Small Business IT: The Marketing Amusement Story

12:30 pm. Wednesday. Lunchbreak. A few months ago, I decided to find a bakery nearby to buy some freshly baked bread.

Step 1. Finding a Bakery – I searched for the nearest bakeries and decided to drop by a tiny local bakery that had a lot of positive reviews and a score of 4.7 on Google Maps.

Step 2. The Location – Once I got there, I was stunned that this small, hole-in-the-wall bakery was so busy and had a pretty long line-up! Why? Well, after trying their delicious and freshly baked bread, I knew having a good product would help, but there must be something more!

Step 3. The Website – I checked the bakery’s website and found it was had a very clean and straightforward website design with well-written content highlighting the business and location. 

Step 4. The Reminder – A few weeks later, I forgot the name of the bakery and was really frustrated I didn’t save their information. However, as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across the bakery again! This bakery was reminding me of its name and its bread. 

Step 5. Research – My eyes were so wide opened, as I completely did not expect that such a small business would use Marketing & Advertisement so wisely! I was so proud and impressed, that now my favorite, bakery fully integrated its customer traffic for their digital media.

Based on this experience, it seems to me that one of Gerd Leonhard’s, whom The Wall Street Journal calls “one of the leading media futurists in the world,” predictions for 2020 became real. That “data will be essential” as users often form different relationships with different clients and reaching them will involve continuous engagement and remarketing. Therefore, as a business grows, it is essential To Bridge the Gap between IT and Marketing, and save all the data for New Social Marketing Trends.  

To read more about those predictions, check out this article, A Futurist Looks at the Future of Marketing.

In terms of marketing, unlike big corporations who usually set the trends, small business owners must adapt to the patterns to stay relative in the industry. The reason for such adaptation is overall business competitiveness as small business owners must watch out for the costs and only implement activities that help them to stay more competitive. 

To tie together marketing trends by Gerd Leonhard and the small bakery, consider that by 2020, most interruptive marketing will be gone. Instead, marketing will be personalized, customized, and adapted to what consumers have expressed as their wishes or opt-ins — which essentially means that advertising becomes content. Data will be essential, and as users, we’ll be paying with our data — swapping a bit of our personal information in return for the use of platforms and services.

So right now, it is not too late to start gathering data for your small business, because understanding the underlying data behind your business is not an option anymore. It is a requirement to stay competitive in 2020!