The Future of Small Business Marketing and Operations

This past February, the Intuit Institute for the Future issued a 32 page report discussing the three trends that will affect small businesses over the next decade.  Given our focus on entrepreneurship and small business here on the smbZen BizJournal, we found the report to be both interesting and incredibly insightful.  The trends are:

1. “The Connected World: Small Business Management On My Time, On My Terms”
2. “Beyond Web 2.0: Technology Fuels Small Business Formation, Operations, and Innovation”
3. “Small Business Marketing: The Mindset from Push to Pull”

In the following sections, we discuss trend two and trend three.

Preliminary Results From Blogging and Search Engine Optimization

The two most important factors to search engine traffic growth, according to Problogger Darren Rowse are:

• the steady addition of content
• the gradual increase in incoming links that results from regular publishing

Preliminary data suggests this does work.  Here is a Google Analytics chart that shows daily search engine traffic to this site since November 1st, 2008, approximately fifteen days since Tom and I started posting regularly.

Before jumping to conclusions, please keep in mind that this site and corresponding domain are new and have a Google PageRank of 0.  Despite the handicap in Search Engine Placement Rankings (SERP), the site’s daily search engine traffic since November 15th, has on average doubled.  I attribute the dip seen at November end to the holiday season.

Word-of-Mouth: It’s All About Emotions

According to WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is “marketing that leverages interpersonal communication between individuals to drive product awareness and growth,” and is comprised of five elements.

• Educating people about your products and services
• Identifying people most likely to share their opinions
• Providing tools that make it easier to share information
• Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared
• Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals

What is Your Content’s Reproductive Rate?

The concept of viral marketing was taken directly from the spread of infectious diseases. Like viral marketing, models of infectious disease begin with a seed group of individuals who spread the infection to their contacts according a reproduction rate, R. For an infection, or content piece to experience that highly sought after exponential growth, the reproduction rate has to be greater than 1. Let’s for example, see what happens when R = 1.25 and when R = 0.50 and when our initial seed size is 1,000.

Patience is a Virtue

Marketing is a lot like farming: seed potential customers with an idea, watch as it takes root in their minds, and wait for it to grow and fruit into a sale. It’s not said enough enough, but successful marketing takes time. Too often, campaigns fail because marketers are impatient and unwilling to let their ideas develop among their customers.

Many professional marketers, most notably Jay Levinson, remark that patience is the secret key to successful marketing. After laying down a strategy, give it time to work; it’s highly unlikely anyone will be convinced immediately. Rather, repetition of the marketing message will slowly change the potential customer’s perception and ultimately lead to sales.

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