As a small business owner, you need to stay up-to-date with the current market conditions and new trends. This lets you harness the power of these trends to promote your business. By understanding small business trends, you will better understand what your customers are looking for, allowing you to address their needs. The result will be better reviews, loyalty, and customer retention.
We’ve made it easy for you to keep up with small business trends by gathering the most important and exciting ones you should learn more about and take advantage of. Whether you are a startup or a well-established business, you will want to follow the new technology and trends outlined below.
10 Small Business Trends to Keep an Eye On
The following are just some of the top trends currently affecting the SMB industry. Remember that this list isn’t all-inclusive.
1. Remote Work Revolution
The remote work revolution is a major trend across all businesses, including small businesses. Spurred by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, businesses of all sizes are embracing remote work as a permanent work setup. Many companies have also made the transition to hybrid work, where employees report to the office only on certain days of the week.
These companies use virtual collaboration tools for seamless communication. Business leaders have the skills to build a sense of community and motivation toward a common goal remotely, thanks to these tools.
2. Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is easily one of the most relevant business trends, as it improves the efficiency and productivity of small businesses. This includes adopting innovative technologies to streamline operations.
Small businesses are also increasingly leveraging cloud-based solutions for common business processes such as accounting, marketing, sales, and customer service. These systems give the SMB market access to many of the features and efficiencies that larger companies have used for years. These platforms also offer easy scalability, which is an advantage for growing businesses.
Small business trends that integrate technology also come with more business challenges, like an increased need for cybersecurity. The market needs these cybersecurity measures to protect business data. You need to protect not only your business finance data but also your customers’ private information. It is a matter of safeguarding your business’ reputation as well.
3. Sustainability Initiatives
While sustainability isn’t necessarily one of the new trends, it continues to be a driving force and a common goal for small businesses and their customers. Small business owners increasingly incorporate eco-friendly practices into business operations.
Sustainability initiatives can include practices like sustainable sourcing, manufacturing, and packaging processes. These sustainability business trends aren’t just about minimising your company’s impact on the planet. Following these trends also lets you appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. It lets you build a positive brand image.
4. Personalised Customer Experiences
With so much competition in the SMB market, customers are increasingly looking for a personalised customer experience. Small businesses today have access to tools that make this personalisation easy.
You can leverage data analytics and artificial intelligence to better understand your customer preferences. Using customer data, you can tailor products, services, and marketing campaigns to meet individual needs.
Current market conditions also allow for chatbots and AI-driven customer support that personalises interactions. Some software even shows you a customer’s sales and communication history during conversations, so customer service reps can add context to future interactions with customers.
5. Alternative Payment Options
While physical stores will likely continue to accept cash for a while, small businesses are embracing an expansive range of payment methods, both in-person and online. Credit and debit cards are still widely accepted, but now physical stores are accepting tap-to-pay in addition to chip, and fewer accept swipe payments.
But big changes are happening with mobile and alternative payments. From Google Pay to Apple Pay, customers and entrepreneurs increasingly want to use these mobile wallets. There is also an increase in innovative options, such as the ability to text-to-pay and other contactless payment methods. These payment methods are especially popular among millennials and younger generations.
6. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the major market needs of small businesses. SMB owners need to harness the power of social media platforms for their brand promotion.
You need to create engaging content that lets you connect with your target audiences. Social media trends right now also include working with influencers and harnessing user-generated content. Both of these strategies enhance brand credibility. They also save you time when creating content to share on social media apps.
7. Leveraging Loyal Customers
We already mentioned sharing user-generated content on social media, but that is just one way that small businesses are increasingly leveraging their loyal customers. You can use that user-generated content on your website and other marketing tools. You can also encourage users to share it via hashtags, bringing your brand to more people. As a bonus, user-generated content tends to be more affordable to generate than traditional marketing efforts.
Reviews and referrals are other common and effective methods of leveraging loyal customers. Create a referral program with bonuses for both the existing customer and the new one. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews as part of your business model.
8. E-Commerce Expansion
In the increasingly digital world, small businesses with an online presence do best. Following the pandemic, it is essential to have an e-commerce option. E-commerce platforms offer a convenient way to establish an online presence.
Offering e-commerce also lets small businesses capitalise on the growing trend of online shopping. Customers crave the convenience it offers, and e-commerce also lets you expand your audience to those who aren’t physically close to your store.
E-commerce strategies will go hand-in-hand with digital marketing and social media marketing, working together to drive business growth.
9. Augmented and Virtual Reality
The spread of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) also affects small businesses. Behind the scenes, VR can have highly specific uses for certain industries, such as in safety training for new employees and in improving recruitment workflows.
On the customer-facing end, AR and VR can make your product or service more appealing to customers. For example, AR can let e-commerce customers virtually try on items or see how they will fit in their space, which can influence their purchasing decisions.
10. Addressing Employee Mental Health
Many employees are dealing with burnout, and companies suffer when their top talent gets burnt out. Small business owners tend to have closer interactions with their employees, so they are better positioned to notice this. This puts them at the front of the trend of making changes to how the corporate world deals with mental illness.
One common example is that many companies are starting to include mental health days in sick leave. Business owners recognise the importance of mental health to employee productivity.
Business leaders are also adding childcare benefits to reduce employee stress and improve employees’ mental health. With childcare benefits, employees feel more supported. This leads to happier employees, improved retention, and better customer service and productivity.
Unlock Success: Harness Podium’s Innovative Solutions for Small Business Growth
As part of the digital transformation, you can harness the power of software solutions to follow these small business trends and grow your small business. Podium offers an all-in-one system that gives you multiple ways to grow your business.
The Reviews tool encourages your satisfied customers to leave reviews, improving your online reputation. Meanwhile, the other Podium tools ensure that customers have a positive experience that will lead to good reviews.
Podium streamlines every interaction between you and your customers, making the process easier and more satisfying for both parties. Website Chat lets customers easily ask your team questions and gives you the chance to turn website visitors into leads.
Text Marketing lets you take advantage of the high open rates of text messages, as well as the fact that it is the preferred communication method. Meanwhile, Inbox means that customer communication through email, Facebook Messenger, and everything in between is done via a single platform. That way, you can view every customer interaction in a single place.
Those conversations are also stored in the Contacts section of Podium. It will be easily visible when texting, emailing, or communicating with customers in another way, letting you personalise conversations and improve the customer experience. That information also displays automatically when using Podium’s Phones, allowing the same level of personalisation.
Podium also offers numerous Integrations, so you can continue to use the systems you know and love. Or opt for Podium Payments, with innovative features such as text-to-pay.
The common theme among all of these features is that they let you improve the customer experience. That improved experience leads to more reviews and a better online reputation. It also leads to revenue growth.
FAQs
Q: Can small businesses benefit from partnering with other businesses to leverage trends?
A: Yes, it is very common for small businesses to work with other SMBs. This is especially common for businesses that are geographically close to each other or serve similar audiences.
Q: How can small businesses stay updated on the latest trends?
A: Small businesses can network, consult experts, look at industry supports and statistics, talk to their consumers, and observe competitors to stay on top of trends.
Q: Are there any risks in following small business trends blindly?
A: Yes. While you should pay attention to trends, you never want to follow them blindly. Doing thorough research lets you confirm that a trend is here to stay and that it is relevant to your business and audience.
