’s because they have no love for their business, it is just the job they do. If you don’t love what you do it’s hard to promote it.
That and laziness or ignorance.
We had a minimal web page for our jewelry for years that we didn’t bother promoting. Since going up on Etsy we finally understand the importance of going global on the internet. We’d be screwed otherwise. My machine business has always been entirely online so you think I would have realized earlier that every business benefits from a web presence.
I sell some tooling made by a multigenerational business, they invented and popularized many important machining instruments and tools (things that they coined the name for, as Kleenex is for tissue) but have lost market share in recent years because they don’t have a web page that would allow potential distributors to learn of their products and history.