How social trends affect a startup business

It’s important to be aware of the world at large when you’re starting a business. Social trends can affect your business in many different ways: they can influence everything from your product ideas to your marketing campaigns.

This means that you need to keep an eye on social trends if you’re going to run a successful startup business. In this article, we’ll look at how social trends can affect a startup business, as well as examples of these trends. The topics we’ll be covering in this article include:

• How social trends can affect a startup business
• Examples of social trends that can affect your startup business
• Free up time to modernise your business with Countingup

Social trends affect startup businesses in three primary ways: how they build relationships with customers, how they design products, and how they make internal decisions.

The most obvious impact social trends have is the way they change how companies build relationships. This is obvious because you can see it frequently in the marketing campaigns of larger companies. Nike, Pepsi, and Gillette have all released adverts focusing on modern social issues in recent years. 

The issue with larger companies having a stance on social trends is that their size leads to these large companies appearing to be impersonal, which leads to doubts about their sincerity. Small startup businesses suffer far less from this problem, though, which means you can use marketing campaigns that focus on social trends to far greater effect. 

Your product development decisions should also be affected by social trends. As people’s interests change, so do the products they use, and you need to be able to adapt the products you offer to keep up with these developments.

For instance, there has been a much greater interest in environmentally-friendly products in recent years, so you should consider changing your production methods or materials to make your products more eco-friendly. 

Your internal business processes may also be affected by social trends, not because of the trends themselves but because of the laws that can follow. 

A good example of this is the rise of social media and how it has affected privacy. Although the initial interest in social media was simply a social trend, the way the industry was handled has led to many new privacy and data protection laws. For your business, this means you need to make decisions about how you gather and store customer’s private data, as it is now heavily regulated. 

Due to the impending climate crisis, consumers have become much more interested in making sure the businesses they engage with are environmentally friendly. This does have some negative impacts — changing your business to make it more eco-friendly can have a significant cost in both time and money.

Despite this, being eco-friendly can also help your small business. It’s quite possible that you’ll find a supplier that offers environmentally friendly materials at low prices, as suppliers are also interested in following this social trend. Favouring these suppliers also builds a strong relationship with them, leading to other potential benefits in the long run (like reduced prices and faster deliveries). 

Finally, being eco-friendly means you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you’re helping to save the planet, which is certainly a benefit if not a business-centric one.

Social justice and equality have always been important, but in recent years there have been two developments. Firstly, it has become a social trend of sorts: it is popular to be interested in positive social progress. Secondly, consumers want the businesses they buy from to be interested in equality too, particularly when it comes to their staff and their advertising.

If you run a small business, you might be more concerned about the financial cost of hiring your first employee than ensuring that your workforce has fair representation from all races and genders. It’s important to keep this social trend in mind as your business grows, though. It’s also something that you should keep in mind when you create advertising campaigns: 61% of consumers see diversity as being important in advertising. 

It’s a smart move to use social media to some degree in your business, but the modern social trends surrounding social media will affect how you use it.

Although it is popular to share almost everything on social media, you may want to focus on using it for marketing and customer service. Social media allows you to engage with people almost 24/7, so it’s wise to factor this into how you choose to interact with your existing and potential customers.

Keep in mind the interest in personal privacy that has emerged alongside social media, though. It’s useful to have a customer’s email address or phone number for marketing purposes, but think carefully about how you go about asking for and using this information. 

All of these social trends can be hard to keep up with, but being aware of them is a necessity when it comes to running a modern business. Complicated, time-consuming tasks such as financial management can take away from the time you need to modernise, so you may want to look into software that can focus on these aspects of your business while you focus on social trends. For financial management, you might want to consider using Countingup. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.