Small Business trends for the year 2018
After intensive research and interview with business maestros from various industries, we learnt that Businesses in 2018 will incline towards the following trends:
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is creating a buzz in the business world. It is the process of marketing a business through different mediums of social media such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram and snapchat or advertising through the smart phone.
This form of marketing is especially popular among small businesses and has a huge potential for increasing sales. This is one of the cheap marketing method while the reach is humongous. It makes your business easily approachable for new clients and more identifiable for your existing clientele. Your audience is familiarized with your product by seeing your brand name appear in multiple social media channels. They get connected to you more effectively and their brand loyalty increases. Moreover, the reaction of the audience is also instant, and measurable. Complaints reach you faster, and you can handle them there and then, thus leading to customer satisfaction.
Following are some of the popular digital marketing tools:
Face book: Most business are diverting their expenditure from expensive local and traditional media channels to face book advertising. This mode of advertising specifically targets the market you are catering to. Face book marketing has lower costs as compared to more expensive advertising media such as television and newspapers.
Instagram: Another effective social media marketing method is Direct marketing through Instagram. Through this, businesses can directly send messages tom their customers through Instagram. Conversations can be started through this medium, answering customer questions then and there thus building a new customer network.
Snap chat: Similarly, snapchat has introduced audience targeting through which you can target your target market effectively.
Smart phones: Smart phones are used to send marketing messages to target customers. The reach is wide and instant especially in this era when many customers use their smart phones for research.
Cloud Computing
Companies today do not maintain computer infrastructures in house, in fact they have resorted to virtual machines or compute sources for their businesses. The hosted services are delivered to the company through the internet. This reduces costs as you are charged for it as you use it.
The advantage of this kind of computing is that it eliminates the need for IT administrators thus reducing your labor costs. Your stationary costs, equipment costs and a lot of time is saved through this method. It has also makes it very easy to move businesses globally.
Computerization of work force
Through this, companies involve less human element in work, that can be done by machines. Humans in turn are available for better utilization of their services. Most of the work is done through machines. Machines are not only used to control equipment; they are also used to interact with customers. Examples include, chat boxes, robots, automated business intelligence.
This also involves reaching the right kind of labor through computer networks, and hire them for free-lance work. Most of the work is outsourced, thus reducing in house labor costs extensively.
The Millennials approach
Millennials is a generation with an evolving lifestyle with different values and beliefs. This market is more focused on uniqueness, is more technology based and desire to be different. Small businesses have started trending towards building work environments that relate to the millennial work force. As the world gets more social media oriented, it is very important to employ people in the work force who are well versed with millennial marketing. Moreover, the target customers are also millennials, thus the marketing strategies used will also be so formulated to attract that part of the population.