Business Trends And Predictions To Look Out For In 2018

Time isn’t going any slower, and that’s especially the case for entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners. Progressively inching closer and closer to a technology-oriented economy, 2018 could show some interesting trends and developments in the way of launching a small business. While our finance factoring experts at The Commercial Finance Group aren’t exactly sure what’s to come next year, we do think that these speculations and predictions are a worthwhile read, and that’s what we’re going to touch on in today’s blog post.

Staying Up To Date With Our Burbank Invoice Factoring Company

If you’re thinking about starting a new company, it’s worth paying attention to the latest and greatest investment trends and market demands. While we can’t manage your business or give you direct advice about what kind of business to start, what The Commercial Finance Group can do is lend you the working capital necessary to fund and grow a small business. With the help of financial services like asset-based loans and factored invoices, we’re able to help you get a bad loan with bad credit or secure a business line of credit at a fraction of the time that it takes most banking institutions.

If getting help funding your company sounds good to you, feel free to learn more about our unique approach to small business and healthcare lending by visiting here, or get in touch with The Commercial Finance Group today.

Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

AI is hardly anything new, but as time goes on, this technology will become more standardized and commonplace in the everyday business experience from customer transactions to business management. Machine learning is sure to play a bigger role in sales and customer support in 2018. With lower costs and increased availability of speech analytics tools, this means that more businesses than ever will be able to record and monitor calls within their contact centers. So, instead of simply guiding callers through prompts, sophisticated speech analytics technology will help to categorize them and analyze responses in terms of what you say and how you say it. These data-driven insights will be used to guide agents – in real time – to get the best results from each interaction.

Workplace Evolution

As cloud technology develops, more and more people will work from home or work remotely. Indeed, the physical workspace as we know it is going to significantly change in the next few years as businesses start to get smart about how they use space to drive productivity and adapt to new employee behaviors and tech tools. Large companies will also look to reduce their real estate commitments and move more to flex desk options, reducing overhead costs while maximizing employee happiness and productivity. According to Staples Business Advantage’s Annual Workplace Survey, only 32 percent of employees spent all of their time working in, or at their office this year. This suggests that the flexibility to work remotely has evolved beyond just an occasional perk with some 43 percent of employees polled reporting that the flexibility to work from home is a “must-have.”

Marketing Will Become More Personalized

Digital marketing is only becoming more and more relevant as modern-day technology and society progressively integrate. Antiquated marketing practices like the use of stock images, generic nurturing campaigns or impersonal phone calls will phase out over time. As marketing continues to evolve, in order to succeed, you’ll have to provide high value and personalized content to the consumer more than ever before.

Social Advertising Will Become More Competitive

Running paid advertisements on various social media platforms has been a costly ordeal in recent years, and this is projected to only get more expensive. Facebook advertising might still be in its golden years, but it’s also true that Facebook is growing their number of advertisers at a very, very rapid pace. While large companies may have jumped on the Facebook ad bandwagon years ago, other SMBs are yet to catch on. So, what will likely happen is that Facebook will continue to accelerate the number of advertisers it has with SMBs, driving up the cost to run paid ads.

Mobile Banking Will Lead To More Cyberattacks

Banking through an app on your smartphone is incredibly easy and convenient as well as time-saving. However, major banks have also been experiencing a considerable increase in attacks on their mobile banking platforms and transactions. Expect this cybersec trend to continue as, of the approximate 80 percent of banking customers that do online banking, 50 percent are on mobile banking, and that number is growing.

Cloud Services Will Become More Segmented

In 2007, the average joe hardly understood what the term “cloud” meant beyond water vapor suspended in the atmosphere. As cloud storage and cloud security have increased in relevance, technology companies are planning to shift the cloud at large into a series of “microservices.” Through these microservices, this is where companies will increasingly seek to scale by breaking up their IT, fragmenting what was once a comprehensive range of cloud-based services into separate services. To entrepreneurs, this means that moving to smaller applications can make it easier to scale and decrease risk, all while increasing process efficiencies.

Plan For The Future With The Commercial Finance Group

With the power of factoring financing, our Burbank small business lenders are here to provide you and your small business with working capital. If you need help financing a small business, our factoring company would love to get involved! Contact us today.