How Is Your Online Presence?

Do you have a significant online presence that will convert small business leads into clients? I've spoken at length in this blog about the importance of having a strong website and using search engine optimization to effectively target small and medium business owners. The Internet is the primary research tool that SMBs are using to source products and suppliers and a new Jupiter Research study confirms it:

"Small business executives' activity level for traditional online activities is much higher than average."

Executives small businesses with 5 employees or less, also known as micro-business owners/executives, display unique online behavior compared to other online users. According to JupiterResearch, micro-business owners/executives spend a median of 17 hours a week online, compared with 14 hours a week spent watching television.

"Micro-business executives are highly engaged online users and great candidates for behavioral and contextual targeting" said Sonal Gandhi, JupiterResearch Analyst and lead author of the report. "They are more likely to respond to this type of targeting than the average online user and are otherwise hard to target online."

JupiterResearch defines micro-businesses as companies with less than five employees and includes sole proprietorships. Micro-businesses comprise the majority of the small-business landscape. JupiterResearch also finds while micro-business executives' activity level for traditional online activities is much higher than average, their adoption of next generation tools and technologies such as blogs and social networking is more or less the same as the online average.