Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can stand to gain a lot of market exposure with effective online marketing initiatives, a business development specialist says.

Tink Taylor, a director of marketing agency dotMailer, states that effective online advertising can allow smaller businesses to "punch above their weight".

He added that viral marketing is a very popular way to drum up interest from consumers in the current climate, with social networking also fast becoming a must if a business aims to get the most captive market.

Mr Taylor added: "The growth of social media also allows businesses to build their brands and develop market share in ways that just aren't possible or effective offline."

A recent report by the Internet Advertising Bureau found that for the period of January to June, the worth of online marketing was close to £1.7 billion.

Spending, it continued, grew by 21 per cent year-on-year while the advertising industry on a whole dropped by 0.7 per cent in the same period.

More than half of small businesses (53 per cent) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support. London-based Connect conducted the research in 2007.