In addition to working with thousands of small business owners each year, I also work very closely with coaches, consultants, and small marketing agency owners. These folks are, of course, small business owners in their own right. Still, this work gives me particular insight into the challenges, workings, and characteristics of this specific niche of business owners. (You can learn about the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network here)

With that in mind, I present the 5 biggest trends that will impact coaches and consultants in 2021 and beyond.

However, I need to add the 2020 disclaimer – I have no idea what 2021 will bring, and anyone who claims they do is delusional, lying, or just guessing. So, when all or none of what I’m about to share happens next year, please do not request a refund.

As much as anything, 2021 will be about re-evaluation, rediscovery, and a whole lot of recovery.

And that leads me to my first trend, which is pretty meta in a post about coaches and consultants.

1) Coaching and consulting practices explode

Good news, this is the business to be in next year. As corporate giants reassess their business models, some current staff will jump into the consulting world. These small, nimble firms will compete with the giant, slow-moving, expensive consulting options.

You can expect a lot more personal development going on next year and open the doors for wellness, mindset, and skill coaching practices of all shapes and sizes. (In fact, we created a Certified Marketing Manager Program for 2021)

Of course, look for coach certifications, coach training programs, and “coaches” coaches to follow this growth trend.

2) More and more firms crowdsource talent

Very related to trend number one is the continued shrinkage of siloed departments for everything. Marketing departments of the future will get very lean and depend upon quick-strike teams that can be assembled for specific initiatives and campaigns.

Look for freelancing sites such as Upwork to get in the game of assembling teams.

3) Social media engagement gets more specialized

Almost every social media platform got a little more complex last year. To stand out and grow market share. Features like reels, stories, and stitching enable content creators to produce in multiple formats that require shorter, attention-getting tricks to compete.

The simple fact is that for anyone other than the full-time social media influencer with a team, it’s become too crowded and too complicated to attempt to compete on multiple platforms.

Look for consultants to specialize and splinter into platform-specific tactics and look for businesses to rein in their social media participation in the same way.

Social media will continue to get more transactional, but only if done to near perfection.

4) People crave faster consumption

Spending eight and nine hours a day in front of a screen doing “work,” laced with video calls, has pretty much killed the appetite for anything streaming that is not full-blown entertainment.

Does the world need that streaming video of you driving in your car talking about how real the struggle is? Um, that’s a hard no. (If I cursed in my writing, this is where I would do it.)

Do we want short, punchy, maybe even a little funny, but to the point content? Can I have an amen right now? It’s a little ironic but consider this; we can consume about three times the amount of content reading than listening.

I’m from the Midwest, so I don’t talk very fast, about 150 words a minute. But I’m a speedy reader, about 600 words a minute. So, don’t assume that audio and video content is all people want. What we want is something that entertains or provides value quickly. (Although I’ll give a major plug for audio content due to its portability – you can listen while doing many other things.)

5) AI get very practical

I wrote about this idea in my general 2021 Small Business Trends post, but it certainly crosses over to anyone who produces or content or helps others produce content.

Almost every trend article you encounter this year will talk about AI in some fashion. While I mention it here as a trend, I do so for some of the practical things it now brings rather than the futuristic promise of the technology it implies.

Without getting too techie about the workings, the mid-2020 roll-out of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 or GPT-3 made AI a useful tool for many applications.

No longer confined to those pesky bots on website help desks, AI is now being embedded in our basic typing functions. Maybe you’ve noticed that the application keeps suggesting finishes to your sentences as you compose an email in Gmail.

This isn’t simply a feature added by Google; this is AI at work powering routine tasks.

This fall, I wrote my latest book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine (HarperCollins Leadership Sept 2021), entirely in Google Docs. I was amazed how often the suggested AI helped me write better or at least easier sentences from a simple suggested start.

Look in 2021 for a host of tools, services, and websites aimed at making writing easier. Tools like HeadLime, Lately, DeScript, and MarketMuse will change how content is created.

AI applications can already write an article based on a handful of fed keywords. Now, is this award-winning prose? Well, no, but is that blog post you paid someone $15 to write near as good as AI – probably not. AI writers can get you 80% of the way there, and then you, the brilliant content strategist that you are, can spend your energy on making it sparkle and getting it read by others.

This will shake up the content creation, social posting, and freelance industries dramatically.

This crystal ball stuff is fun, but more than anything, stay curious this coming year, and you may indeed discover a new and exciting chapter in business and life because the only thing that I know for certain is that change is gonna keep coming.

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In a recent blog post identifying marketing insights for 2020, I mentioned the idea that more small business owners should and are taking basic marketing tactics in-house.

Now, that may seem like an odd trend for a marketing consultant to promote but let me tell you a story about a typical small business today in the world of digital marketing.

Years ago I started working with a small remodeling contractor helping them transition to the digital age. We helped them narrow their ideal client description, create a core message that helped them stand out, and basically updated their brand identity and promise.

We also made their website more useful, added a blog (possibly the first-ever for a remodeling contractor), went to work on their SEO, introduced them to social media, and started running ads that attracted leads. Pretty standard stuff today.

And boy did it work . . .

They doubled in size and then doubled again, and again. Now, while I like to take credit for all of this success, the fact is they do great work, they treat their customers right, and they have a strong culture of service.

But as they grew rapidly it became apparent that they could grow even faster with an even stronger marketing effort that included community relations, public relations, referral programs, even a focus on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.

But, at the time, I was their entire marketing department and what they really needed to go to the next level was to start building an internal team. I introduced this idea to them and it went nowhere.

Here’s why – they had tried this in the past before engaging my services and it failed miserably so they were gun shy.

When I pressed this idea they eventually conceded that it failed because they didn’t really have the ability to train, manage, and direct a “marketing manager” so the person they hired had no real plan and ended up working on things that were not relevant in the big picture. (In truth they did like so many businesses do and found a young, inexpensive hire that they thought knew how to do social media.)

A new approach

I had a great working relationship with this business and wanted to continue to help them grow so I proposed an innovative solution.

I would help them hire, train, and ultimately direct a “marketing manager” with them. I had already created a repeatable marketing system and a training curriculum so I knew I could make this work for them.

Well, work it did. We were able to help them find and completely level up a relatively inexperienced marketing manager to the point where they now have a potent internal resource and are on the verge of adding more team.

Oh, and did I mention their business is now 10 times the size it was when I first started working with them. (that’s what the next level looks like.)

Now, the point of this rather long post is this. I think this is a model whose time has come.

Certified Marketing Manager training is coming

I’m currently working on a hybrid coaching model for businesses who need to level up their marketing with an internal resource or team but either don’t know how to do it or know that they would benefit from an outside resource helping them build a complete marketing system, structure, and plan – with their internal marketing resources.

We are calling this program the Certified Marketing Manager powered by Duct Tape Marketing and I’m in full swing creating the training and tools needed to make it as useful as possible to any business determined to take this path.

This training and coaching will be perfect for:

• Organizations who want to hire a marketing manager
• Organizations who want to level up their current marketing manager
• Organizations who are committed to personal development for their team
• Even business owners who want more clarity and control over their own marketing

Not another course

The details of the program are still being worked out but let me say this emphatically – this is not a course. Courses have their place, but let’s face it, few of us take action using self-guided courses. (C’mon you know I’m right about that.)

This will be personalized training based on your business, not on theory or generalities. You’ll have a coach who will help you train your team, map out a marketing plan, and help you create marketing structure and process.

And, you’ll have your very own proven marketing system.

That’s what you need to go to the next level!

All I ask today is that if anything about this idea sounds interesting click the button below and tell us you want to be one of the first to get the details.

[thrive_link color=’blue’ link=’https://certifiedmarketingmanager.com/’ target=’_blank’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]Yes, this sounds amazing[/thrive_link]

Thanks for reading and let me close by saying I believe this is the future of marketing for small business, check it out!

Want us to train your people while you grow your business? Check out our new Certified Marketing Program here and schedule a free coaching session to learn how this program can work for you.