The previous post looked at how much money small businesses tend to spend on their marketing campaigns and how they allocate that money. A surprising number of businesses have yet to tap into the wealth of customer leads that can be generated through online or mobile marketing. However, they indicated that 19% of new customers are brought in by SEO, a second place only behind word of mouth.

BrightLocal’s survey went on to reveal other interesting facts about the marketing sector. For instance, about 40% of the 20,000 business representatives surveyed indicated internet marketing is “quite effective” at attracting customers. And 60% of them said they have a mobile ready website, which is a rather important detail in today’s mobile obsessed culture. Just 4% of businesses believe having a mobile-compatible website is not relevant to their business.

Matt Cutts, lead of the webspam team at Google, stressed the importance of mobile device optimization, saying, “Mobile is probably growing faster than anyone in the room expects. Mobile traffic to Google will surpass desktop traffic to Google pretty soon—not in weeks or a few months, but soon.” In addition, a 2012 survey by Google found, “When users visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future.”

As for how they perform their marketing strategies, a large proportion of businesses choose to save a little money and do it themselves. In addition to lowering their marketing budget, in-house marketing gives business owners more control over content published on their site. They can check content for consistency, accuracy, and quality with more knowledge than an outsourced freelancing company would.

The prevalence of SEO companies is fairly large, with 32% of SMBs contacted every day with someone offering their services. BrightLocal said of this, “A major concern for the search industry is that over-competition among agencies drives down the cost of local search services . . . the danger of competition is that it leads to price competition, discounting, untenable performance promises that ultimately devalues [the SEO] industry.”

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Source: brightlocal.com/2013/11/18/smb-internet-marketing-survey-2013/