Small and New Businesses – Who Do You Trust?

A recent study done by Alignable – a small business social network, shows which companies, service providers and ultimately, products, are on Small Business owners minds and who they think helps them expand their brand recognition and their relationships nurtured.

These results make you question and re-evaluate how businesses, specifically small and new businesses, build their “world view” of worthiness – who and what products are providing them good value and a worthy return on their investment, where many a times the investment is their time spent on getting to know and use new products and services, even some which are offered for free under fremium models or limited time free trials etc. One of the most precious resources a new / small business has is time, therefore looking at products and brand they trust, sometimes more so products and services offered for free – means a lot in terms of knowing how your business should market (how to tell the story of) your own product or service offering, in way that makes it worthy for other businesses to stop their daily rat race and give your products and services a thought, much less their time or financial commitment.

Report Highlights:

• WordPress, Mailchimp, Authorize, Google, Square & PayPal are leading the charge amongst small businesses
• Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter all are trending positively in the minds of small business owners
• Wave’s free back office software seems to be poised to make a run at Quickbooks
• GoFundMe and Foursquare still have opportunity for growth, but are currently in the red
• Shopify and Freshbooks, and both are trending up since last quarter
• Jack Dorsey’s two companies, Twitter and Square, are in the top 10 of our NPS data
• Facebook has stabilized in the mid-twenties. Since beginning to collect the data 10 months ago, Facebook’s NPS has steadily declined from the mid-thirties

More About the Data:

• More than 7,500 ratings across 45 different SMB brands according to our local business owners
• Over 1,500 net new ratings collected last quarter across the 45 different SMB brands
• Businesses included in the study are based in North America and employ under 50 people
• Businesses analyzed include both B2B and B2C, across many industries
• In order to be included in the SMB Trust Index, brands must receive 25+ ratings
• NPS scores are only shown for brands with 50+ ratings. Brands with less than 50 ratings are placed where their score is currently trending

If your business is offering products or services to other businesses, you should contact us today and get a free sample of our New Business Mailing List. With our New Business Telemarketing List, other businesses have seen as much as 300% increase in the number of new customers they reached and acquired within a short period of time.

Thanks for reading this post. If you want to get the full report in printable format, you can download the PDF infographic from Alignable (on AWS)