Small Business Survey

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This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.

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Anita points to a recent survey of small business owners. The survey, conducted by Hewlett Packard, looks at the overall challenges of this group as well as where they plan to invest resources for growing their business.

Here are some of the results:

1. When asked what are the three biggest challenges, here were the top answers with the percentage of people choosing that answer:

  • Providing health insurance coverage 32
  • Cash management 31
  • Reducing operational costs 25
  • Improving marketing effectiveness 24
  • Customer retention 20
  • Customer acquisition 20
  • Staying up to date with technological advances 19

2. When asked which of the following have been incorporated into their marketing plan:

  • Print advertising 73
  • Direct marketing 60
  • Website 45
  • Radio advertising 36
  • Television advertising 12
  • Web logs (e.g., “blogs”) 10
  • Other 25
  • None 6

3. When asked where they’ll be investing money over the next year:

  • Reducing operational costs 70
  • Improving company productivity 66
  • Improving customer service 66
  • Improving marketing effectiveness 65
  • Customer retention 65
  • Staying up to date with technological advances 60
  • Customer acquisition 55
  • Cash management 55
  • Maintaining employee morale 45

4. When asked where they’ll be investing money over the next two to three years:

  • Marketing 75
  • Sales 68
  • Technology 61
  • Company website 57
  • Company online services 43
  • Recruitment 32
  • Management personnel 28
  • Designing products 25
  • Outsourcing 18
  • Weblogs (e.g., blogs) 16

I’ll post my thoughts on these results later. For now, Anita provides some salient commentary on the results along with a bit more detailed info. Thanks for the link Anita.

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