According to a survey recently conducted by Constant Contact with more than 1,300 small businesses, on average they spend 20 hours per week on marketing. For majority of them, their extra effort has paid dividends across several metrics.

However, the report also highlighted a challenge that small businesses faced, which is the number of marketing channels where small business owners can reach their customers. It is illustrated in the survey that compared to traditional marketing tools, small businesses spent most of their time focusing on online marketing. The real challenge here is that with the amount of platforms from search engines, social media to mobile devices that allows businesses to interact with their customers, small businesses find it overwhelms to be there and everywhere.

In the survey, over 80% indicated that they uses multiple platforms to market their business which includes websites, emails and social media generally. What small business owners got back is 57% of new customers, 54% more web traffic and increased revenues of 40%!

Here are a few possible reasons why some businesses, on the other hand, did not managed to reap those benefits:

1. Not having the knowledge to maximise the capacity of the tools

2. Not spending enough time on marketing

3. Not identifying the right channels their customers are using, thus not reaching to them

4. Not having the knowledge to measure success across different tools Marketing should never be an activity to conduct when your business have ‘extra cash’, it should be considered as a compulsory part of the business from the beginning in order to success.