2011 Trends For Small Businesses

Like any other year, the beginning of 2011 is a crucial moment for any small business owner. It’s critical because, as a business owner, it’s your only time of the entire year where you have a few seconds of breathing room to look forward and plan your business decisions for the next 12 months. With the economy in it’s current state, smart decisions are going to be the difference between success and failure in 2011. According to Mashable.com, here are the expended trends for small businesses in the next year:

1. Increased spending on websites. Recent surveys state that over 50% of small businesses have websites, yet virtually all of them are informational and have nothing available for purchase on them. Even less of them have anything more than an email address as the “customer service” arm of their business online. As more and more people shop for goods and services online and have less face to face interaction with their merchants, it becomes increasingly important that businesses, and specifically small businesses, keep up with the times. Falling behind technologically in 2011 will be a direct indicator that a business cannot compete with the “big boys”. Many of those businesses will be passed by. Trending shows that competitive businesses will invest in their websites in 2011 to not only compete aesthetically, but technically in order to best serve the new age of customers who are changing the way people shop for products or services.

Businesses that compete will do so by upgrading their E-Commerce offerings, blogging to interact directly with their customers, creating ways to schedule or reserve services online and creating direct links/interfaces with the social media market.

2. Increased Smartphone Growth. If you have a television, then you realize that every phone company is pushing hard to convert all 132 million cellphones on the market from old-fashioned RAZRs to one type of smartphone or the other. Those that have smartphones USE THEM. Whether it’s for tweeting on the fly, getting immediate directions to a business when you are in your car, or simply looking to buy that birthday gift while sitting at McDonalds during lunch from your business, a business must have their website enabled to work on a smartphone.

The competitive trend in business by business professionals is that they make their website widely accessible on any smartphone. This means giving smartphone users an easy way to call a business, find directions to the business, or even shop from their phone. If you sell widgets and Walmart sells the same widget but offers it to smartphone clients, guess who they will shop with.

3. Social Shopping and E-Commerce Advancements. Back in the day, a small business served their local community. In 2011, successful offices use their “office” as little more than the place they sit while they handle their business. If you sell any sort of product, then it’s imperative that you have a web store. For many businesses, they have abandoned the retail storefront in favor of having a strong online store and a solid Adwords campaign to promote it.

Looking at trending the last 5 years, online shopping has increased each and every year at 20-50% pace. With that said, the competitive small businesses will invest in their websites and incorporate either a full web store or shopping cart to their current websites. They will also utilize the social media tools available to sell in that platform as well.

4. More Focused Social Media Efforts. From many of the small business owners I’ve spoken too, they just don’t understand fully how to use social media to their advantage. In short, there’s too many of them. Obviously, Facebook is the big boy that every business should have a presence on, but outside of that, you really run into valuable questions. How can Twitter effect my business? Is Yelp a valuable resource? Should I blog and post to Digg or Reddit? What about YouTube? The questions are many, and without investigation, you regularly find businesses trying to have a presence in all avenues. This is OK if it’s maintained, but ultimately these solutions are not maintained fully and end up with acting as a poor, disinterested imaging of your brand.

In 2011, the trend will be for businesses to stop trying to have presence on every social media outlet and narrow down to those that are important to them doing better business.

5. Increased Adoption Of Cloud Computing. As a business owner that does a great deal of work in the cloud, I can say with certainty that businesses WILL move this way in the future. Think about it. If you have a small call center with 10 people total today, you could reduce your costs for licensing the Microsoft Office Suite from $1500 to $0, and could reduce your inbound and outbound calling costs from roughly $6000 to $0! That’s $7500 saved, today, while giving up almost no functionality from what you are used to using. Working in the cloud will get increasingly easier in 2011, with my guess being that the launch of the Chrome OS combined with the growth of IPad usage convincing businesses that they simply don’t want to be tied to software-installed applications that are costly and seemingly go out of date every 18-24 months.

The smart business person, especially those who are on a shoe string budget, will increasingly adapt their operations to cut costs without sacrificing ability. In short, it just makes sense.