Editor-in-Chief of Small Business Trends, Anita Campbell, discusses the top trends that are shaping small business in 2009.
Every year I come up with lists of trends that are shaping small businesses – how we get sales, how we grow our businesses, how we run our internal operations. Here is my list of trends that are shaping our businesses during 2009:
It’s a buyer’s market in technology. Tech used to be expensive and take a long time to make its way down market. Not so anymore. Software is virtually free today (Google, Microsoft). Hardware is commoditized. Net result: small business owners are using more technology. No longer the laggards. It lets us do more without hiring, and hiring is by its nature is expensive for small businesses. It also allows us to operate in ways that are more sophisticated than our size would suggest.
Small business owners are increasingly online, especially microbusiness owners. A Jupiter Research survey showed that small businesses have made strides, and have become more Web savvy out of necessity. We purchase more online, and we perform bigger chunks of our businesses online. “The PayPal invoice effect.”
Small biz is in partnership with bigger entities. Small business continues to be “in” — meaning that lots of assistance and support is available. Government websites; non-profits; vendors that offer small biz websites and training resources. This means more entities vying for the attention of small business owners. Your large vendors may be doing a lot to promote and assist your business, beyond just the product or service you buy from them.
Word of mouth is crucial, and citizen marketers are heard. Today everyone theoretically is a publisher, a radio show producer, even a filmmaker/TV producer through YouTube. Word of mouth is magnified through social media. The rise of the citizen marketer, who makes it a hobby or even a business to write about your company, has to be considered. These individuals can become your biggest cheerleaders. Know who they are. Seek them out. They are natural evangelists.
Go green, young man. Going green – conserving energy and operating as environmentally friendly as possible – is not just on the fringes anymore. More small businesses than ever are demonstrating a desire to operate in a socially responsible manner.
Women business owners on the rise. Women are one of the fastest growing groups of business owners. Mompreneurs and Executive Owners are two groups. Often they are involved in artistic or creative endeavors. And they are masters at online networking.
Small businesses continue to work at strange hours and in nontraditional locales. Always-on, self-serve environments are the name of the game. Internet, phone. Yet, work hard at appearing personal and accessible. One button rule to get to a live person on the phone, for example.
More one-person businesses and microbusinesses. Expect to see more loose ad-hoc partnering by solo players vs. traditionally-structured small businesses with employees. Size is deceiving. Lots of use of contractors. Paperwork and admin work are robbers of solos – we feel it acutely. The rules for determining who is an independent contractor and who is an employee are uncertain, and can be sources of risk.
Small business owners continue to fund businesses through credit cards. Loans reach the larger, more established businesses. Younger/smaller biz prefers plastic.
Search engines and social media drive everything. The race is on to get found online. Old standbys get new SEO life: press releases become SEM tools; whitepapers evolve into how-tos and get their own minisites; social media’s echo effect needs to be part of strategy. Blogs grow up. Audio becomes de rigueur. Video sets the bar. New social media sites fundamentally change how we interact and network for business purposes.
Anita Campbell is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Small Business Trends (http://smallbiztrends.com), an online community touching over 250,000 small business owners each month. It is an award-winning site, named to the Forbes Best of the Web (twice in 2005 and 2008), and receiving recognition from the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC television. Integral to the success of the community is the Small Business Trends network of experts – a group of small business owners who share their expertise to other small business owners, managers and entrepreneurs. Anita also maintains conversation at Twitter: http://twitter.com/smallbiztrends
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