You can either follow a trend or go against it. The choice is yours. The truth is, nonetheless, that if you fall behind, your competitors may overcome you – steal your customers and offer a better service or product. Knowing that being a business owner is a tough job, technology is sometimes considered too hard to implement because it is costly to hire a strategic partner or IT support or time-consuming to learn new tactics yourself. These myths may not apply for your business – today's tools are made to be easy to implement and understood by non-technical individuals.

We will cover some key trends for 2020 below, but before we jump into that, let's speak about the context. 

In 2018, 50% of the world's population was online. Today in 2019, it's more than 54%. Now, most people have jumped into the information age, where everything is moving at an unbelievable pace. Not only are things (goods and services) changing on a daily basis, but their costs are constantly decreasing. 

Imagine you bought a 3D printer 12 years ago. 40,000 USD is what you'd have paid. Today, the cheapest 3D printers cost around 100 USD. Yes, your math skills are up to par: 400x less.

Everything changes. We either accept it and do our best, or die.

You can embrace technology in 2020, because it is meant to be available for you. When running a local business, you focus on what's really important, right? You don't want to spend time doing things that don't positively affect your bottom line. Being an entrepreneur, there are two key factors to go after:

1. You want to generate more money with the assets you currently have.
2. You want to save time and money.
   

To achieve one or the other, you might try tactics you haven't tried yet. To understand them, let's dive into a few trends to follow in 2020.

Marketing Automation

You know your business best, but we know what saves you time and generates more money when it comes to marketing. Automating routine tasks and delegating the costly work that you or your agency needs to do, to tools like groost. allows you to manage your online campaign effectively and for a fraction of the price. 

If you rely on your sales team, CRM systems like Hubspot or Pipedrive strive to help you automate follow up emails or customer retention activities.

Focus On Your Customer

Always put the customer in the center of your – not only marketing – activities. I can assure you this won't be relevant only in 2020, but will last for decades. The times in which Henry Ford kept saying “You can have any color as long as it's black” is over. In today's era, your customers' desires and preferences are what should keep you awake at night. 

Does this apply to marketing only? Not at all. Imagine you market your product so that hundreds of people are waiting in line to buy from you. Once they approach the cashier they turn back and never come again – unwillingness to serve your customers nicely by one of your employees can be very costly. 

To give another example, say you run an ecommerce project. Everything from marketing to IT works great, until your logistics crash and the customer does not get what she ordered. Is this something that can badly harm your business? Absolutely! Customers have many touch points when dealing with your business – make sure every one of them is as customer-friendly as possible.

Don't Rely On Your Organic Reach

Let's stay in the marketing field for now. You probably run your profile on social media. Having 1,000 page likes brings you nothing if you only reach 20% of them. The organic reach is – and will be – decreasing constantly which we covered in our latest article. You will have no other choice, but to create truly engaging content that resonates with your audience and to invest in paid advertising. What you need to focus on is:

• keeping your target audience in mind
• calculating the ROI for every campaign you run
  

📖 Read more about the Deloitte Small business technology trends that says 80% of small businesses aren't taking full advantage of digital tools.

Work On Inbound Marketing

There are two main communication strategies: inbound & outbound. Inbound makes the potential customer discover you by the content that you create – be it articles on your website, videos on your Youtube channel or podcasts on Spotify. 

Outbound is focused on push or disruptive strategies – you reach your potential customers while they scroll on their social media feeds, watch videos on Youtube or read articles. 

Working on your content brings you long-term results. Educating your audience, providing valuable content – and boosting your inbound marketing – is something you should be focused on throughout not only 2020, but every upcoming year.

We've come across a few basic tips to leverage technology in 2020. As stated, even small businesses can – and should embrace the latest technology. Not only in 2020, but beyond. Let us know what works for your business. 👋