January 28, 2010

Small businesses are vital to our nation’s economy and owners often times find themselves wearing a variety of hats such as manager, marketer, and accountant. While the days can be long and the resources short, it’s important to work with an integrated marketing strategy to maximize the investment. Today, there are so many choices from traditional print, radio, and tv, along with online strategies and social media. Business marketers can be hesitant to venture into the unknown, yet understandably concerned about being left behind as technology speeds ahead. Breeze Marketing Media Minute is a blog dedicated to the business owner who seeks to understand online marketing and advertising avenues and strategies.

Snapshot: How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domes- tic product (GDP). Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and pro- duced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

Source: SBA.gov and U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census and International Trade Admin.; Advocacy-funded research by Kathryn Kobe, 2007 (www. sba.gov/advo/research/rs299tot.pdf) and CHI Research, 2003 (www.sba. gov/advo/research/rs225tot.pdf); U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.