Small businesses missing out on opportunities

One of the most hated things small business owners can hear is that they missed out on an opportunity to attract more customers, which could've increased the company's revenue.

While missed opportunities are a part of business, small companies can take measures to avoid missing out on increasing revenue.

According to a recent survey released by Pitney Bowes, small businesses are not measuring their marketing effectiveness, which is placing them at a disadvantage with companies that are keeping track of metrics. Small business are relying mostly on traditional communication methods in order to market to customers around the world, but some are not tracking their results and missing out on many opportunities to infuse multi-channel communications to increase response rates and get customers.

The Pitney Bowes study included more than 750 of its small business customers. The survey was conducted to discover more about the customer communications channel preferences and marketing tools that are used to co-exist with the tools they already have in place.

"A surprising number of businesses are not tracking results of communications they send to customers and prospects, particularly through direct mail and email," said Justin Amendola, vice president of global SMB digital strategy at Pitney Bowes. "This is a big missed opportunity for businesses who could instead help their business grow by using any of a number of affordable, easy-to-use communications tools to deliver and measure their marketing programs."

Small business marketing has become more important in recent years, with more companies exploring social media tools and other methods of reaching out to its customers and other consumers who could potentially use their services and products.

Pitney Bowes discovered several missed opportunities by companies that could help expand their reach. One of the most common missed opportunities is not measuring the success of marketing campaigns, which gives business owners no way of knowing how well techniques worked for them.

Another missed opportunity is avoiding new digital and social media channels. With more companies utilizing Twitter and Facebook to market, those that don't have social media pages will fall behind in comparison to their counterparts.

According to an eMarketer report, 24 percent of small businesses and 33 percent of medium-sized businesses have found a way to use social media to market their company, which will increase once other businesses realize the benefits.