Survey: Fewer Small Businesses Expect to Hire or Grow

Uncertainty surrounding the federal deficit, taxes and health care is negatively impacting small businesses' revenue and hiring projections for this year and next, according to the fourth annual U.S. Bank Small Business Survey published today.

The survey was conducted online in January among 3,210 small-business owners with less than $10 million in annual revenue. While two-thirds of small businesses surveyed said they are in good financial health or better, only 16 percent expect to increase staff over the next 12 months. When asked the same question a year ago, 20 percent of small businesses expected to ramp up hiring.

Mobile Provides Promising Revenue Opportunities for Media Sellers

From the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference 2013

One of the more interesting sessions at the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference I recently attended was “What SMBs are planning to spend on mobile and when.” Researchers Greg Harmon and Larry Shaw from Borrell shared some data from their latest research on mobile trends. They surveyed nearly 2,000 local SMBs between December 2012 and January 2013 to find out what their marketing plans were for the coming year.

5 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Budget

According to an Ad Age survey presented by Marketing Charts, content marketing comprises an average of 12% of overall marketing budgets. A full 10% of marketers spend more than 30% on content marketing, and 9% spend 19-30%. This means that approximately one in five marketers with a budget of $100,000 would spend up to or more than $30,000 per year on content marketing. Also worth noting is that 55% of those surveyed indicated that they would be increasing their content marketing budget for 2013.

The results of the survey are below:
 

Is Marketing About To Get Really Creepy Or Really Good?

Apple acquired a company last week. It's something to pay attention to.

There is still one slightly unchartered territory that will - without question - be the last mile in marketing. It is the ability for a brand to deliver contextual and highly targeted marketing at the local retail level. We may be inching ever-closer to this reality. On March 23rd, 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple acquired a company called WiFiSLAM for an estimated $20 million (not bad for a two year old company with just a handful of employees that includes some ex-Googlers). WiFiSLAM is billed, according to AngelList, as a technology that, "allow(s) your smartphone to pinpoint its location (and the location of your friends) in real-time to 2.5m accuracy using only ambient WiFi signals that are already present in buildings. We are building the next generation of location-based mobile apps that, for the first time, engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place. Applications range from step-by-step indoor navigation, to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based social networking." If you can get beyond the marketing jargon, WiFiSLAM is, essentially, GPS for the indoors. It is able to triangulate the location of consumers, track their every move and deliver contextual marketing messages to them while capturing a tremendous amount of consumer data. 

Marketers and Publishers Rallying to Change Display Ad Metrics

The simple display ad market, now worth $12.7 billion may begin shrinking soon. Marketers are starting displayad1to understand that a significant percentage of the inventory has no value, primarily because of new viewability standards. To counter this problem, publishers are making changes to the media spaces that they are selling.

68% of people use their smartphone for email, 26% for shopping

The importance of optimising email campaigns for mobile has again been underlined by a new survey which shows that checking emails is among the most common activity for UK smartphone owners.

The Nielsen Mobile Consumer survey found that 68% of UK smartphone owners used their device to check email in the past 30 days. Only text messaging was more popular (92%), while using the mobile web (66%) and social networking (63%) achieved similar results.

US smartphone owners exhibit similar behaviours, with 86% using their devices for text, 82% for the mobile web, 75% for email and 63% for social networking.

Social Media Marketing: Social login or traditional website registration?

Janrain, a social Web user management platform provider, recently released its Social Identity study with the research conducted by Blue Research.

The study involved a final sample size of 616, with respondents recruited by email and screened to ensure they either purchased a product online within the past 30 days, or read articles or watched video from major media outlets in the past 30 days.

A key element of the survey was finding out how respondents felt about using a social login — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. — instead of having to register individually at multiple websites.

3 Technology Traps to Avoid in Sales

In sales we work hard to create mutual next steps with prospective customers and ultimately to help buying opportunities for these prospects – these buyers.

But time and again, we get bombarded with interruptions, alerts, tools, and technology. Younger sales reps tend to be more used to an interruption-based work day filled with texts, chat, some e-mail and perhaps phone calling all as a part of their day. Older sales reps can get stuck in a rut doing the same things they have done before, often with less technology and getting the same sub-par or average results.

Either way, there is a lot of lost productivity among the noise and disturbances. The cost of interruption is high – it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to a task after being interrupted, according to a 2008 study done by Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine.

Facebook drives most social B2B traffic, but Twitter is top for conversions: report

Despite the huge attention lavished on social media, it still accounts for only a fraction of the traffic and leads for US B2B websites according to a new report from Optify.

Overall, social accounts for 1.9% of traffic compared to 41% for organic search, however there is potential for it to become a more important and effective channel.

This is a topic we touched on recently in a post about how to use social media to widen your sphere of influence in B2B and in an infographic looking at how B2B companies are currently using social.

Optify’s report found that companies that actively manage social media campaigns (as measured by companies who had more than one lead from social or more than 10 visits per month) have seen comparatively high conversion and engagement rates.

Think big with effective video marketing strategies

Customers buy products or services from brands they trust, so it’s imperative for companies to discover how to develop loyalty through web marketing initiatives. In many instances, organizations strengthen rapport with new and existing shoppers through compelling marketing collateral, always selling to prospects, but never taking their business for granted.

Professionals look to expand their arsenal of tools to create loyal fan bases, but when it comes to video, brands drop the ball. The problem stems from how sales executives view visual media compared to creative staff members – taking the wrong strategic angle can turn video content into a sales tool, not a relationship builder. Therefore, when looking to foster trust with prospective and current customers, brands must spend significant time developing the right strategy – the production should always take the backseat. Check out Brafton’s white paper on how to create the perfect video marketing strategy.

Report: Mobile Travel Callers Convert At Much Higher Rates Than PC Users

Call-based ad network Marchex has released an interesting travel study that captures data about the differences between PC and mobile users. Overall the study found that mobile users convert in much higher numbers than PC users in travel. (Marchex makes money by selling call-based advertising.)

Marchex’s report found that call-based conversions were “consistently over 25 percent for rental cars and over 20 percent for hotels.” The company presumably relied on industry data regarding online conversions for comparison. The total number of calls analyzed by Marchex for this study was 15,000.

Over 85% of Marketers Plan to Raise Their Mobile Budgets

Over 85 percent of marketers have reported that they plan to increase their mobile advertising budgets in the near future, according to a new study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and MediaVest.

According to the study, 95 percent of marketers are currently using or plan to incorporate mobile advertising into their marketing plans. Study participants reported that brand building, awareness, and customer retention were the most common objectives for their mobile advertising plan.

Online Marketing News: Holiday Spending & App Downloads in the Billions, Google Resolves FTC Concerns, Facebook #1

5 Types of Social Media Strategies
Social media is not a magic bullet. It’s an enabler. Social media won’t make an antisocial brand suddenly social. But it can facilitate and amplify the role that brands play with their audiences.

Whether in social media or any other domain, we need to focus less on how “awesome” we are and more on working toward making our customer’s more “awesome”.  Via Marketoonist. 

Advertising on Social Media via Nielsen

The Nielsen 2012 State of Social Media report was released earlier last week. I previously went over the report’s findings about the largest social networks of 2012. The report also contains some interesting information about advertising on social media and what it means for consumers.

Consumer Sentiment towards Social Media Advertising

Nielsen found a surprising statistic about consumer sentiment towards social media advertising. Nearly one-third of users believe that ads on social media sites are more annoying than other ads online. Social media isn’t supposed to be annoying. It’s supposed to be meaningful.

Takeaways From Forrester’s 2012 CMO Study

This month, Forrester published “The Evolved CMO, 2012,” a 15-page study highlighting the salient data and issues facing today’s Chief Marketing Officer. The joint research project by Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles presents four critical opportunities for CMOs:

• Beef up digital and technical understanding
• Partner with and lead peers on the executive team
• Increase focus on retention in addition to acquisition strategies
• Align with sales and service leaders to drive the brand experience throughout the organization.” 

The study also explores each of these four points and it would really benefit any CMO (and their partner) to commit them to memory. However, I’d argue a closer analysis of two areas: evolution of the CMO and internal support networks is equally important and thus should be added to the list.