Each year, it's important for small business marketers to change up their game a little bit. Whether its adding something new or changing how something is done, these changes can bring new customers into the sales pipeline. Yo Noguchi, a marketing writer, said on Promotion World that there are number of ways to spice up an email campaign in the new year, including location-based marketing.

"This is all about delivering content to consumers’ mobile devices based on their location," Noguchi said. "Imagine getting a push message from Starbucks as you walk past one of their stores offering you a free muffin with your coffee. It can be achieved using a number of technologies including Mobile Phone Tracking, WiFi, and RFID."

Other suggestions for the year include improving previous great offers, launching a new program, adding video to emails and marketing, and connecting with another business to bridge gaps and draw in new customers.

Christopher Penn writes on WhatCounts that another thing marketing emails should focus on this year is welcome messages for new subscribers. This is the first of many steps for reaching out to new customers and maintaining a positive impression.

Small business marketing online can be great for any business, especially with more customers shopping on the internet every day. However, internet marketer James Debono said companies that want to take advantage of online marketing need to first develop a plan to ensure their strategies are aligned.

In a post on Business 2 Community, Debono said businesses should look at marketing tactics that increase brand awareness, build authority, build an online community and humanize their brand.

"Knowing what you are setting out to achieve will mean that you can focus your attentions on delivering just that and not waste valuable time and money," Debono said, adding that businesses should be delivering a consistent message with their online marketing.

Other things businesses need to remember when working online is that customers need to be continuously engaged and social media is a marketing tool that cannot be ignored.

According to a survey by Research Now, 57 percent of small businesses plan to use social marketing in the next year, an increase of 7 percent from the previous year. This combined with marketing emails can be a great way to inform people about a business.

Social media is one of the most important ways for small business marketing professionals to improve brand recognition, and Christine Erickson of American Express OPEN forum said using the web-based marketing tool doesn't have to be complicated. She offered some tips for small businesses, including using Facebook analytics to help measure how the page is doing.

"If you have to provide a report of Facebook metrics to your boss or a client – or maybe you just want to see for yourself – the best time-saving tip is to export the Facebook Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet," Erickson said. "You can see which status updates performed best, whether your audience responds well to video and get a sense of what’s driving your Likes."

Small businesses also should provide local content for fans of the business, create a QR code for the Facebook page and buy ads through the social media giant to help improve visibility, Erickson said.

Small business marketing professionals should also find out whether their "vanity URL," or a website address that bares their name, is available. This can help people easily remember how to get to the page and provide a business with a more credible-looking web address.

When it comes time for a marketing executive to sell the boss on getting marketing automation software, Lauren Carlson said there are a few great ways to help convince the person in charge. She starts by saying that those trying to push for the software should stick with the facts and not let their personal feelings get involved.

"With fewer resources and higher expectations, it is likely that you are under a lot of stress," she said. "While your boss might understand this, they won’t respond well to a frantic cry for help. Think about what’s important to them (hint: revenue!). With that in mind, approach them with facts and numbers that will help them quantify the benefit of MA to your organization."

Other ways to sell the boss on marketing automation could be to put together a business case for the software, tie goals to revenue and suggest strategy shifts.

Kim Roman writes on Marketing Automation Software Guide that people should also be prepared to give information that would sell to the boss' boss just in case there is someone higher up the food chain who will ultimately has the final say.

Although many small business marketing professionals may not have thought about using video to enhance marketing campaigns, Shawn Naggiar, customer revenue officer at Act-On, said the strategy can be effective. However, rather than integrating videos into email, he said marketers should post them on a website or on the company's YouTube channel, and only include links in the actual email message.

Other things marketers should remember with video in email marketing videos include keeping the length short and to the point, not getting too wordy in the video, creating a transcript and reviewing how it went for future campaigns.

“Video allows marketers another avenue for effectively tracking engagement,” Naggiar said. “Video links within email messages allow you to track open rates, play rates and references to friends.”

With all of this data, marketers can craft new and improved marketing campaigns that will connect better with their target audience.
With HD smartphones and tablets, video could become more important than event in marketing emails. Cisco's Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast for 2011 to 2016 said video traffic was more than half the wireless use in 2011 and is expected to go up to 70 percent of mobile data traffic in 2016.

Email has been socialized, according to the CEO of Da Li Social, Liana Evans. Small business marketing now cannot rely on direct marketing alone and must integrate social media and other things into a campaign to be successful. Evans said segmentation can be very useful for companies to help figure out where to go online.

"Some of these [email] services allow you to segment your email lists by way of how subscribers are socially engaged," Evans said. "For example, if you were running a specific campaign just on Facebook, you could send out a very targeted email campaign to subscribers on your list that also uses Facebook with that same email address."

Evans said analytics through things such as CRM software has become more important than ever so that marketers can see just where to go and what to do with regard to where to send email. She also notes that businesses shouldn't just limit emails to text, but and should add video, social media links and images to help draw attention.

Frank Falcone, co-founder and executive program director of the Centre for CRM Excellence, tells the Globe and Mail that companies using integration and social media need to assess return on investment differently by looking at how many people are talking about the company, what the tone is and what kind of share of the conversation a given company is getting. These can all be telling stats for small business marketing professionals.

Business-to-business companies often have more trouble adopting to new technology, but when it comes to reaching customers via smartphones, these companies may need to get their marketing emails on track for better sales. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, VP-client acquisition and marketing at Quaero, said mobile emails must be different than normal emails to be effective.

"Mobile doesn't have to be daunting, nor do you have to settle for suboptimal open rates on your email communications," she said on BtoBOnline. "Think mobile with every campaign you develop and every communication you send out. Your customers will thank you by opening and responding to your email, thus leading to better, more productive dialogues."

To reach customers on their smartphones, she said B2B companies need to make emails easier to read, send emails during off-hours to help get the subscriber's attention and have unique content that will hold a reader's interest no matter the size of the screen.

Email Monday said B2B emails on smartphones have about a 3 percent open rate, whereas marketing emails sent by retail companies to smartphones hits at about 20 percent. B2B may want to take a cue from what retail is doing to improve rates and draw more interest.

Steve Sipress, director of Chicagoland's Sharpest Entrepreneurs, gives some sage advice on Crain's Chicago Business. He said he was taught that small business marketing professionals need to enter "the conversation already going on inside your customer's mind."

"Did you capitalize on these opportunities to connect with your audience by creating marketing messages and special offers involving one or more of these topics, such as 'Our special will run six more weeks because the groundhog saw his shadow' or 'Here's a special offer because we love our customers'?" he asks, referring to Groundhog Day and Valentine's day offers companies could have taken advantage of.

For businesses that didn't happen to take advantage of any of the latest hot topics, he said there are always more. President's Day and other holidays are coming up, which small businesses can use to help cater to their customers and keep them coming back.

Optify suggests changing content keywords during the holidays and creating a calendar to help remember when these key days are coming up. Marketing automation and CRM software can also be helpful for implementing and evaluating this of a marketing strategy.

While marketing automation and CRM software are great for small business marketing, there are also many free tools out there that many companies don't even think about using. Walter Dailey, a small business marketing consultant and speaker with Dailey Sound Vector Media, said on Fox Business that having cheap but creative ideas is a great way to generate profitable returns.

Dailey said businesses can improve their marketing effectiveness by following a few key tips: 1) include contact information in email signatures; 2) always keep businesses card on hand; and 3) send out minor upgrades to subscribers to keep customers on their toes and don't be afraid to send out minor upgrades to subscribers.

"In the marketing world, it’s quite easy to lull customers to sleep by doing the same things over and over," Dailey said. "Try to freshen things up a bit. Now this doesn’t necessitate the reinvention of the wheel – just a subtle shift. For example, swap out the images in a graphic layout, tweak the language of a radio ad or alter the color scheme on a brochure."

Another great way for small business marketing professionals to get some free publicity is social media. The website said companies should pick one thing they do very well and stick with it on social media until they feel comfortable moving on. This will help build a good base of perspective clients.

Business-to-business marketers need to take advantage of beneficial tools such as marketing automation and CRM software if they want to keep pace with the evolving marketing landscape. Keeping up with the latest technology solutions is essential for B2B marketers who want to stay ahead of their competitors, says Chris Chariton.

"As online and email marketing become more sophisticated, continually looking for new ways to produce greater results from your marketing efforts becomes more important," Chariton writes on MarketingProfs. "Technology can definitely help in that regard."

Chariton said smart marketers in the B2B sector will invest in marketing automation software to help bring in new customers and ensure the correct message is delivered on a consistent basis. This should help put more customers in the sales pipeline and enable businesses to reach the correct audience at the right time.

Marketers also need to allocate more resources to social media strategies, continue shifting money to online activities and focus more on crafting great content.

According to a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, B2B marketers spent more than a quarter of their marketing budget on content marketing in 2011. Marketing automation can help get a better hold on making sure these content emails hit their targets.