On January 13, Maurisa Potts presented a workshop on Marketing Trends for 2015. This workshop focused on the top marketing trends that small businesses need to be aware of and gave ideas on what to do to take advantage of these trends. While some of the trends were familiar to many small business owners, such as the need to be mobile friendly and the importance of marketing to millennials, new trends have emerged for 2015 as well. These include an increased focus on personalization in a digital world and using emotion to strengthen your brand engagement.

While we would love it if all of our small businesses could focus on every one of these top trends, we know business owners have limited time and resources to dedicate to marketing. After the presentation, Maurisa sat down with us and shared her thoughts on the two most important things that small business owners should focus on this year:

Here are the two trends that Maurisa recommends that small businesses focus on for 2015:

1. Don’t be afraid to test. Test new ideas and new initiatives, even if it’s a small demographic that you want to try to test a marketing effort to see if it has results. This year will be known as the year of the test, where people will try to think outside the box and be a little more creative in how they attract certain audiences, customers, and new clientele.
2. Focus on bite-sized content in which you employ the less is more approach in trying to engage consumers and potential customers to your business. Invest more in photos, illustrations, and videos to get your message across. Tighten up what you’re trying to say. Unfortunately, the average attention span of individuals is seven seconds, so you have seven seconds to get what you want across from a marketing standpoint.

We hope you will take advantage of these trends to boost your marketing in 2015.