Five Small Business Trends on the Upswing
Updated: Oct 21, 2021
2020 did a fabulous job of shaking things up so it’s easy to see how new small business trends began popping up everywhere. While investing in fads may not always be the best economical choice, staying on top of these trends have many advantages.
This includes giving businesses a competitive edge, revamping & refreshing a brand, and helping to adapt to the new entrepreneurial landscape. With that said, here are some 2020 small business trends that are on the forecast.
1. Remote Work Adjustments
Along with mask-wearing, Tiger King bingeing, and social distancing regulations; the coronavirus brought along a fresh perspective on working from home. Since the pandemic began, an estimated 42 percent of the U.S. labor force is now working from home full-time. The historic switch from cubicle office spaces to dining room tables has had many positives like opening businesses hiring up to a larger pool of talent, saving money on infrastructure costs, and increasing employee productivity.
While remote work blazed at the peak of the pandemic, this is a small business trend that isn’t burning out anytime soon. Try taking some aspects of the typical 9-5 job online with tools such as Zoom and Slack Also, with the lowered cost of office space due to remote work, small businesses can be more profitable.
Notably, we have also seen increasing employee productivity with many companies going remote. Whether that is because of employees enjoying working from home or another reason, we'll have to wait and see.
2. Redesigned Marketing Strategies
The importance of having a strong social media marketing vision made headway when the world jumped online during the pandemic. Emarketer reports, “this year, US adult social network users will spend 82 minutes per day on social networks, a significant upgrade from our previous forecast of 76 minutes.”
Hooking consumers during those 82 minutes spent online means having an eye-catching digital marketing message across various social media platforms such as Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter is key.
Having social media and digital marketing experts involved in the process of reaching that target audience is a smart way to get ahead of competitors.
3. Sustainability Concerns
Sustainability is trending and it’s time for your business to go green! Recycled fabrics and reusable products have been on the rise since Gen Z and Millennials started dominating the market. These generations want products that will last and that they feel good about purchasing instead of ones that increase their ecological footprint.
Surveys of Gen Z members have shown that 73% of them are willing to pay more for sustainability. The switch to being eco-friendly is a profitable change and one to embrace going forward. This small business trend will also do plenty for brand respectability.
4. Going Cashless
Since the dawn of credit card usage in 1950, the popularity of the cashless option has only gone up. Now, with the coin shortage and heightened awareness of the unsanitary practices that come with money exchanges, the importance of credit card readers for small businesses is only increasing.
Make sure your business can accept a variety of credit/debit cards and can register both chips and magnetic strips. Other cashless exchange options like prepaid gift cards, loyalty programs, and mobile payments are easy to adopt and will increase business profits with their versatility.
5. Creative Logo Design
Forbes writes, “the right logo can inspire loyalty and instill a love for effective design” and in today’s small business world, logo design is an understated yet imperative trend to jump on. A logo must embody a brand, be recognizable, versatile, and timeless. It should withstand the test of time and be instantly recognizable to the mass consumer market.
Small business owners may think the cost of a professional logo construction and design exceedingly high; however, our services are offered for as low as $200. Jumping on this small business trend is a smart investment for the future.
Implementing These Small Business Trends
Adapting just one or all five of these trends can make the world of a difference and consulting with experts about these trends is a key to success. For more information about our services and what social benge can do for you, go ahead and explore our services tab above. Remember, fads aren’t always temporary!
42 percent working from home full-time still leaves the home-office stipend question unanswered: set a monthly reimbursement cap and require VPN use, or remote savings get eaten by ad-hoc expenses. On the marketing side, 82 minutes per day is the number to design around, so a short-form video workflow for social platforms can help repurpose one clip across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter instead of making five separate assets.
The remote work and social marketing points really stood out. For quick visuals, I also check seedream prompts when I need product shots or posters.
42 percent of the U.S. labor force working from home full-time sounds simple until payroll has to track state tax nexus, equipment stipends, and reimbursement rules for each remote hire. Before adding another Zoom or Slack seat, build a shared worksheet for remote-work policy and state-nexus tracking so those decisions don’t live in six inboxes. That step is missing from the trend list, and it’s the one that gets costly at tax time.
Solid roundup - the section on redesigned marketing strategies is the one I would underline. A small business can out-post a much bigger competitor on social long before it can out-spend one.
One addition from the editing side: on a small team the bottleneck is usually production, not ideas. Aim for one short native video a day and repurpose the same footage across Reels, TikTok and Shorts instead of making separate assets, then schedule a batch so a slow week never leaves the calendar empty.
For turning a single prompt or still image into that ready-to-post short, aifruit.net is a quick option.
The shift to remote work and the 42 percent of the U.S. labor force now working from home really does change how small businesses should think about hiring and daily operations. Alongside those adjustments, marketing has clearly moved toward capturing attention during those 82 daily minutes on social networks, which feels like a much shorter window than it used to be. A tool like an AI music generator could help smaller brands create quick, custom audio for those social ads without needing a full production team.