The low-cost social media and online marketing is proving its worth to small businesses in these economic times as 96.2 percent of respondents say they will be using internet marketing in 2010. SMBs will increasingly rely on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing next year as 86.2 percent will continue to use or implement search engine marketing.

Overall, 23.8 percent of small businesses reported that search engine marketing was the tool they felt their businesses most needed to succeed in the upcoming fiscal year.

As small businesses are getting more comfortable with social media, many are simultaneously phasing out other forms of advertising. The majority of SMB owners - 79.6 percent - will not be using any television advertising and 72.7 percent will not use radio.

The emphasis of online strategies may be a wise use of marketing energy; Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, told The New York Times that with "300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that's increasingly where [small business'] audience is for a lot of products and services."