New Year Predictions

With only a few days to go until Christmas, I thought I would share with you some of my predictions for the New Year. All of them will likely affect your business and I have split them into three categories - Political & Economic, Business in General and Marketing Direction.

Political & Economic
With the UK election decided it looks like Brexit will happen (confidently said despite any evidence to the contrary). This will create Political stability in the UK and a slight recovery of their markets (based on the certainty of politics, nothing more) but the rest of Europe I have no idea about.

From a marketing point of view, Donald Trump will win the 2020 US election. It is irrelevant of policy; he is too good a salesman and nobody will touch him in this area. This will mean stability and certainty in the US and for US markets.

Australia will be steady as she goes. No great jump, but probably not a slump either.

The Asian markets are an uncertainty. With something like a third of Australia’s exports going to China, China’s economy is always of interest to us. However, from the past three years, we have seen trade wars/tariff wars and not that much has changed. Therefore, I suggest the same will happen for the next year or two.

Feel free to disagree with any or all the above – it’s politics after all!

Business in General
I think many of us have been slogging it out for the last year. Not necessarily going forward at great knots but not going backwards either. In general, things seem a bit flat. Though in the last month I have noticed a change. Many companies are in the planning mode for the New Year. This is interesting because it means that instead of waiting for the busy Christmas period to be over and getting to it in January, February; I’m seeing people get very prepared now. So now I will present a totally unsubstantiated theory for this:

1. Everyone has been waiting for “something” as an indicator of change in order to push the foot down and grow the business. But nothing has arisen.
   
2. Everyone has waited long enough, and now we are getting on the front foot to make it happen ourselves.

I think if you combine the likely stability of politics along with the "threat of nothing changing very much", we will see fertile ground for people to create some positivity themselves. A solid base is a great place from which to grow.

Marketing Direction
It has taken a long while for the “Shouldn’t we be on Facebook?” mentality to subside and transform into the “What should we be doing online?” mentality. This is a great question, with online marketing growing to 3.535 trillion (20.7%) worldwide this year with forecasts of 4.9 trillion by 2021*. So, let me lead you to some of the answers:

1. You could be gaining more than 50% of your business from online sources. If you are not, you have room to grow. If you are, you probably have a lot of room to grow!
2. Strategic use of the internet and all its methods rapidly becoming the norm for success. Not one platform or the other, but all as a system/ecosystem.
3. Over the next year video on websites will come of age with video marketing generating 66% more qualified leads.** That is, it will become the norm to create and use video to communicate your benefits, methods and reason to buy. (OK many are doing this already but not most, just the select few with a budget).
4. A return to direct mail. Yes, you heard me, a return to direct mail! OK, not mass direct mail but strategic direct mail. Combine direct mail with strategic use of the internet to understand who is looking and when and you will have a very powerful medium indeed. 

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Fit 4 Market are Marketing Strategy and Inbound Marketing specialists, operating in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.