9 Marketing trends every small business should consider for 2019

If you don’t have your marketing for 2019 all figured out, you’re not alone.  Online and offline marketing is competitive and ever-changing and I offer some marketing trends for small businesses in 2019.  It’s most important that you understand your ideal customer habits and understand they don’t care what you make, only what it can do for them.

1. Establish and update a Google My Business page

All local businesses can benefit from the power of Google. Establishing a Google My Business page is designed for finding your location but more importantly for customer reviews and place to add your posts, pictures and any content that supports & promotes your business. Even if you have an online business, this is one tool that you want to implement into your digital marketing strategy and can give you a competitive advantage.

Learn More: https://www.google.com/business/

2.  Personalize and Humanize Your Marketing
Consumer trust is tough to earn and in short supply. For small business owners it can also present a challenge and finding key differentiators can be hard especially in competitive niches.  What can you do? Humanize your brand – get real – pull back the curtains and tell your story.  Show the people behind your brand, what they do and how they serve clients.  People buy from people, think of how you can tell your story and continue through your communications all year.

Check out this great example from Simms – manufacturer of fishing waders. They do a great job of telling the story of their company.  https://youtu.be/s3D8cg1swhk

3.  Incorporate a Video Content Strategy
Video has become the most viewed type of content and isn’t slowing down. It can be used to generate brand awareness, establish thought leadership in your industry, teach, share behind the scenes and ultimately build trust.  In my opinion, there is an over-abundance of video’s that ‘all about me’ style that may be fun but aren’t very effective in driving business.  Unless you can tie those videos into making a point that relates to your expertise you are simply adding noise online.  Add video as part of your overall content marketing strategy will be worth the effort. I previously wrote about the 6 ways to use video in your marketing and the benefits to this type of content.

As reported by Social Media Examiner, our industry is moving towards a future that places video at the center of marketing. That’s why nearly every platform has released short-form vertical video stories.

People are more apt to watch a short video than read a lot of text. 

You Tube Tip

If you post a video to YouTube, you need to promote it hard within the first 24 hours – that seems to be what You Tube (Google) cares about in terms of ranking.   It’s the opposite of traditional SEO. When you plan to release a video on You Tube be sure to promote it at the same time to your email list, messenger bot list and social media sites simultaneously to get the optimal traffic and ranking.

4. Social Media Loves Video
Gain more attention on your social sites with video.  People love watching video, but they only want to watch ‘short video clips’ meaning about 1 minute. In 2018 and trending in 2019 are video posts on LinkedIn and Instagram.  Video’s on LinkedIn have been averaging 2-3x more views than text posts (which were getting top engagement).

Consider video advertising on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as part of your advertising budget.

5.  Social Media: Focus on Engagement
‘Likes’ add little value to your social media posts – getting people to engage with comments makes all the difference to the algorithm.  Comments change the elusive algorithm in your favor – why?  Social media sites are about whether posts are really engaging and if they are, they are adding more value to the reader. It’s a simplistic way of saying that comments to relevant content will lead to better results for you as a marketer. 

6.  Focus on Client Retention
How many of us forget about past clients and don’t offer them additional services?  Its far more cost and time effective to nurture current and past clients than to prospect new ones.  I hear clients tell me they have heard past clients say, “I didn’t know you did that” or “Oh, I forgot you also did that.” 

Now is the time to review your products and services to ensure you’re creating real value for those existing customers.  Think about how to enhance the customer experience in ways that are memorable.

  • Send a welcome card when someone joins a program
  • Send thank you cards when someone buys from you
  • Send personalized gifts to higher-ticket customers
  • Call customers personally asking for feedback & share their opinions
  • Offer an unexpected bonus
  • Ask your customer to participate in a case-study & promote their business in return
  • Build incentives that encourage past clients to refer you to others

There are dozens of ways to enhance your customers experience with your company – think out of the box and focus on your competitive advantage. 


“Now consumers have infinite choices and limited attention and so attention and trust must be nurtured”

– Seth Godin

7.  Facebook Ads – Competitive Strategy

Investing in advertising is a must to grow your small business, organic growth is no longer an option.  If you have competitors that are running ads that seem to be doing well, here’s a hack where you can do some competitive intel and follow their lead.

Go to your competitor’s fan page and in the left navigation bar click on “info and ads.” This will show you all of the ads that your competition is running.  You can start off by running similar ads to your competition even though you don’t know their audience targeting, you should know your own audience well enough to begin and do some testing.

8.  Email Marketing Getting More Personalized
Email marketing is changing from generic marketing emails to personalization in terms of trigger emails based on the customer interests and journey. Knowing how your subscriber entered your list is key to starting the personalization journey and then sending them what they opted into your list to learn. Assuming the subscriber is interested in everything you do or offer could be too broad. Focus on what they came to learn from you first and go deeper.

9. Develop Interactive Content
A growing trend in content right now is interactive content that allows your audience to actively engage with your brand. There are many types of content you can experiment with here, including:

  • Polls
  • Quizzes
  • Contests
  • Assessments
  • Online voting
  • Animated graphics

Conclusion

Marketing is ever-changing and requires small businesses to evolve with the changes because consumers are evolving especially with changing technology.  It’s most important that you understand your ideal customer habits and test strategies that meet them on their customer journey. Marketing strategies are not a one-size fits all plan, rather be aware of all the changes and implementing what you can, will keep your business relevant and competitive.

LEARN HOW I CAN HELP YOU IMPLEMENT THESE TRENDS INTO YOUR STRATEGY-> HERE