Failed connections
Jul 29 2009
It’s official: the internet is slooooow. But only Ofcom seems surprised to learn that broadband facilities don’t always run as fast as advertised. The real shocker comes from a new survey which says that shows more than half of small businesses aren’t online.
There is a tendency to over hype the area of ecommerce and flexible working. From the way some people talk you’d think that old-fashioned trading interactions had been eradicated to a thing of our barbaric past, with the only highway left being the digital one. Nevertheless, to hear that fewer than half of SMEs have a website is slightly disconcerting. Particularly as in these cash-strapped times being online can provide SMEs with the tools for some really cheap and effective marketing tactics.
Jack Fairhall, chief executive of social network building site Kwiqq, watched the company's turnover fall when the recession hit last year. But by responding with an online marketing strategy he saw a revenue uplift of 180 per cent in the following quarter, and reduced his marketing overheads to boot. ‘I would attribute the increase in sales entirely to shifting our strategy to online,’ says Fairhall. ‘It wasn’t due to higher demand because, if anything, companies had less money to spend on the sort of services we were offering.’
Fairhall now employs someone full-time to promote Kwiqq through social network sites – a decision he says has paid for itself many times over.
But internet marketing isn’t just about spending endless hours tweeting and blogging on whatever topics pop into your head. Instead, it can help you to target specific groups of people with promotional offers, and save money on the cost of postal mail outs in the process.
Yes, it’s not for everyone. The truth is lots of small businesses don’t need to go online. The local chippie, for example, probably won’t be using social networking sites to find out more about its target demographic any time soon. But with figures showing a 12.3 per cent year-on-year growth for online spending in June, many small businesses simply can’t afford the opportunities the internet presents.
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