What Do You Think - 6 Small Business Marketing Trends For 2014

As the world of marketing evolves and becomes more complex, one has to wonder how small business owners can stay abreast of what marketing trends are emerging, never mind figure out which are worth investing in for their particular situation.
Let me offer some help. First, as you update (or create) your marketing plan for 2014 (get your template here), ask yourself:

• Will the marketing activities that have been effective continue to work for my business?
• Will I need to add new marketing tactics or simply make adjustments to those in which we currently invest?
• What should I be adding to my marketing activities that are worth my time and effort?

1. The integrated marketing plan becomes popular again

Although I’m not a huge fan of complex marketing plans, I do believe having a plan is more important for small businesses than they realize. A marketing plan focuses your efforts and helps you avoid wasting time and money doing things that aren’t moving your business towards your goals.

And now, with all the varying online activities – email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, search marketing – you need one place where you define what you will be doing and in what time frame.

2. Content marketing dominates small business marketing strategies

Today’s buyers are smart – we no longer want to be sold and we are sure going to know a lot about the possible solutions to our problems before we make a purchase decision. In fact, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) almost 60% of the purchase decision is made before prospects reach out to vendors. This means the buyer is finding content from expert sources to help them determine the best solution to their problem.

To position your business as an expert resource, you need to create content that speaks to your audience, helping them determine the best route to take. What this means for small businesses is that you need to have a blog if you don’t already have one and you must keep adding new, fresh content regularly. Blogs convert readers into buyers. 42% of consumers look to blogs for information about potential purchases; 52% say blogs have impacted their purchase decisions. According to Hubspot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing, almost 80% of marketers with a company blog have acquired new customers.

3. Case studies get reinvented into content marketing stories

It’s hard to continually produce content that is relevant to your audience. Most small businesses have plenty of satisfied customers but few use these experiences as a source of rich content that will help others understand how you solve a problem better than anyone else.

But did you know that for B2B marketers customer testimonials (89%) and case studies (88%) have the highest effectiveness rating for influencing potential buyers? And 85% of consumers say that they read online reviews for local businesses and 73% of consumers say positive customer reviews make them trust a business more.

4. Marketing activities evolve from mobile enabled to mobile optimized

A year ago in my post on small business marketing trends for 2013, I said that mobile support was mission critical and that mobile responsive design would be the most popular small business solution. Today, responsive design is just the first step.

If you are like me, you read email, participate in social media and research information regularly via your mobile device. According to Pew Internet research, 63% of adult cell owners now use their phones to go online and 34% of these cell internet users say that they mostly go online using their cell phone.
With this growth, if the first impression a buyer has of your brand on their smartphone or tablet is not the experience they expect, you can potentially lose a customer before you even know they are interested. Review your marketing tools and determine if mobile access provides a user experience that doesn’t detract from the message you are trying to convey:

• Can your email newsletters be easily read?
• Is your website content consumable?
• Can the visitor fill in your contact forms?
• Can they use the shopping cart easily from their mobile device?

5. Getting and staying visible is no longer an option

I ask this question every time I am speaking with a small business owner who is wondering if they should create a solid web presence for their business. 93% of online research starts with a search engine, and 68% of consumers check out companies on social networking sites before buying. Online visibility is a must, so every small business needs a strategy that increases their visibility when someone is in need of their products or services.

6. Simplicity in marketing will become the norm

 Many marketers feel that today’s buyers are web-savvy, mobile-enabled researchers capable of sifting through the complex information about a product or service in order to make a purchase decision. In reality, buyers are looking for trustworthy information that helps them easily and efficiently weigh their purchase options. Too many options and messages can paralyze decision making, encouraging the buyer to look at your competitors.

Keep your marketing simple. It will help both you and your prospective customer. Make your value clear, your purchase process simple and customer service awesome. Focus on creating websites and marketing materials whose design is clean and message is clear to attract more people to your business.


By  Debra Murphy
Repost : Acarre Community Media

The Art of Advertising and Branding (repost)

Nowadays, it is quite fascinating how companies from different industries try to constantly outdo one another. If you are not observant enough, try checking out the all the creative advertising and branding strategies they use to their advantage just to gain at least a few significant steps ahead from their competitors. Its a constant battle on who gets to most patronage from consumers, which will equate to a bigger market share that would ultimately mean generating higher sales.

The art of advertising and branding is quite complicated than an ordinary person would normally think. All concepts are painstakingly developed and deliberated, researches and endless surveys are made to determine the markets current preferences. This is all geared towards making an intelligent forecast and calculation on the consumers reactions to certain products, and what would be the most effective approach in introducing such product in the market. In advertising and branding, nothing can be attributed to simple stroke of luck or an instant, phenomenal success. Everything is a product of grueling work. That is why advertising think tanks employs an elite team of highly creative people to conceptualize and ensure a certain products success in the market.

So how can one correctly gauge the victory or failure of any advertising and branding effort? Well, its quite simple, really. You can try showing a certain image, logo, color combination, a pattern or a tag line to a number of consumers, and if they are able to properly identify the product behind it, you one can say all marketing efforts have achieved a certain degree of success.

The very first key role of advertising and branding is generating awareness and recognition of a certain product or service. The second most important thing is to actually condition the minds of consumers as to what image you would want them to associate with the product, whether its cheap, durable, dependable, etc. This is the intrinsic value of advertising and branding and can be a little harder to determine. For example, if you mention toothpastes, what brand would first come to mind to consumers? Or if you ask for a most wonderful vacation hotspot, what would be the first word they would be likely blurt out? This does not necessarily mean they have actually been to that particular place, its their perception of the place for what they have seen and heard that made them believe its actually the top choice.

However, on the other side of the coin, once having established a very strong and powerful brand name, companies will find it hard to step away from its shadows. If in the future, the company would want to project a new image, or take on a different market position, it can be a difficult task to veer away for the identity that have been established. This would take another series of powerful marketing effort to transform the image of the product. It all whole new ball game, and a very expensive one at that. This is the beauty of advertising and branding. It is certainly the most powerful marketing tool that can make or break a company.

Author : mter9248
Repost : Acarre Community Media