Small Businesses Have Big Opportunities in 2021

This year brought a shift to eCommerce, contactless transactions, local delivery and shop-from-home is the new norm. As many storefronts and restaurants closed, others made the shift to online and contactless purchases.

With steady advances being made in medicine, #2021 looks promising for businesses to recover.

According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, this number rose dramatically from 13% to 20% over last year. This is a massive increase as online sales grew 47% in November and December as compared to last year.

Shopping from home became the new norm as online retailers served up special promotions through targeted digital advertising campaigns to help push us to record eCommerce growth.

Retailers that hadn’t launched online digital ad campaigns prior to 2020, experienced a surplus of inventory and no framework in place to reach potential customers. Having an established online presence gave existing businesses – both on and offline – the ability to attract new consumers from their local markets, across the country and around the globe.

Successful local search campaigns paid dividends to businesses with the ability to put their products in front of the consumers searching for products available in the area. We saw a concerted effort by consumers in 2020 to support local retailers and thus, an increase in organic searches for local businesses as an alternative to large retailers.

The push to support local businesses also leads to sustained growth for many retailers with a smaller footprint. Having an online and offline presence allowed consumers to find and locate in-stock items to meet their needs. Setting up and properly configuring your Google Shopping campaigns to display live stock updates and local inventory ads (LIA) will help increase your local search results by alerting customers who are within range of your products and let them know you have inventory available.