Internet giant Yahoo recently unveiled its latest targeted online advertising package, with the power of such technology for small businesses in IT being particularly beneficial, it has been said.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the UK's trade organisation for the internet marketing industry, made comments on the latest developments in the sector.

Jack Wallington, the IAB's chair, said: "Targeting gets better results because you are hitting people that are actually interested. The fact that targeting and retargeting is proven to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns suggests that [these new tools] will be even better."

The latest figures by the IAB, which registers the online spend of businesses up to June 2008, found that internet marketing now costs £1.7 billion for UK companies.

Furthermore, the growth of the industry on the year before was found to be 21 per cent on a like-for-like basis, showing the potential market to be had by small businesses in the IT sector of Britain.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.