December truly is the most wonderful time of the year for small business owners. Besides the spurt in shopping activity, it's the time when business pundits provide predictions for next year's trends.
I'm feeling pretty good about my track record in picking winners -- you can check out my 2011 predictions post. OK, maybe most businesses didn't splurge on IT this year, but there were definitely more IPOs, QR codes gained in popularity, and cloud-based software and services were huge.
What changes in the business climate are just over the horizon as 2011 winds down? The overall economy is expected to grow just 2 percent, but your local mileage may vary. I've sifted through stacks of forecaster pronouncements to find the best bets.
Here are my favorite predictions for 2012:
- Volatility ahead. With Europe now teetering, economic uncertainty will remain the big issue for every small business owner, with 44 percent of owners naming it the "one thing that stands between where you are today and growing your company," a Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute study found. Winners will have flexible long- and short-term plans so they can shift gears quickly.
- "Right-time" multichannel marketing. Watch for new tools that will help business owners better analyze complex customer behavior and comments on various social-media platforms. Then, you'll use that data to monetize your business's social-media presence with tailored marketing campaigns that reach the right customer at the right time with the right message, opines Joe Cordo on the MarketingProfs blog.
- More cheap online ads. Marketing will center around a move to low-cost online tactics such as paid search, says Kenneth Wisnefski, founder/CEO of the SEO firm WebiMax. "Merchants and retailers who chose innovative and less-expensive advertising channels including social media and paid search were rewarded well during the Thanksgiving weekend," he says in reference to the spike in online sales.
- Customers in charge. More businesses will involve customers directly in merchandise and marketing decisions, Susan Reda writes in STORES magazine. How? Here's a hint: If you aren't doing online customer polls yet: Facebook makes those insanely easy to set up.
- Mobile purchasing grows. "Those retailers not optimizing their website for mobile phones need to start as soon as possible," says Diane Buzzeo, CEO of ecommerce-software provider Ability Commerce. Research firm eMarketer adds that m-commerce more than doubled this year to $6.7 billion, and expects it to quadruple again by 2015.
- Credit gets easier. Business owners may finally get the capital they need, says Odysseas Papadimitriou, CEO of the credit-card portal CardHub. Underwriting standards relaxed this year and will continue to loosen up in 2012, he says.
- Services head offshore. Service-sector businesses will be in demand overseas, Elance forecasts. This year, U.S.-based contractors exported their services to more than 140 countries through Elance's freelance portal.
- Daily deals die down. Experts agree: The daily-deal space is oversaturated with competing offers. Also, many business owners lost money doing daily deals. Expect a shakeout, both in the number of deal companies and in the types of deals offered.
- Retail-format experimentation picks up. From pop-up stores to smaller-format Wal-Marts to food trucks, expect more retailers and restaurateurs to experiment with their store layouts. As the economy slumbers, retailers will look for ways to make cheaper, smaller footprints work, the Booz & Company's "2012 Retail Industry Perspective" report says.
- More collaboration. This one's my prediction: the small businesses that stay afloat will be the ones that reach out to complementary businesses in their town or their industry and find ways to help each other.
What's your prediction for 2012? Leave a comment and add to my list.
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Comments:
SMBs will continue to adopt cloud services at a faster pace vs. larger enterprises in 2012 (both at start-ups and established firms). The average SMB starts with 4.9 workers today, down from 7.5 in the 90's, according to the Kauffman Foundation. It's far easier to start or grow a small business without the IT headaches. Cloud gives an SMB everything they need to go beyond simple web presence and e-commerce - hosted infrastructure (IaaS), communications and collaboration and hosted business applications (SaaS). Even Desktop and Platform-as-a-Service (DaaD and PaaS) will be appealing to many small businesses. Cloud is a game changer, enabling SMBs to compete with much larger firms, so expect more and more SMBs embracing its potential in 2012
It's just the start of 2012, so we'll never know if this year is going to be as eventful as 2011, or even more than that. What we can expect is that there will be a lot more improvements in the online business niche because of the tweaks made on search engine algorithms. SEO will still be there. -- Ray
Number 10 resonates - survived my first year as a business owner and one of the most siginificant experiences was realizing that as all the different relationships got developed and began to grow so did corresponding results. This is something to keep of top of mind and further build upon 2012...
After experience, teaming comes in a close second on every engagement. I agree with your prediction for 2012 on collaboration; if you are a small business and you are not active in growing your strategic partners it might soon be a fatal mistake.
So will 2012 be
For small and mid-size businesses, 2011 was an eventful year for the owners and managers tasked with technology decisions.
Very helpful that I was looking for
Mcommerce is the big growth area as you say and if the increasing number of emails I am now receiving on a daily basis can be used as a barometer then more and more retailers are already embracing this and optimizing their mobile website platforms.Daily deals maybe over saturated but will be re-packaged to improve retailer margins.Consumers are now "deal savvy" and will continue to look for deals and discounts in the pursuit of value for money products and services.I think the loosening of the squeeze on available credit for businesses will apply only to robust businesses with a track record of returning profits.Life will still be difficult for the smaller retailer and new start-ups.
I had a similar list with me, but end of the day it is being at the right time, right place.
Oh! I have already expected 6 of the above mentioned list. It is unbelievable. I agree with your list of predictions.
Carol, if you're giving yourself credit for predicting that QR codes would grow in 2011, you're kind of a generous grader. While QR may have grown, the technology is still a long way from catching on in any meaningful way. Have you personally used a QR code in the real world? Do you know anyone who has? Have you even downloaded a QR app? I didn't think so.
Finding a lot of similarities between what you’ve listed here and our collection of predictions we published in a whitepaper this week. We interviewed 34 marketing and brand strategists and consultants about their predictions for social marketing in 2012. Find it here: http://info.awarenessnetworks.com/2012-Social-Marketing-New-Media-Predictions.html Biggest similarities, real-time integration will be crucial, per David Meerman Scott (@dmscott:twitter), as well as the overall rise in mobile. Both C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman:twitter ) and Brian Solis (@briansolis:twitter ) commented that understanding mobile behavior is really the key to developing a good mobile strategy. Interested to hear your thoughts. Join the conversation here: #2012Awareness
We agree! We put something together as well - 34 leading marketing and brand strategists and consultants gave their top predictions for 2012. Like your findings, real-time marketing will change the way marketers develop campaigns, as predicted by David Meerman Scott (@dmscott:twitter ). Also, the overall rise of mobile, especially integrating location based services, will significantly impact both B2C and B2B marketers. Everyone we interviewed, including C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) and Brian Solis (@briansolis:twitter ) had much to say about mobile in 2012. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/swXH2A #2012Awareness
I agree that more collaboration is likely to be a feature of 2012. Collaboration works, but only if it is structured. Key to the success of any collaborative activity should be: 1. Ideally, collaborate with those you know and importantly, those you know you can trust 2. Ensure that you are trustworthy and that you respect other people’s contribution as well as their time 3. Agree a structure of how you will collaborate and set clear objectives 4. Understand what each side will / could bring to the party 5. Listen to the ideas of others – this is one of the benefits of collaboration
And they will make money form both Sheep and Goats, is this a symbiotic or parasitic relationship? If your customer fails because they use your service that can't be good customer service.
While I agree, sadly, with #7 "Services head offshore. Service-sector businesses will be in demand overseas, Elance forecasts. This year, U.S.-based contractors exported their services to more than 140 countries through Elance's freelance portal." ... I would never hire outside of the USA, unless I opened an office in another country, then I would hire the local talent in that particular country...I like to keep things local.
Groupon will separate the sheep from the goats
Interesting point!
The weakness of daily deals are already getting exposed even in our country. But who knows, if this market is oversaturated and no one will ever enter, it might be a great market again.
The forecast for the year is good for the people who work as a team yet maintain their own individuality. If we have bypassed the responsibility of what we are putting out there as a service or selling then 2012 is the year we will be faced with the challenge to accept it belongs to us, good or bad. The time of the victim who screams 'poor me, will come to an end. Personally and professionally developing new strengths and using different approaches will combine with the technological age to rebuild the economy to bring longevity. Trust has been broken in so many ways and trust will become a major factor in loyalty as competition soars.
Point 10 is without a doubt the future.Particularly in my own buisness H&S and training.There is great need for local consultantancies and training providers who are flexible and can cater for local SME's needs,at competive rates.In very simple terms 3 -4 days work for 100 local SME's on an ongoing basis is 2 years work
This is a good article about trends that are transforming the retail industries around the world.
I like your vision and I do believe that 2012 is the year of creative marketing. New channels and ways to produce and convert leads. The potential of mobile app marketing and sales portals is still young and hop to see more development in this field.
More collaboration. This one's my prediction: the small businesses that stay afloat will be the ones that reach out to complementary businesses in their town or their industry and find ways to help each other. I too like this one the most, communication networking and sharing of information very important.
Spot on with number 10. Our business is, and always has been, entirely self financed so we grew through networking and word of mouth. That moved into partnership and referral deals with complimentary but non-competing businesses over the last year. Result? a 600% increase in turnover YTD with over 3 months of the financial year left. We effectively created a 200 strong commission only salesforce,
I think your last one will be the most influential, and yet the real difference will be made when all businesses collaborate internally with ALL their employees. With all of our hierarchical structures and way of working we often ignore or do not even realise that we have the answers within our own people. We invest so much on external systems and processes with little or no real return. If we invested a fraction of that on integrating our people, our thinking and our purpose I believe the gloom and doom predictions for 2012 could be blown away with renewed innovation and action. The problem we have we are predicting the future from within our current paradigm, so all we can predict is more of the same.
" the small businesses that stay afloat will be the ones that reach out to complementary businesses in their town or their industry and find ways to help each other." I think this prediction will become more practical in the coming days. Companies need to work with other companies in this leverage model.
I guess that 2011 is the Year of Social Media and 2012 will be all about real engagement and listening. I can't wait for that ultimate tool that will accurately measure the marketing efforts + your customers' sentiment to your brand. More Success in 2012!!
4th and the 5th point i find very strong. Because as a business firm , we done all work for the people and for the customers. So it is needed to know about their reviews and opinions for our product or the firm. And now as heard this year shopping rate increased through the smartphone more. So need for the website that easily accessible on the mobile. And in coming days chances for increasing rate of shopping through the mobile. So now the need is to be sure for this point also. Thanks for such nice points shred with us.
Interesting insight - it will be interesting to see how things shake out this time next year.
My prediction on 2012 is that many SEO companies will be born. Many small and medium businesses will be informed on how SEO and Internet marketing works now a days. Of course they don't want to be left behind so they still take the risk.
#10 should be the standard for small businesses operating in a big-box world. We need to stop fighting amongst ourselves and concentrate on fighting the bigger "demons." #8 does more damage then good, IMO. Training consumers to always get something for nothing (or very little) is a bad trent to start. After 9/11, the auto companies went to 0% financing to entice consumers to purchase vehicles, and it took YEARS to break that habit...
I don't think so...the more the economy is nuts, the more important it is to really listen to customers and make sure you're delivering exactly what they want. How do you see a conflict?
Good ones! Here are ours: Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2012 from the SMB Group wp.me/ppxlm-tU
#1 and #4 would seem to contradict one another...on the surface.
Collaboration is KEY -- get with other businesses and figure out a promotion you could all do together, I see. The small businesses in my town have some great co-marketing events they do.
Customers being in charge is something to pay attention to because during these changing times customers now have more power than ever to help a business succeed or fail. Great customer service along with excellent products and services is mandatory and will force many people to restructure their businesses or be pushed into demise. entrepreneurialambitions.com
These look excellent—right on the mark. Thank you for your article.
I predict customer service making a comeback. as consumers have to make more choices about where to spend their money, business who deliver the most satisfying experience will be the winners.
I like the last one the most.