Marketing Trends for 2025 Small Business Owners NEED to Hear

Vivian:
Welcome back to another episode of the SOB (Small Owned Business) Marketing Podcast. Y'all, it's 2025. Yay! Congratulations. You made it through 2024. I don't know what kind of year you guys had, it was an interesting one for me. I don't want to relive 2024. Not super sad to see it go, but I am super excited to be moving into the new year.

As a little bit of a reminder, marketing is your life source for your small business. If you have made a commitment to yourself in 2025 to put marketing as a priority, then please hit subscribe to this podcast channel because we want to be bringing you important marketing topics throughout the year just to help you along your way and to ensure that you guys are keeping your marketing top of mind because eventually that's what's going to drive the revenue.

Also, leave us a review if you're not new around here. If you've heard a couple of our episodes and for whatever reason you just haven't left us a review, now is a perfect time. You guys didn't get us anything for Christmas, so you might as well just go ahead and leave us a review.

Remember we have a TLDL section or chapter in this episode. We just started doing this. Too long, didn't listen. If you are short on time right now, Chelsea has your back. Go ahead and forward to that TLDL chapter. She's going to give you a really quick rundown of what we talked about in today's episode and then when you do have more time we want you to come back and listen to the full episode so that you get all of the context behind the discussion.

Chelsea:
Perfect. We wanted to start 2025 off right, which means we are going to be talking about marketing trends that we believe are going to continue to get popular, continue to grow, that are going to be super important in 2025 for small business owners.

Vivian:
Yeah, I'm really excited about this discussion, Chelsea, because I'm curious. Let us know as you listen to this episode, if there are any marketing trends that we talk about today that really knock your socks off and you're like, Whoa, didn't see that one coming. I'm curious about this, but for the most part, I get the inkling that you guys have maybe heard some of this rhetoric or some of these trends before, but we hope to give you more information and more context on how this might be morphing within the next year or two and what that might mean for your small business.

Chelsea:
Yeah, I also want to say, y'all, there is a lot of information out there. This is our list of marketing trends. We've done research. This is what we believe the research is showing and what we believe as marketing professionals make the most sense for 2025. This is not going to be the same list as all the other lists out there because everyone has a different opinion.

Vivian:
Absolutely. Y'all know Chelsea and I live, eat, and breathe this stuff, which means we do a lot of reading. We do a lot of watching videos to keep our ear to the ground about what's changing and what's going on.

I read an article that was "75 marketing trends for 2025". I was like, first of all, who has time to write about 75 marketing trends? Even if you asked me to, that'd be a good challenge for me. Even if you asked me to write about 75 things, I'd say, yeah, pass hard pass.

Chelsea:
Question, what makes it a trend and not just a strategy?

Vivian:
The word trend to me signifies that there shouldn't be a lot of them. Right? A trend in the sense of the definition by itself is something that a large part of the community or the population is doing. So you can't really convince me that there are 75 trends that I need to prioritize as a small business owner. No.

I can maybe prioritize four, maybe five. Okay. But I ain't doing no 75.

Chelsea:
Yes, 75 seems a little excessive, but let's go ahead and start with our first trend. No surprise, it's going to be AI.

Right now everyone is pushing to create new AI capabilities and to find new ways to use AI in their businesses. A great example of this is chatbots. And I personally love chatbots. It's a great use of AI, but businesses are working to make them more and more complex so that they can answer any question that your consumer may have. If you're not aware of what a chat bot is, it's when you pull up a website and you get that little message box and it goes, how can I help you? Then you can ask a question and it'll hopefully respond. Now, sometimes the response you get is, we'll have to get a live representative for you or something like that. So people are trying to minimize that as much as possible. They want these chat bots to be able to answer any question a consumer would have.

Vivian:
I think what's interesting about this and as small business owners, we just want to remind you, Chelsea and I've had several conversations just personally between her and I, because we use chat GPT and the like, but we often go back to our conversation internally about when it's appropriate for us to use it and when it's not.

We don't think AI is going to morph in the sense of, it's going to be running your business or doing anything like that. What she's talking about in regard to the chat bot specifically on a website is, there are some questions that you hear over and over and over again. Okay. Maybe it's something to do with your shipping. Maybe it's something to do with your refund policy. Those basic questions that you don't need to have a human answering that because it's very basic and repetitive. That's what she's saying is those questions once identified, you can utilize these platforms to help you come up with some type of decision-making tree that says, Hey, if the conversation escalates past these types of questions, then a human needs to be involved. But if it's not, then you can easily input information and data that a chat bot could answer. It feels like it's still a person answering you, but they're just answering the basic questions.

Chelsea:
Yeah. What a lot of businesses are also trying to do is to expand on what those basic questions can be so that they need a human, customer support person less and less.

Vivian:
If you're saying, "well, Vivian, Chelsea, I don't plan on using a chat bot for my website", that's okay. Think of it in terms of if you are still answering a lot of questions in DMs and Instagram direct messages, chat bots like ManyChat can help you with setting up systems to where it will allow you a little more freedom and you're not having to stay in your inbox all the time. Instead that system that you set up can address some of these basic questions. That's the way to look at AI. I agree with Chelsea. I think this is a big marketing trend that we're going to see in 2025.

Our perspective of how we use AI in a business is going to change drastically because as these platforms change the way that they're using it so that we can, you know, engage more, on the platforms, we're going to start to see those examples and be like, well, that's not weird. One of the things I saw in SocialMediaToday.com. Chelsea that I want to read, this is a direct quote from an article that they had.

"Pinterest already has try-on options for makeup products along with selected furniture items that you can virtually place in your home. While it also has skin tone search filters and hair type discovery options to refine your in-app searches. Expect Pinterest to launch more of these types of tools powered by AI to improve its discovery elements."

What that means y'all is they're basically telling us, the functionality on the back end. AI is what is allowing them to get very concise with these filter options. For example, I'm very pale compared to my baby sister. Chelsea has beautiful skin tone. I am just super white, which means that I have a harder time finding makeup and stuff like that. So Pinterest therefore now gives us an option to be able to scale down, whether that be me uploading a picture of myself so that I can try on eyeshadow to ensure that it will look good on me prior to me making that purchase. They're doing more and more of that. Chelsea, you were just telling me you and Tim are redoing one of your rooms. Furniture is a big deal. Is it gonna fit in the room the way I want it to?

Pinterest is basically like, "hey, girl, don't worry, we got you basically you upload a picture of the room, and then you can place the dimensions and graphic of the actual furniture into that to ensure that it fits correctly."

Chelsea:
I needed this when we were buying a mirror.

Vivian knows this story. In our main bedroom, we have double sinks and I wanted a mirror to go above it. Tim said, "okay, let's go shop for one". I said, "well, don't you need to measure the area first?" And he told me, "no, no, no, I know the sizes. It'll be fine". Long story short, we bought a mirror that's too big. So now it's on the other wall across from the sinks and I have no mirror above my sinks because I was like, forget it.

Vivian:
So see Pinterest is low-key wanting to save relationships because it's like, just take a picture of the space beforehand, find the mirror on Pinterest, and then we'll tell you if it's going to fit in the space so that you can visually see it.

I think that's where, going back to what I was saying about AI, when you start doing or using AI outside of just what people think about these days, which is chat GPT, y'all, let's just call it. When we say AI, everyone thinks chat GPT and how can I use it in my small business.

When we start to see this conversion in functionality and how AI is just helping us to have more of these filter options and create a better customer experience. I think in 2025, we're going to pay more attention to AI because it's going to start to click for us as small business owners. Small business owners are going to be like, oh wait a second, I can maybe somehow integrate AI in this way. If you guys want to just be sure that you're staying present and on top of this AI conversation, highly recommend that you go and join our email list, you could do that just by going to theseasonedmarketer.com. Nice little pop-up will appear. Just give us your email address in there, opt in, because we'll keep you guys informed as the year progresses with it.

Chelsea:
In the coming weeks, we will have another podcast episode specifically about AI, AI do's and don'ts. We haven't recorded it yet, y'all, but we have it on the schedule. Definitely when it comes out, listen to that, because like Vivian was just saying, the way that we think about AI is going to change. And that is a good thing.

ChatGPT is a great tool if you're using it correctly. Do not just copy and paste posts and stuff like that from ChatGPT. We'll get into it in the episode. But there are ways to use AI, and there are ways to use ChatGPT, and there are ways that you don't want to use it.

Vivian:
Absolutely, it can be used for good and it can be used for "evil".

We'll call it not evil, but menacing.

Chelsea:
For once, I'm going to be like, no, we don't mean evil. It's more like marketing is about standing out. Y'all, you can tell when someone has copy and pasted a caption from ChatGPT. How is that helping you stand out?

Vivian:
People can see right through it. You know, you're a small business. You have a really big advantage in the sense that people want to buy from you because it's from YOU. It's from your business. If you're just using ChatGPT to write all of your communication, to write all of your social media posts, to write all of your copy on your website and stuff, it's diluting your advantage. Because then you look like everybody else and people are like, what is this person a robot?

Chelsea:
Related to AI, here's another trend that I believe will continue to grow. I saw this less when I was doing research on it, but I do agree with it. It's voice search and voice commerce, because voice search is becoming more and more prevalent. When I say voice search, I mean Alexa. Alexa, find me the nearest waxing salon. Or you could say, Alexa, purchase this cat food again.

That's voice search and voice commerce. So making sure that your content and your small business is compatible with voice searches and just kind of keeping that in mind for 2025, great for your small business.

Vivian:
I think this is also a great topic that we can uncover Chelsea in a future episode too, because as a small business owner myself, I've read up on it and I kind of know the basics where they tell you, think about SEO same vein for voice search. However, I want to get very clear on what that means. What do you think small businesses should do to ensure that they're doing everything they can to show up on these researches? So, if you need just one more reason to go ahead and subscribe to this channel, that's something that we'll put in queue for a future episode just so that we could bring you the latest and greatest information from 2025 about voice search.

Chelsea:
Okay, so our next marketing trend is again, one that is no surprise - video content. Y'all, video content is not going anywhere. If anything, it's growing even more. I saw recently that it's even become a leading trend in B2B marketing. So business to business marketing. I thought that was very interesting.

Vivian, I want to ask you, when I was doing research for this, I saw two separate opinions. I saw one opinion where they were saying, you know, educational content will continue to grow. It will continue to be relevant, especially in video marketing. Then I saw the opposite, saying educational content is dead, because people don't want to learn anymore. They just want to be entertained, not educated. They don't want to be educated anymore. They just want to be entertained. What's your take?

Vivian:
I will pick option C. It's called "edutainment". So it's a mixture of the two. First of all, education is never going to go away. If somebody says that to you, that's stupid.

Chelsea:
Ooh, hot take from Vivian.

Vivian:
Yeah. Can we just say that that's dumb? Dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's assuming that we live in a culture of just idiots who don't want to learn anything new. People are hungry for information. Shocking.

We talk about marketing. It's all about the packaging. Think about the way that you utilize Instagram or Facebook or TikTok. We have one of our close friends, Karen, we joke that she's the spreadsheet queen. She loves an Excel spreadsheet and she gets on TikTok and I kid you not, she loves watching Excel spreadsheet hacks on TikTok. So for one, it's entertaining. She likes the particular person that does these videos because of their presentation style. Then on top of it, she loves it because she's learning a new rule or a new way to go about doing something that saves her time. Education is not going to go away. Do people want to be entertained? Yes, absolutely.
You're getting meshed in there as a small business with all of this other video content that's floating around.

Chelsea:
Exactly. I'm so glad that you picked option C.

I feel like we do this all the time, y'all. We say, it's whatever works best for you guys. It's, not yes, not no. It's a mix of in between. Because that's how the world works. Okay, I have a hot take. If someone's telling you this is how you have got to do something or this cannot be done, if they're giving you absolutes, you shouldn't be listening to them.

Vivian:
I agree with you a hundred percent. I learned this a long time ago, when I'm arguing with my spouse and I say, you always do X, Y, and Z. He's probably going to find examples of when he didn't do the thing I'm claiming he did. Therefore the word "always" isn't necessarily true. So when people say the words "never do this" or "always do that", you're always going to find examples of businesses that have not done what they're telling you to do and have come out fine. You're going to always find the exception to the rule. It's just not a smart thing to take advice from people that are claiming that, and it's a little click baity.

Relating back to video content - I was recently reading up on something that was saying that Facebook is going to lean heavy on video content. If y'all think they've already done this, you ain't seen nothing yet. They are saying they're going to lean even more into this video content and prioritize it simply because of what is possibly occurring with TikTok. Instagram basically just copy and pasted what TikTok was doing onto their platform with Reels. So Meta is saying, we see how popular it is. We see that there's a secret sauce in there. So we're going to utilize it and prioritize it and make it even more so something that we're going to be doing in 2025.

Chelsea:
Y'all, if you are a part of the SOB community, you would have heard this conversation already. We were talking about Facebook and their push for video. One of our community members was actually talking about how he's noticed an uptick in views on video content on his Facebook page. So we're seeing it firsthand.

I'm going to merge to marketing trends, AI use in video, video editing, video creation, like that. Vivian, I don't know if you've heard about this. And y'all if you want a deeper dive into what I'm about to say, again, join the SOB community because I'm going to be bringing it to one of our weekly meetings to talk about this. Instagram recently announced that they are currently exploring with AI and video, and being able to change what you're wearing in a video, being able to change the background so you're in a different place. They're playing with how to incorporate AI when it comes to recording on Instagram. So AI and video marketing can merge in together.

Vivian:
I had not heard that. I have mixed feelings about this because I already hate that y'all be using so many damn filters on this thing. Can I just tell you, I'm not going to name names, but I sometimes will see people's pictures and I'm like, you definitely do not look like that. You are out here catfishing people. So I just feel like they're opening up Pandora's box with catfishing even more because now we're going to be swapping out backgrounds, we're going to be swapping out outfits, like, you know what I mean?

Chelsea:
Mm-hmm. I would love for us to have this conversation later on in the year when it's actually happening, to see how people are actually reacting to this, you know, particularly with businesses. Like, are consumers going to like the fact that you're changing your background, or is it going to be super obvious and super off putting?

Vivian:
Can I tell you what this reminds me of and I can't believe I haven't shared this with you yet Chelsea. I think I took a screenshot of it. If not, I remember the business that did this. You know how more people are using AI to generate content for their business. Well, apparently there was a business during Christmas time that was running a Facebook ad and it's one of those survival businesses. It's one of those types of companies that sell gear like backpacks and stuff. The ad, the image was obviously created by AI. When I saw this one thing that I'm about to tell you about, when I was scrolling through my feed, I was like, no f**** way, no way that this actually got approved through probably like three or four people and they're running this ad. Okay. It is a picture of rubble. All right. A city that's in ruins. Then there's a family. So it's got a mom, a dad, a kid, and then a baby. One of them is wearing a backpack, but here's the funny part. There was a random arm sticking out of the backpack!

We talk about how AI hasn't quite figured out how to really do well with images yet. Just a random arm sticking out of the backpack that they were carrying. I was like, that's kind of creepy. I clicked on the comments because I was like, clearly I cannot be the only one who sees this. And sure enough, first the comments are like, I love this brand. I love this product. I have this backpack. It's great. Then I get down further and it's like, does anybody else not see the hand, the random arm coming out of the backpack that has no body attached to it?

So that's an AI fail. Y'all don't be using AI to create your Facebook ads, please. Okay. Stuff like this will happen.

Chelsea:
Yeah. I'm sitting here thinking, how did that get approved? Do you know how many people an ad has to go through before it can be approved?

Vivian:
Or we could be wrong and it could just be one person that it had to go through when they just did not see it. What you should get from that is don't use AI to create images.

Chelsea:
So our next marketing trend for 2025 is social commerce. Y'all, shopping on social media will continue to grow and these platforms will continue to push for it. Trust me.

Vivian:
I was reading something recently in regards to TikTok. So obviously, TikTok has a Chinese version and they often talk about the difference between the TikTok we see here in the United States and the difference that they see in China. One of the big differences they were talking about is that they have had such an uptick in these type of profiles on TikTok that are just live streaming or selling product and it's fast paced, think QVC on steroids. What I was shocked by, and I didn't write the numbers down, was the amount of sales that these people were doing was insane.

A lot of times some of these other countries get ahead of these trends and then the U S just kind of follows suit, but you're probably going to see more and more of this. Funny story, I don't know how many of you out there have, I'm a big Facebook girl. So I was on Facebook and I'm in some of these Facebook groups. There are some of them that are resident groups for like the area we live in or like mom swap groups.

Recently, I kept seeing these women were posting these links to their TikTok saying, Hey, if you click the link, share your link and I'll click it for you. I was like, what is this all about? Well, apparently during the holidays, TikTok is running this thing where until January 1st, so we're recording this January 1st, so it ends today. Anytime somebody clicked on your link and let's say they joined TikTok, they would give you $75. Okay, so these women would get on these big groups so that they could like cash out, make some extra money doing this because to them, they're don't have to do anything. They just click the link.

Interestingly enough, when I logged into our TikTok account, I noticed that we had $6 and 34 cents, like in the little bank thing. And I was like, what is this even? Because like, I'm not on there doing anything. Chelsea's not on there doing anything. And sure enough, just to prove to you guys how valuable this is to TikTok, the $6 and 34 cents was an accumulation of activity that either Chelsea and I had gone in there at some point. While we were watching TikTok, it told us and timestamped our activity. You were on TikTok shop for this amount of time. We gave you 50 cents. You were on TikTok shop for this amount of time. We gave you a dollar. All right. So think about this. as a way to get people onto their platform to spend more money.

Chelsea
Yeah. I feel like this is also connected to the ban. So, y'all, we are in the United States. The U.S. is more than likely going to ban TikTok.

When TikTok gets banned, it means that it's no longer in the app store. If you have it downloaded on your phone already, you will still have access to it. Now at some point you won't be able to get the updates or anything like that. So at some point you won't be able to use the app anymore because it'll just be so outdated. But until you get to that point, you still will be able to use the app. So I feel like they're trying to get as many people to download TikTok and to get used to using it so that it's at least on your phone so that when it does get banned, at least they will still have that US audience for the time being until they either figure something out or it becomes outdated and you can't use it anymore.

Vivian:
I do agree with you on that.

There is so much value in those live shopping experiences to them that they are now going to be promoting, prioritizing, trying to get people to spend even more money on TikTok shop. Let's move away from TikTok, Chelsea, and you're saying social commerce. That's what you called it, right?

Chelsea:
Yes. I actually was reading an article that was saying platforms like Instagram are looking to expand their intuitive shopping features. So for example Instagram is working on creating the ability that if you see a travel photo from an influencer, you can click on the clothes that that influencer is wearing and buy it.

Vivian:
Let's say they have a pair of sneakers on in a photo and you're like, where'd they get these sneakers? You can take a screenshot of the photo, go to Google and use their picture search, their photo search, upload it. It will show you how much the product is, where you can buy it, all of that stuff. It matches the image to the product. So to your point, Chelsea, I feel like the technology is already there, but the application hasn't quite been as intuitive and it hasn't been an AI version of it, right? So if Instagram is going to, it's interesting that they're going to take something that's already kind of in use, but they're going to amplify it. Now when you upload a picture, we'll tag the products in there and then people can buy them.

I think they're going to use that type of technology, that AI stuff, and then go to these brands and say, Hey, you know, we'll turn this on for your brand. If you pay us X amount of dollars or there's got to be something there for them, right? To where they make money off of it, or it could just be, if you buy it from Instagram, we're taking a cut, a percentage of it, and so it behooves us to increase those product sales just because we get a portion of it.

Chelsea:
Really interesting. So let's move on to our next trend. We have talked about this all year and it's following us into 2025. Y'all personalization. I want to say it one more time. Personalization no longer means hi "name".

Vivian:
Say it louder for those in the back, please.

Chelsea:
Hi name is not personalized. Vivian, if I had a nickel for every time someone forgot to actually insert my name, I'd only have two nickels, but that's too many nickels. Okay, it's weird that it's happened twice.

Vivian:
So the last time Chelsea and I got a big kick out of this, because I can tell this is now, this is going to be a thorn in Chelsea's side from here on out. She forwarded me an email that we got from someone who's trying to be a guest on this podcast. What did it say?

Chelsea:
It said, "hi podcast name". And you want to be a guest? Like, come on.

Vivian:
They didn't even bother putting our podcast name in there. I, you should have, you know what, I think we need to be nice. From now on, when we receive these, we need to respond back and we need to say, yo, the answer is no, and it's because you didn't even bother putting our podcast name in there.

Chelsea:
You know what? Yes, we probably should do that.

Vivian:
Lesson learned. Hey, you need to pay attention before you hit send.

Chelsea:
The other thing I want to say is personalization is not a luxury at this point. Okay, it's an expectation. Your consumers, your customers, they respond better to personalized ads, not generic ones. They want to feel like you know who they are without it being invasive.

Vivian:
Can I just encourage you, I don't know how popular this sentiment is amongst small business owners. Being a small business owner should not take away from the fact that you need to be collecting data. Data is power. The reason we say this, you don't need to be creepy about it. You don't need to be, uncle Sam tapping into people's phones, listening to their conversations. We don't need that kind of stuff.

The data you collect, whether that be, let's say you have a home decor store and at checkout, maybe you ask people for their first name, last name and their email address, right? Of course goes without saying, you always ask people to opt into these things guys, okay? Or let's say you sell stuff online, you ask people for their first name, last name, their mailing address, all of that.

The information that you are collecting, hopefully you guys have software or are using platforms where you could pull reports to see products sold, services sold and attach it to individual purchases. But the reason you do this is because when Chelsea's talking about the personalization and how personalizing something like "hi insert name" is so 2000, and y'all that was 25 years ago. Now in 2025, personalization is I know that Vivian Walton came in and she bought these products and because of her product purchases, I also know she might be interested in these other similar products or extensions of that product. Therefore I'm going to create communication, emails, texts to her and to others that fall into that little bucket that I created. Chelsea, I know you were telling me Amazon does this. So you guys think Amazon except better, right?

Chelsea:
Yes, I have three things I want to say. One: this is why you need to segment your target audience. So what Amazon does, you know if you're searching for let's say new headphones, Amazon will then show you, here's some other new headphones, maybe you want a different set of headphones. Now where Amazon kind of loses me is that after you purchase the headphones, they're still going to continue to show you other headphones. Well I already bought them, I don't need new headphones now, stop showing me these recommendations, right?

That's why segmenting your target audience, looking at what they're purchasing will allow you to be smarter than Amazon. Instead of saying, Hey, you bought this table, do you want a different table that I sell? Instead of being Amazon, you can say, we have these table lamps, or we're doing a sale on our home decor.

Vivian:
Yeah. If you're thinking, I can't get any more narrow in how I divide up my target audience, I'm going to give you an example. Let's say you sell car seats, okay? So parents are your target audience. Parents to a newborn, very different from parents to an infant, or parents to a toddler, right? Car seats, kids have to be in them up to a certain weight, you can tell Chelsea and I do not have children.

I think identifying and knowing my target audience will allow me to say, within that group I can create ads or create communication emails that is very specific to newborns. Let's say people are having a baby, they go to a baby registry. Someone included in the baby registry our product, then we know they're going to be parents of newborns. I can send them content that is geared towards newborns to stay top of mind. Perhaps I have other products that would fit into that particular scope.

But that information would not necessarily apply to, let's say, parents of a seven-year-old who just happens to be teetering on that 45 pounds and y'all, I don't know if kids weigh 45 pounds at seven, I don't know. Okay. This could be entirely made up. Okay. There are ways, and I think the better you get at marketing and the better you are at kind of walking through this stuff, you start to identify groups within your target audience. It sets them apart enough to where you can specifically target them and tap into, wow, this business really knows what I'm about and what I'm going through.

Chelsea:
Yes. Okay. Going back to my two other things. Next thing, getting permission. Making sure that you get that consent is really big when it comes to being intrusive and not being intrusive. For one, legally you have to get consent y'all. Please don't just start emailing or texting people, but some people still do it anyways. I went to a business recently, purchased something, filled out all the stuff, but I did not consent to getting any messaging because I didn't want to. And yet I still got a text later on. Well, now I'm mad, you know? If I had consented to those texts and if I wanted to receive those texts, I would've been like, cool, thanks. But because I did not give you consent and you did it anyways, now I feel like my privacy was violated.

Vivian:
It's funny because you know how in my head I always take a story and I magnify it and I just let it run wild. Sitting here thinking that you're going to be the reason for this business's demise simply because you're going to report them and then it's going to create this whole domino effect and Chelsea would have taken down that one business that didn't get consent.

Chelsea:
I promise not to take down any small businesses. Okay, I'm not here for evil. I do like to say I'm in my villain era, but that's like a personal life thing. I promise not to come for all you small businesses out there.

The third thing I was going to say, when you were talking about, that's so like 2000s, I thought of the Black Eyed Peas song, where it goes, I'm so 2008, you're so 2000 and late. I'm thinking, dang, 2008 is late too, man.

Vivian:
I mean, 2008 is a long time ago nowadays. Well, Chelsea's a big music buff. So I'm not shocked that you related it back to some lyrics. So personalization, the key takeaway here, we just want to remind you guys it's evolved. Just remember the more information you have on your customers or potential customers, the better. If you're thinking, it's still hard for me - if you're using free downloads to get people onto an email list, that's data. Okay. What type of free downloads do they like? What can you pull from that? All of that. So just be sure that you're leveraging that going into 2025.

If you need a little inspiration or help, you guys can always email us and I'm sure Chelsea and I can help you along or just join our $50 a month S.O.B. community y'all, because that's where the good conversations happen, the one-on-one attention.

Chelsea:
Exactly. Okay, so our last marketing trend for 2025, experiential shopping. Wow, we sound like broken records at this point, because I was going to say, if you're part of the S.O.B. community, you would have heard about this already. People want an experience when it comes to shopping. Just think about the rise of markets and craft fairs. People want to walk around and shop.

Vivian:
So what else, Chelsea. Let's say I'm not a business that necessarily wants to do markets or set up shop. What would that look like for me? How can I incorporate experiential shopping?

Chelsea:
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking record stores, just because you have your records behind you. For one, record stores already have an added edge, because people like flipping through records. It's a good experience. It's fun, right? But you could also do listening parties. I know you were telling me the other day that our friend Melinda over at Cotton Down South, she now does classes, correct?

Vivian:
Yeah, this is a storefront. She has home decor. One of the products she's known for are these candles that they make in-house because they have like a sweet tea scent to them. Which is very Southern y'all. We live in South Carolina. We love us some sweet tea. So it's a very nice scent that she's known for.

Well, the way she sells the candles is in these dough bowls that once the candle is finished, you can actually reuse the bowl, for like centerpiece or just to hold little keys, tchotchkes, all that stuff. So she has taken to creating classes for groups of people that you can book. She charges a flat fee. You come in there, she has all of the material needed and they'll walk you through creating your own candle. So you leave with a candle that you've created but what she's done and what's interesting about that as far as the vein of what you're talking about Chelsea is she's taking a product that she's well known for, she's launched a service off of it so it's added revenue but on top of it, it's an experience that people can take advantage of.

So there are ways, and I know Chelsea and I both gave you examples of stores that are doing this, people with storefronts, but if you're an online business, you can still do this in terms of, if you can do anything virtually, right? So maybe it's doing webinars of some type.

We have one of our previous guests on here, Haley, who does wine tastings. She has an actual like virtual component to it that people could do. That's still an experience that they can have no matter where they're at. The other thing is she also has the one-on-one where she could walk you through stuff in person. So it's just thinking a little more about that customer experience.

Chelsea:
I love that example. I love that we have a storefront and virtual example - let's do one for markets as well, I know I said markets and crafters are already a shopping experience. You can take it one step further. A great example of this is our friend Rae, The Design Demon and her charm bar. So she first off, she listened to her customers. People were coming to her and they were saying, I love these earrings, but you know, I would love a gold hoop instead of a silver hoop. Or people are saying, I love these two charms. I'd rather have these charms on my earrings instead of the ones you have here. She listened. She was like, you know what, I'll do a charm bar. So here are the hoops that you can pick from, the charms you can pick from, and build it yourself. This is the fee that it would be. I will build your earrings right there in front of you. You pick out what you want.

Vivian:
Yeah, I really love that example because for one, it was also one of those realizations for her where she's like, why am I trying to guess what people want when really all I have to do is put all of the material there, charge them one set fee and then basically let them have at it. The price is dependent on how many you put on there or what you want, but think of the build a bear experience. It sets you apart from others. All right.

So Chelsea, are we ready for the TLDL?

Chelsea:
I think we are ready for the TLDL. So if you guys are here because you skipped ahead to this chapter, TLDL: too long, didn't listen. I'm glad that we got you here and that you're listening to the synopsis. When you get a chance, go listen to the entire conversation. There's some good stuff in there.

What you need to know: marketing trends that we are expecting to see in 2025 either continue to grow, to become more prevalent or to pop up: experiential shopping, personalization, social commerce, so that means purchasing stuff on social media platforms. Video content. That's not going away y'all. AI, AI is definitely not going away as well. So those are the marketing trends that we expect to see in 2025. Go listen to the entire conversation if you want to hear our reasoning and why we are keeping an eye out on all of these trends.

Vivian:
Friendly reminder too, if you guys are making marketing a priority in your small business, we have free resources for you. Number one, we want you to sign up for our free email list. Once a week, we send you an email with even more marketing information. Number two, we want you to go follow us on Instagram or Facebook. Number three, we want you to look at our YouTube tutorials under The Seasoned Marketer. We have a ton of them. So if you're looking for just basic marketing information, or you're trying to figure out a way to do something, go and take a look, take a peruse on some of the topics that we've already covered. Also, number four, hit subscribe to this podcast channel. And finally, number five, you guys, why have you not joined us in our SOB community? Okay, high priority for 2025, you guys.

I you want the marketing conversations, we want to hop on Zoom with you once a week. We have other community members there. We want to talk about your business and just give you the option to ask us questions about how you can go about promoting your small business.

Chelsea:
These questions can be personalized to your small business. You can ask a very specific, this is what my business is going through. How do I market this or something like that? It doesn't have to be a very vague marketing question. Yeah, so I hope to see you in our community and just go out there and be the best S.O.B. you can be!