Small businesses are always searching for the most effective way to market their products and services. That’s because finding new customers and encouraging customer loyalty is a constant.

But marketing tools and strategies are always changing with the times. Here are 3 of the latest trends marketing professionals and entrepreneurs are seeing right now. Take a look to see which idea might work for your small business?

Shoppable Posts

The popularity of social media has delivered plenty of new marketing power for small businesses (and companies of all sizes). Creating shoppable posts is part of that power.

Whether you use Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram, there are now ways for businesses to create shoppable posts – making it easy for users to shop directly from your posting, says Christian Thomson, CEO at the Canada-based Marwick Marketing, in a Forbes blog post.

“Social media offers you the ability to reach new customers quickly and easily, shortening the sales funnel and making it easier for users to shop,” he writes.

It’s a tremendous opportunity to market your business – 72 percent of Instagram users have purchased a product on the app, Thomson says. “Even more impressive, a survey of more than 4,000 Pinterest users found that 70 percent use Pinterest to find new and interesting products.”

Personalization

Personalized marketing is another trend being cited by industry and business leaders.

“Consumers are quite adept at tuning out generic ads that have no real connection to them,” writes Thomson in the Forbes blog. “Accordingly, traditional means of advertising are becoming much less effective. So, what can be done? Personalize it!”

In a survey cited by AdWeek, 90 percent of the consumers surveyed said they found personalization appealing, and 80 percent of the 1,000 surveyed said they’d be more likely to give their business to a company that offered them a personalized experience.

Email lists lend themselves well to personalization, Thomson says.

“Segmented lists with personalized email blasts have been shown to perform better than generic emails sent to an entire list,” he writes. “Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.”

Peter Wilfahrt, managing director of the digital agency Versandgigant, advises businesses that want to execute a personalized messaging strategy to be sure to do so using market data.

The best approach, he says, is digging into analytics and understanding demographics, affinity categories and in-market segments.

“We’re not talking about adding the first name to your email greeting … really dig into your prospect’s mind and discover what they fear, wish and want,” he says in a blog by Lisa Smith posted on WordStream, a marketing software and online ad services company.

T. Maxwell, owner of the digital marketing agency eMaximize, also stresses the importance of using customer data to personalize your marketing. He cites a study by Epsilon that says 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a company that uses digital insight to offer a personalized experience.

“This could be as simple as having an automated email sent on your customers' birthdays,” he writes in a Forbes blog. “Both Instagram and Facebook capture insight data automatically. Use this data to fine-tune your marketing.”

Video Content

The customer trend to respond well to visual content means producing video content as a marketing strategy remains an effective digital marketing trend.

Thomson advises businesses to use live video when they can, citing studies that show on average, live videos on Facebook Live and Instagram Live keep your audience watching three times longer than recorded ones.

“The daily watch time for Facebook Live videos have quadrupled in a single year, and they produce six times as many interactions as traditional videos,” Thomson writes in the Forbes blog.