What are the Hot Internet Marketing Trends for 2016?
In 2010 we were curious about how small business owners were taking advantage of social media tools. While there was research about what large companies were doing, that wasn’t our focus. We wanted to know what small business owners were doing, so we conducted our first internet marketing survey.
Several hundred small business owners participated in the study and their responses provided valuable insights into how they were attacking the challenges of social media, managing content creation and measuring the results.
We learned so much with the first study, that we made the survey an annual event. Past studies have looked at how factors including the size of the company, gender of the owner and industry served, affected social media activities. We have tracked changes in who manages the program, the amount of time spent, and the rise of blogging across a range of industries. We’ve also studied:
- How B2B and B2C companies are using social media to meet different needs
- What companies are doing to address customer service inquiries on social media
- How small businesses are using online advertising tools
- How businesses are developing content for their websites to improve search results and drive traffic
- How owners and managers are using social media as a tool for employee recruitment
Things have changed a lot over the years. Social platforms have come and gone and starting last year we saw more interest in online advertising as business owners begin to understand social media isn’t free.
So now it is time to kick off our 2016 survey. We are looking forward to finding out what’s changed. Once we’re done collecting the data we’ll share the results in a new white paper, but there won’t be much to share if you don’t do your part.
- Take the survey – There are only 22 multiple choice questions so it should only take about 5 minutes to complete.
- Share the link with other small business owners. The more people who complete the study, the more informative the report will be.
- While you are waiting for the results of the 2016 study you can grab a copy of the 2015 report to see what we have learned so far.
