Yosef Solomon
Management Consultant
George S May

Thanks for your well-informed article:)

The results published by my US colleagues confirm a piece of research we led in the UK last year. There is a clear gap between the determination of SMB to get online, and their understanding of the medium.

On our side of the pond, we realised that 62% of the SMB who had a website did not promote it at all! You can of course assume that it is a fashionable element to feature a .com address on your business card, a statement, but you start doing the maths, it becomes confusing as per why a small company with limited budgets would spend on a website without leveraging to its full potential. We thus estimated that £3bn were wasted on websites that could not be found.

Again, there are consistency on why SMB don’t invest in SEM in the US and the UK. There are indeed three long-lasting misconceptions about search engine management that make SMB owners hesitate: it would be time-consuming, complex and, interesting enough, not generating a great ROI…

I could get the time consuming bit as a SMB owner is already multifaceted and already struggling for time so if you add a new task to their agenda… And yet, the return on time investment is great, and the conversion of the traffic, especially adCenter’s, makes you wonder whether it would be worth investing this time.

I am puzzled the ROI argument though, as CPC hardly compares with the cost of a DM piece or an insertion in the Yellow Pages where you have to pay upfront for a prospective potential lead who might, one day, open the phone book on your page. Finally on complexity, I tend to argue that SMB have got more intrinsic qualities that make them even more relevant for SEM than bigger companies: they are more agile, more adaptive, quicker to respond… All critical attributes to strive online. In addition, Search Engines, and again adCenter is working probably even harder on that, are developing solutions to help facilitate the use of this channel. For instance, we offer a 6-day a week phone support, regular tailored tips and tricks updates by email, and some managed services… All for free. And yet, as mentioned by some other readers above, there is also the solution to opt for a SEM agency who could work for you as a proxy if you really don’t want to get you hands on that prolific and cost-efficient lead generation channel.

So overall the barriers to entry are mostly psychological, which advocates the need for further education from the market leaders…

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And yes, this is a great opp for a entrepreneur to come in and help these business do just that.

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Where have all my customers gone?
http://www.locallycompared.com/blogs/2008/12/11/where-have-all-my-cust omers-gone/

There’s also one aspect about the Microsoft study which is worthy of note (and which I mention in my own blog posting on this topic). The press release reveals that the study was performed in April. Why has it taken around 10 months for Microsoft to publish it? It’s not the kind of study that needed 10 months of statistical analysis. Could it be that Microsoft has dredged up this study because it needs to stimulate demand for its AdCenter offering? After all ad revenues are falling at the moment. Far from small businesses being in trouble on pay per click, it sounds to me as though the people with the real difficulty are Microsoft,

While PPC campaigns can be the most efficient marketing vehicle, it can also crash and burn budgets if not piloted correctly by a trained professional.

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