THE Top 10 Trends IN Small Business Sales

What’s the best way to drive sales today? Our experts share their predictions.

- by RACHEL DAVIES

1 Direct-to-consumer will be a bigger piece of the marketing pie.

For years, brands with new products had a simple playbook: Drive sales on Amazon. That’s where customers were, after all. But now, small businesses are renewing their focus on direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategies, instead of trying to win the Amazon game. “There is huge, huge competition on Amazon, and new entrepreneurs are finding it’s really hard to invest all this money to be in the first pages,” says Hope Khoury, a cofounder of Go Vertical, which has worked with over 250 inventors on developing their products and launching their small businesses. “They are relying on [other] sources so they can boom and have brand awareness elsewhere.”

In order to incentivize more DTC sales, small business owners are getting strategic about differentiating what they offer on their own sites versus what’s offered on Amazon. For example: Tubby Todd, a small business that makes bath products primarily for babies and children, only offers bundles on Amazon—but on its own website, it also offers other opportunities.

“Amazon is for a specific Tubby Todd customer,” says Tubby Todd cofounder Andrea Faulkner Williams. “If you want to buy the bundles with two-day shipping, you can do that. But if you want to get the products at a slightly lower price, you might have slower shipping, and you can get loyalty points and other limited-edition things that are only on TubbyTodd.com.” Differentiators like these will draw more customers to shop directly with their favorite brands in the coming year.

2 Micro-influencers will make a bigger impact.