Small Business Spending on the Rise
New research has shown that small businesses are expected to spend more money in 2011 than in 2010, particularly on IT, social media, and online advertising.
According to the latest International Data Corporation forecast of small business technology news, the nearly 8 million small to-medium sized businesses in the United States will spend more than $125 billion on advanced technology in 2011. This is an increase from an increase from approximately $120 billion in 2010. This money is projected to be spent on cloud services, as SMB technology consumers are expected to raise their allocated funds appropriated towards cloud-based services from 10 to 15 percent in 2011.
"SMBs account for an increasing share of overall corporate IT spending in the U.S.," said Justin Jaffe, senior research analyst for SMB and home office research at IDC. "Vendors that understand how changing economic conditions and emerging technologies are affecting IT acquisition for different company size segments will have a considerable advantage in developing and marketing technology products and services for SMBs."
As for blogs and social media, small businesses are planning to spend three times more than large businesses, as marketers focus on increasing their lead generation budgets. Research has found that small businesses are planning to spend 29% of of their lead generation budget on blogs and social media.
Online advertising is beginning to overtake traditional advertising venues, as the 2011 Outlook survey from Borrell Associates asked 2,872 small and midsize businesses about their advertising budgets, and found that they plan to increase their online ad spending by 29 percent this year, compared to a 4.5 percent increase for their offline ad budgets.
The areas of online advertising that small businesses plan to invest in the most are e-mail marketing campaigns and involvement with social media, as well as improvements to their company websites. In terms of the overall online advertising picture, the survey found that small and midsize businesses make up 95 percent of all local advertising online.
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