Where did the year go? It seems like only yesterday that I was wishing everyone a happy new year. Well, 2011 has been a fantastic year for small and mid-sized business marketing professionals. Our world is changing so rapidly it is hard to keep up. While this is an exciting time for marketers, it is also a challenging time for us. The continued evolution of the Internet and the digital revolution are mind-blowing. The continued challenge of marketing professionals in small and mid-sized privately-held businesses (SMBs) is how to allocate our time and limited budgets. How do we take advantage of these changes knowing that we lack the resources of our larger competitors?
Well in today’s blog, we will try to help you maximize your marketing dollars and people by outlining what we believe will be the top 12 trends for small and mid-sized enterprises for 2012. Our goal is not necessarily to predict the unknown future, but to focus on the trends that will impact small and mid-sized businesses the most. This list is by no means all inclusive and I would love to hear from others on what they see for 2012.
- Customers and employees will become more involved in marketing decisions as electronic communications and the Internet specifically make direct input easier and less expensive to obtain for SMBs.
- The power of referrals and recommendations will expand in importance with an ever-increasing social network footprint.
- Mobile marketing will enter into marketing efforts for the first time for many SMBs in both advertising and in the development of customer-centered apps.
- Social networks will become a significant source of organic search traffic for SMB websites as more SMBs participate in the low cash required marketing tool afforded by social networking.
- LinkedIn will become the dominate business networking website granting SMBs access to and identification of important contacts.
- Customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention strategies will re-emerge as key strategies to measure marketing performance as the drive to keep customers in a slow economy continues.
- Branding and identity strategies will become more prevalent in small and mid-sized businesses.
- Marketing automation will grow in importance as SMBs try to leverage limited resources and marketing automation improves.
- More websites of SMBs will contain more than English language pages as more SMBs cater to growing international sales.
- Small and mid-sized businesses will utilize virtual events such as webinars, online training, and Skype meetings to be more efficient and effective.
- Blogging will become more common place with small and mid-sized businesses as they attempt to exhibit industry or product expertise as a marketing differentiation against larger competitors.
- Original or 2nd generation business websites will be revamped to help SMBs compete, involve customers more, and to take advantage of new web technologies and integration with social media.
I am sure that I have left some items off this list. Tell me what you think. 2012 is sure to be another exciting year for marketing professionals of small and mid-sized privately-held businesses. Good luck and give me buzz if I can be of any help.
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