A survey, “Small Business Search Marketing Survey”, conducted by American Express OPEN and SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), Word of Mouth is the top way of driving for US SMBs to acquire new customers, followed by the Internet and search engines.
Most of the SMBs believe that word of mouth is the low cost marketing strategy. 82% of the respondents cited that the Word of Mouth is the best way to improve success of SMBs by acquiring new customers. WOM strategy was followed by Search Engines or Internet (66%), Advertising (37%), Yellow Pages (23%), Newspapers (23%), Storefronts (17%), and others (21%).
The top five marketing techniques include social media, online websites, mass email, organic search techniques and paid research.
Market research firm, e-Marketer compared other reports and revealed that more than 70% of US small businesses used Facebook for marketing whereas only two-thirds used Google and One third used Bing. And according to the Ad-ology, about 57.2% of the respondents told that social media was at least somewhat useful at generating leads. And the Merchant Circle survey found local small businesses were more likely to say search engine marketing (40.2%) was an effective channel than social networks (36.7%).