If you’ve heard it once you’ve heard it a thousand times: small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. You hear it all the time because it’s true. So it’s especially encouraging to me to see them not only embracing video as a valid online advertising format, but also succeeding with it.
There is always a learning curve for small businesses, and it typically means they’re a few years behind the big brands on embracing the latest trends and technology. The WebVisible report suggests that small businesses are finally catching up to their larger counterparts, at least in the areas of search ads and video.
While many of you surely dabble in pay-per-click advertising, you’re really here for the stats on video, aren’t you? Well, they don’t disappoint. Specifically, 26% of small business advertisers used video on their home page (or landing page), up from 19% the year before. So obviously more business owners are turning to video for the kind of content that can engage a customer. Video is actually the second-most popular landing page behavior after “clicking through to advertiser’s website.”
Not only that, but views of those videos are up as well–a whopping 85% increase over 2009’s numbers. Video views now account for nearly 7% of all consumer landing page behavior on small business websites.
WebVisible, an online marketing software provider, has released their Fourth Quarter report on the State of Small Business Online Advertising, and if there’s an overall conclusion from the findings, it’s that small businesses are having better success with online marketing than ever before. There are positive signs in the areas of search advertising, but the best news is how widely video is being embraced by the small business community.
