SMB Marketing Trends

Small and medium businesses have more and more online marketing tools available to them. Their challenge will be to determine which tools will help them connect to their types of customers. From Marketingprofs.com, marketing trends for small and medium businesses in 2011.

Facebook Supplants Websites
Websites can be complicated to build and maintain. Many companies have moved to Facebook as their primary online presence. It's easier, and more important for social commerce reasons.

SMB Agencies
The complexity of online marketing provides an opportunity for companies to act as intermediaries. Expect agencies to focus on SMB online marketing as their core market.

Location-based Services
SMBs should take control of their business pages on location-based services like Foursquare and Yelp.

Metrics
SMBs will start to embrace metrics in order to determine customer acquisition costs, lifetime customer value and advertising ROI.

Coupon Sites
The group coupon site will be overloaded. Couponing will be used to drive repeat business rather than customer acquistion.

Video
Blogs, news and reviews are flooding consumers with text content. Consumers increasingly prefer video as a way to learn about a product or company. Producing video content is both easy and cheap. YouTube will compete with Facebook as a channel for SMBs.

Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing offers quality help with advertising and marketing at a low cost.

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