BizSugar.com › Marketing › Marketers and SMBs Disconnect over Online Tactics

Despite a continued preference among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) for receiving marketing information via direct mail and in other traditional ways, major marketers to SMBs are cutting back on these tactics and switching to lower-cost, online marketing to save money.

These efforts are at odds with what SMBs say they prefer. As a source of information about products and services, SMBs rely most on newspaper and magazine articles (43.6%) and direct mail, including letters, postcards and catalogs (43.5%). Ranked last are phone calls (27.4%) and radio/TV ads (32%). Online, referrals from friends and peers rank first (71.9%) among SMBs, followed by search engine marketing (57%), educational websites (44.5%) and email newsletters (38.2%).