Why Some Say Small Business Will Dive into Online Video in 2011?

The year 2011 has already been dubbed the ‘Year of the Entrepreneur,’ by various federal governments, and President Barack Obama has repeatedly said that the economy is well into its recovery. Wall Street Journal’s Small Business writer, Rex Nutting, compared the recovery to running on one leg.

“Large businesses—the good leg—have been growing robustly for at least a year. Production is rising, sales are higher and profits are through the roof. But the recovery missed the second leg—small businesses, which account for about half of U.S. output and jobs,” said WSJ’s Nutting. He continued to say, “Encouragingly, there are now tentative signs that the second leg may finally be healing.”

According to these experts 2011 will be our year, the year of small business. It will also be the year to market your business. Ad-logy’s 2011 Small Business Marketing Forecast stated that half of small business owners will increase their ad spending this year. ReelSEO.com, a website aimed at being “The Online Video Marketer’s Guide,” wrote about Ad-logy’s Forecast saying, “45% of small business owners are going to increase their resources alotted for online video, up from 2010’s 28%.”

That is nearly a 20% jump! And while that statistic is astounding I can’t say that it surprises me. The average person watched nearly 15 hours of online video on YouTube in December 2010. When you do the math multiplying the 145 million users with the 15 hours of video watched it comes out to 75,000 years of video viewing in a single month.

Who is watching is also important. A Forbes survey of various business people found nearly 60% of all respondents said they would watch video before reading text on the same webpage, and 22% said they generally liked watching video more than reading text for review business information.
I guess that’s what makes YouTube the second largest search engine.

For years small businesses have been struggling to keep up with the big marketing budgets of large firms and businesses, now because of online video, technology and websites like FINDitKC.com small businesses have the same opportunity that larger corporations do.

“Small businesses are becoming increasingly savvy on how to market online, and their plans for increased spending on video and mobile show they are ready to try new ways to reach the customer,“ said C. Lee Smith, the President and CEO of Ad-logy Research.

“They may not have the resources of big businesses, but things like online (video) and social media help level the playing field.”

If you are part of the near 50% that vows to increase your marketing and ad spending this year I encourage you to also make yourself part of that 45% increasing their online video budget. If not you’ll be left behind. Online-video advertising is expected to almost triple by 2015. So if online video viewers continue on their growth track, as a society we will watch more than 500 billion videos online this year.