The great thing about bringing your small and medium business online is that you’re able to cut down on the expenses by a significant margin, while you become more productive and earn more. If we look at some older statistics of small businesses at a glance, the United States is the home of some 30+ […]
The great thing about bringing your small and medium business online is that you're able to cut down on the expenses by a significant margin, while you become more productive and earn more. If we look at some older statistics of small businesses at a glance, the United States is the home of some 30+ million small businesses, and you can rest assured that many of these businesses are competing for the top spot in their industry.
Through some basic research and analysis, we can deduct the trends and hot topics that will be dominating the year 2015 for small and medium business owners. It's all about growth, expanding to new horizons, and getting those extra customers through every means possible.
Growth optimization is going to stay, in fact, we will continue to see new trends emerge that teach us new ways of growing our business. Email marketing, user on-boarding, and customer acquisition - all these areas of growth are hackable, and every week we see at least one new technique that can be viable to a business.
The best way to stay in touch with the latest growth techniques is by following people who most often write about these topics, luckily there is a resource available that covers some of the influencers in this market.
Customers are the driving force behind every business, and if the last few years were solely focused on polishing your product for the most optimal performance, then this year we will see how important it is to treat every customer right. The supply is increasing, so is the demand for good customer service.
Large businesses have realized and acting on a key learning that it's good to have compelling products and services, but it's even more important to build real relationship with the customers who want your products and services. Large companies have invested in technologies to understand that not every customer is the same, and they expect to treat them uniquely. SMBs need to learn what it means to cultivate unique relationships, and how they can use technology to do it well.
Many influential bloggers and big business sites will be covering this topic in great detail, look out for it.
It's really strange to see how long it has taken for small and medium businesses to realize the importance of a content marketing strategy, and even now - many startups, small businesses and individuals are denying that they need a content strategy in place.
If you're new to content marketing, read up on this Buffer blog post to learn more about the common techniques used today. The biggest problem is that business owners are afraid of investing on good content, but that is exactly what it takes to have a successful content marketing strategy.
In 2014, we saw a massive increase in content that discusses big data, and it's uses in the real-world. In 2015, we can expect big data to become even more mainstream, and more appealing to small businesses who want to really learn about their business on a deeper level.
Increase in easy to use tools, cloud services, and big data as a service are some of the trends to look out for in this new year. There is a lot of data out there, and it can be used to the benefit of growing and expanding your business.
The mobile industry is booming and steaming, and we can expect some big things happen in this field during the year of 2015. Smartphones are becoming a lot more cheap, a lot more accessible, and definitely a lot more features to enable tasks such as shopping, paying, reading and watching media material. It's all about being able to make those purchases and other tasks 'on the go'. For your business, that could mean the adaption of a mobile design, or an integration of a mobile application that can really be the driving force behind your sales in 2015.
Author: Alex Ivanovs
Image courtesy: 1shots, freedigitalphotos.net
