Small companies (defined as under 500 employees) make up 99.7% of the companies in the USA and create about 50% of the GDP and jobs.  In fact 79% of companies have fewer than 10 employees and those with fewer than 20 employees create about 19% of the GDP.

So the health of small companies is important to the economy.  Small companies need to sustain sales or grow to stay healthy. Are small companies adapting to changing times to promote their sales and stay healthy? Evidence suggestions the answer is some are, but not enough.

It is now a digital world with digital customers and companies must become digital too. Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0b8sUdGYA Online is where it is at.

But most small businesses still devote most of their online budget to…. their website. What’s wrong with that you ask? Well… a website is just a container for information – a destination.  Like any destination, you need to entice people to go there. You get people to go to a website by advertising it via search optimization, search advertising, or via incoming links from other virtual locations.  Small companies still don’t invest enough in generating traffic to their destination.

And Internet users (80% of all people who are still breathing) have moved beyond just visiting websites. People use the Internet to have a conversation, to share, or to get what they need more efficiently; that is what Social Media, things like YouTube, and self-serve online customer service are all about. Yet small businesses undervalue search marketing, email marketing, social marketing, sharing (blogs, video, etc), and automated customer service. Instead, they are content with just having a pretty website and even that is often not well done.

Most small business websites are just digital billboard type sites with general company information – ho hum. Most sites lack interactivity, customer service, lead capturing, and conversion elements. The owners of those types of sites don’t get it and often they don’t know what they don’t know.

While not totally useless, many small businesses cling primarily to old methods to keep their sales healthy like networking, customer referrals, newspaper ads, or oh-my-goodness are you kidding me… many still cling to Yellow Page advertising. Businesses caught in the old-era marketing twilight zone are on an unhealthy advertising diet and are going to be sick if they are not already.

Yes, a business needs a website. No, a website by itself isn’t enough.  You need traffic driven to your website from many sources. You need to engage the public in the virtual world outside of your website and invite them in. And you need to convert traffic from visitors to customers after they arrive.  Most small businesses still have not learned how to do those things. Their success and the economy would be a lot healthier if they moved beyond just having a website.