For decades, newspaper execs have fretted over the tendency for young people to be less apt to read a newspaper. Now local media of all stripes has a new worry: Young businesses, it seems, are also less likely to be loyal to traditional media when they start thinking about advertising.
And from iPad apps to SEO and "reputation management," there's a new crop of digital marketing tools vying for SMB dollars.
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That's the word from speakers at the Directional Media Strategies conference which got underway yesterday in Dallas. The three-day conference is hosted by BIA/Kelsey, a company that tracks how advertising dollars are split among the various media.
Small and medium-sized companies are far more likely to use Twitter to get their word out if they're young, according to Matt Booth, a senior vice president at BIA/Kelsey. About 16 percent of companies age 3 or under use Twitter, compared with just 2 percent of those in business 11 years or longer, he said.
That pattern holds true when looking at companies with plans to build a social media Web site. About 44 percent of small and medium-sized businesses that are 3 years old or less plan to add such a site in the next 12 months, Booth said. Only 22 percent of similar-sized companies that are 11 years or older plan to do so, he said, quoting data gathered by his firm.
In fact, according to Howard Lerman, founder of Yext and the conference's keynote speaker, almost a third of the advertising budgets at young companies (small to medium-sized) now goes for online advertising. Meanwhile, the oldest group of companies spent only 13 percent of their budgets for online ads, he said.
