Many small businesses are at a competitive disadvantage.
Redshift Research survey commissioned by Web-hosting company GoDaddy reports that well over half of very small businesses have no Websites or Facebook pages.
[source: Inc.] About 60 percent of very small businesses (made up of one to five people) don’t have Websites, according to a recent survey. Of those, about 12 percent have Facebook pages.
That leaves a lot of businesses relying on word-of-mouth to get their name out, though many may have a presence on online platforms like Yelp.
The Redshift Research survey, commissioned by GoDaddy, showed that the percentages were roughly the same for the U.S. and the aggregate of businesses surveyed globally, in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.
“While we take for granted that everyone is online, the reality is that for many small businesses it’s simply not true,” said Blake Irving, CEO of GoDaddy, Inc. said in a press release.
The reason given by many of those surveyed, according to GoDaddy senior vice president of business applications Steven Aldrich, is that they perceive themselves to be too small.
The survey reported the percentage of businesses that saw themselves as too small for Websites at 35 percent. Other reasons given were that they lacked technical expertise (21 percent) or couldn’t afford a website (20 percent).
The statistics seem surprising until you consider that 39 percent of businesses surveyed globally and 46 percent in the U.S. consisted of only one person, according to GoDaddy.
Of course, Web-hosting business GoDaddy, for which small businesses are the core audience, thinks businesses without Websites are missing out. Aldrich points out that being on the Web makes a business easier to find.
Of the surveyed businesses that have Websites, 83 percent said their online platforms gave them a competitive advantage over businesses without Websites.
“What is clear is that these very small businesses are realizing that if they don’t fully engage online, they are at a competitive disadvantage,” said Irving.
The survey was conducted of 4,009 businesses of 1-5 employees each, with the sample size split roughly equally among the eight countries where businesses were surveyed, according to GoDaddy. The survey had a margin of error of +/- 1.5 percentage points.