Constant Contact along with its partners, with ACCE, SCORE, and ASBDC partners conducted a survey on Small Business Attitudes and Outlook Survey for the year 2010.
70 percent of the respondents showed confidence in growth of their businesses in 2010, of these 39% already planning to hire additional employees.
On being asked about the overall outlook on their own businesses in the past 12 months, 66% of them responded, that had seen increase in costs in their businesses, mainly in the areas of materials and supplies(64%), taxes (45%) and marketing (57%). Therefore, the SMEs are striving to cut their costs in the aspects of operating costs(57%) and travel and entertainment costs(43%), marketing budget (43%) and prices (31%), though not willing to compromise on their headcount costs.
SMEs are also planning to make their marketing strategy more cost effective and viewed that it is the area where they need help, rather than sales and growth planning (both 23%). In this regard, most of the SMEs are opting for less expensive ways of marketing such as through social media and other online marketing tools. 59% of them also said that reaching their customers is the biggest challenge for their business, therefore using social media sites would help them solve this problem. 51% of the respondents preferred Facebook, 29% preferred blogs and 27% preferred Linkedln.
Inspite of popularity of social networking sites, email marketing is the the most preferred choice of businesses compared to other means of online advertising. 89% of them said that, they find email marketing very important in attracting new customers, while 88% said that they will use email marketing to promote their business.