Smallbiztrends.com (appropriately named, huh?) recently came out with
what they thought would be the most important marketing trends for
2009. There's a long list and I'll provide the link at the bottom, but
I wanted to comment on it first. As I mentioned in an earlier post
("Marketing Tactic Mainstays"), I discovered based upon real-world
client work that the two workhorses this year and for some time will be
online and referral-based marketing.
I'm beginning to see a definite disconnect between what businesses should be doing (eg. the list in this article) and what they're actually doing. My experience is that, in spite of this list of supposed "trends", most small businesses are not doing these things. I can see most companies adopting the "bootstrapping" strategy and making things simplistic for their prospects and clients. But I can't see many companies launching paid membership sites this year. Information is free and I frankly see a long curve on that changing for the masses.
The other disconnect is that while "do-it-yourself" marketing is on the rise, the truth is that most business owners don't know how to do many online tasks that they suggest in this article (put up a forum section on your website?? what if they can't afford to hire an inhouse marketing person to do that? how would they accomplish that?).
For some reason,
they left out a key trend (Search Engine Optimization-SEO) that they
held for another related article that I included below. Here's the
article on the 2009 marketing trends-
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/01/top-small-business-marketing-trends-2009.htm
And here's the article on search engine optimization trends for 2009-
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/01/seo-trends-2009.html
What are your thoughts on these trends?
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