How much time do you spend on online marketing for your small business?
There are likely to be a number of reasons that are affecting your Small Business Online Marketing strategy.
The complexities of the many different marketing platform dashboards that provide you with a wealth of information can be daunting.
Many small business owners do not know how to interpret the data found in tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, and can find themselves tied up in knots when tackling Google Ads.
Let’s not forget also the more advanced licenced marketing tools that you will pay a monthly fee to use. Whilst these are packed with information on both your own website and give you some data on how your competitor is doing, the problem is knowing how to properly interpret that data and having the skills to apply the necessary fixes to your own website pages to become a serious competitor.
Internet Marketing is a key factor that is holding back business owners from having online marketing success with their brochure or ecommerce website.
Small Business owners are still not committing enough towards investing both money and time into their marketing strategies. Today, business owners cannot really go it alone when it comes to marketing a website. Consider the website like a racing car that has to win races. The answer is to consider the availability of 1-2-1 support with the provision of supplemental marketing support services.
For most small business owners marketing is not their primary skill set. They did not set out to be creative content journalists capable of adding flair to a website landing page and be able to produce engaging content and images on a page that will lead to conversion.
2 Additional key barriers are that small business owners don’t have the budget or the in-house skills and talent to support a regular monthly rinse and repeat marketing strategy. So all of this adds to the problem.
Small Business Owners were already stressed in 2019 before the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020. The problem of limited finance was the biggest issue in the previous year followed by not enough time. Then there are those who simply cannot identify what should be the best marketing tactic to promote their business online.
Finding the balance between spending the right amount of money and time is key.
How much time should a Small Business spend doing Online Marketing?
Small businesses continue in not spending enough time on website marketing to get the results they need.
Most small businesses are found to be spending less than five hours per week, because business owners are busy committing to other parts of their business operations which they see as a higher priority.
Some business owners have two jobs. A full time day job and then coming home in the evening to try and commit to running for example an ecommerce website. They will complain that bigger brands are fairing better than themselves. Of course they will. A small business owner needs at least 2-30 hours a week to run an ecommerce website. Because in-between they have to deal with orders and shipping, especially if there is only them running the business single-handed.
So, its not surprising the micro and small busness owners online growth is suffering. But from years of supporting small business owners there is lots of evidence to show a clear correlation between spending more time and thus achieving higher growth.
Marketing Small Businesses
With so many challenges, where are small businesses finding success with their marketing strategies? Some have turned to using social media as their primary marketing channel, but not paying for any of the Paid Ad offerings available to use. Organic social media marketing is easily a huge drain on time and resource. Small businesses can of course deploy some automated solutions but this all comes back to dedicating sufficient time to both learn the products that can assist with this and again having that creative flair and ability to produce engaging content.
Just chatting through your current position with us as to what might be preventing you from marketing your micro or small business online can help. Having a discussion aorund the website you have, whether its fit for purpose, what skills you have, how much confidence do you have in your developer, is that developer also delivering marketing results, and what can you realistically spend towards marketing your website. Lots to consider. But by talking to a Digital Excellence Scotland Marketing Professional can help you put in place a digital marketing strategy tailored to your needs.