Ever wondered what other small businesses are doing online?

Have you ever wondered what other small businesses are doing online?

Not the success stories we hear about in the news, but what the average small business owner does on a weekly basis to grow their company.

I thought it’d be fun to take a quick peak and profile the “typical small business owner in North America in 2013.”

Are you curious?

If you’re a typical small business owner, you…

• …spend 5 hours a week marketing your business.

• …have an annual marketing budget of $2,500 or less. 

• …don’t have a phone number on the homepage of your website. 

• …view online reviews as helpful to your business, but you won’t use paid review services. 

• …would rather do mobile marketing than daily deals. 

• …don’t have a mobile app or mobile optimized website, and you’re unlikely to build either in the next 3-6 months.

• …believe the economy was better off in 2008 than it was today.

• …won’t hire or reduce the number of employees you have in the next 6 months. 

• …think Mitt Romney is a better advocate for growing small businesses than Barack Obama. 

What else does “the small business owner” do?

Imagine we were at a conference full of small business owners, and I asked everyone at the event the following questions. This is what we’d say… 

If you had to invest all of your marketing time and budget into one channel, what would it be?

32.9% of us chose SEO as the winner, ahead of paid search advertising, mobile marketing, and even traditional media. 

We’re also leaning away from the classic Yellow Page Ads and starting to see the benefits of inbound marketing as a long term growth strategy. 

Are you promoting your business online with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, something else or nothing?

Almost 70% of us are using Facebook, and more of us have jumped onto the Google+ bandwagon (49.2%) than Twitter (32.8%) – only 18.6% of us aren’t using any free social media platforms.

Which platforms are you paying for promotions?

We’re not paying for a lot. 

Only 7% of us use Facebook Ads and a smaller 1% are using paid twitter promotions. There’s also a question as to whether we’re abandoning Google Adwords. 

(Not sure if Google Ads are right for you? Here’s how you can decide.)

How am I making these assumptions?

The conclusions are based on a few studies, including one by Merchant Circle and Reply.com that was done from a random sample of 1.6 million small business owners in North America, 80%of them have less than 4 employees.

Conclusion

There is no “normal.”

Obviously there’s a huge range in what “the typical small business owner in North America in 2013” looks like. But I think it’s interesting to see, as a whole, how our community of fellow entrepreneurs is doing.

So, what do you think? 

Was it helpful to know what the average small business owner in North America looks like, or would you rather learn how to convert your website visitors into customers?