During our Twitter chat this week about the State of Women-Owned Businesses in the US, due to our time limitations, we only able to explore the barest tip of the topic.
From December 2012 to January 2013, NAWBO, in conjunction with web.com, surveyed 552 women business owners about their businesses. Some of the results were not what I expected. One thing that startled me was how much the state of the economy was a concern, though a distant second to acquiring new customers, it also came in ahead of generating revenue.
This surprised me for two reasons, though I’m well aware the first reason is that I was indoctrinated with the idea that there are ways to survive, even thrive in any economy. I also find, personally, that things are much better than they were in 2008.
The other reason I wasn’t expecting these results, was that I’d think that access to capital would be a much greater concern, considering the fact that it’s statistically harder for women. I wonder if we have different ideas about accessing capital from outside sources, or if most of us just assume that we’re meant to bootstrap our entire entrepreneurial journey- I know I did.
Another thing that intrigued me, though it was not as surprising: 29.4% of women business owners that responded to the survey believed that having a social media presence was somewhat or very unimportant, or weren’t sure, and 31.3% didn’t think search engine optimization was important.
Social media i can sort of understand – it’s still sort of new to most people.. It makes me wonder whether it’s getting through that social media and search engine optimization are two things that in the short and long term respectively, can make your site “findable” or that the two are increasingly related.
You can download The State of Women Owned Businesses for yourself for free. It’s a really interesting survey – there’s no email capture to fill out, just be aware that when you click the link, it takes you directly to the PDF file.
Even what I’ve touched on here doesn’t cover half of the survey, and the data collected is presented in a clear, straightforward manner. It’s 26 pages though, so if you don’t have time to go over the entire thing now, here’s the infographic.
Stick around after the link for the embed code if you want to talk about it on your own website, or you can generate the code on your own.
NAWBO and Web.com present: The State of Women Owned Businesses
Embed The State of Women Owned Businesses on Your Site
Updated: the original post rendered the image twice, instead of embed code the second time – after many attempts we took that out and left the second method.
The embed code that will give you about the same size image can be found in this file on Google Docs – just be sure to download it as text.
