Small business marketing – what opportunities lies ahead?

Posted in Hot, Ideas, Marketing & SoMe

A recent survey conducted by Constant Contact polled 917 decision makers and reports that the primary concerns of running a small business have largely remained unchanged in five years.

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The report also describes about increased usage of marketing tools and challenges around finding new customers and retaining them. For example, there is almost equal split between businesses who find it easier, same or harder to find new customers.

One would have expected that adoption of new tools around email marketing and social media marketing (SoMe) will actually bring down these concerns. Or at least make it easier to address these concerns. However, customers are increasingly paying less attention to marketing and the competition is always increasing. On a positive side, customers are actually spending more money despite higher expectations.

I see this report as a huge opportunity for anyone focusing on small businesses. The core concerns of doing a business will always remain the same – new customers,  retain existing customers. The opportunity lies in finding ways to make it easier for these businesses to find new customers. What can you do as an online marketer to solve issues with customer paying lesser attention to marketing? Is it because the marketing efforts are not reaching the right audience? Is it because wrong tools are being used? How can you reduce time and money to do marketing? How can marketing for these business be done with a philosophy of “making hard things easy”?

You can find a better visualization of the report from MarketingProfs infographics.

Please share your thoughts and what challenges and opportunities you see as you go through the data.

How would such a report look like five years from now?

 

Pen is getting mightier than sword, again!

Posted in Hot, Ideas

Adobe sneaked project Mighty and project Napoleon at Adobe Max yesterday. A nice slick video is available on YouTube here.

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I am very impressed by the thought leadership that Adobe has exhibited here. This opens up tremendous opportunity for kind of applications that can be possible. And not just that, it opens up market for lot more people to get into the creative world.

Last year I was working on my own fun project called Stook (Story Book) and it originated from a simple request from my daughter to help her understand what gravity is all about. I realize if I can draw few pictures, perhaps her favorite toys and explain her the concept in an easy to visualize way. This surely opens up avenues for many such capabilities.

You can sign up for more information on the projects here.