New Year New Changes! Huge Updates! | The Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to B2B Vault. This is the 2024 wrap-up and the 2025 kickoff, and we're going to talk about, uh, 2024. We hit, uh, 300 episodes on B2B Vault, and B2B Vault sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. And, you know, we had a great 2024 with the podcast and business, and we always do, um, work in the community throughout the year. It's one of the things that we do. So we did a lot of work this year with, um, students in the city of North Miami, which is close by, and we, uh, sponsor children there for clothing throughout the year. To help children that are identified by the schools in the area that might need some financial assistance. We also participated in sponsoring a large menorah at a local synagogue. We also donated on behalf of my old assistant who passed away, Anna, who I miss a lot. We made a donation to her church., and we also made a donation to a dog charity that she really liked. And that was, you know, that, that was, you know, how we wrapped up 2024 here by, you know, that's doing a different community participation things in the community. We like to participate in the local community with different nonprofits throughout the year, either volunteering or helping them financially. And then for 2025, what's going to happen in 2025? We're going to be doing a little bit of a new format with B2B Vault. We're going to have— going to have more interviews. We're going to have more Street Smart specials where we're going to— where it's focused on different things about the magazine that I write for, The Green Sheet, and have some more podcasts involving the articles that are written over there. Interviews are going to be more for tools and products and different things that merchants can use, and you're going to find out more about that in our— when we launch our Merchant Toolbox, which is going to be really cool and contain a lot of pro— different products that businesses will be able to use to help them grow their business, run their business better. So it's going to be really interesting. And alongside that, we're also going to have what we call the ISV toolbox. So for companies who have a point-of-sale system or a SaaS product and they want to integrate more fintech products into their software to create additional revenue, we're going to be offering to help partner with your companies, your comp— your, your your product so that you can create additional revenue and help your clients make more money and keep customers happy. So everybody, you know, you got to keep up with it. And what are some of the trends coming up in, in, um, 2025? So let's talk about trends for 2025. One is AI is probably the most talked about subject matter on the internet right now. So how are businesses going to leverage AI? I suggest if you've never tried AI, go on openai.com, create a free account, and start to play with what it can do. So there's a lot of cool things that AI can help you do for your business— create content, create blog, help you create blog posts. I don't suggest making one and then just posting it. You have to do a little bit more work than that, but, you know, people need to start experimenting with AI. Mobile shopping— that's going to be a continuing trend of people being able to— consumers going to the business website on their phone and making purchases. If you don't have a website currently for e-commerce, I definitely suggest 2025 is the year that you make that upgrade. Um, social selling. So I mean, the biggest thing everybody hears about is the TikTok shop, but social selling is everywhere. To do social selling, you don't even need e-commerce. You can use a virtual terminal and create links for a single product and put out a single product out on social and sell that. So it's pretty, pretty easy to do. And if you want information about that, you can reach out to us. Also, buy now pay later— this is a huge, a huge thing. Customers want it. I always say products work when the customer wants it and the business wants it. Then it makes it a win-win product for business owners, small business owners, medium business owners, any type of business owner. It's super, super important to figure out like how you can use that in your business, like auto repair, medical, and there's other different app businesses where it definitely applies. Um, I know you can definitely do it on websites for smaller type purchases. SEO, this is something that's talked about all the time. And if you don't do SEO for your website, it's something you should look into. There's a lot of AI tools out there that can help you do SEO on your website. And local SEO is super important. And it's super important to make sure you have your Google Business Profile updated. Some of the new algorithms for search, that's going to help you get more people in the door. Of your business, especially if you're, you know, dependent on people coming to your business, or you're a service business like air conditioning, plumbing, handyman, things like that. Those— having that profile active is going to help you get more business. And believe it or not, search results are showing up in the new AI search tools like ChatGPT Search Cloud Search, the Microsoft Search, Copilot Search, all of these products, you want your business to show up there. Another thing that a lot of businesses are— have been doing and they need to think about is a subscription program. So having a subscription program or recurring monthly charge for whatever it is that you sell. Maybe to make your product or service more affordable or to make it all linked together. And you need to make sure that you have your click-to-cancel button on your website so you're complying with the new law in California and the new FTC rule involving click-to-cancel. Again, if you want more information about any of the things that we're talking about that involves payments, you can leave a comment and we can post some information about that. Video content is super big. That's not going to stop. There's more, more and more businesses are opting to post video and start podcasts and do things like webinars and things like that. So video content's definitely on the rise. If you don't have video content, You should experiment with it. Get a high school kid to help if you can. And then payment options is super huge. So pay at the table and hospitality, um, making sure that your credit card machines take Apple Pay and Google Pay or Google Wallet so people can tap their card, tap their phone. This is a growing, growing trend. Every business should be should be doing that. And then here's some other things to talk about is business, you know, other ways to promote your business, because promoting your business can be super expensive. So it can be super expensive in that how do you promote your business? Maybe the advertising budget is not there. You don't have a— you don't want to spend thousands of dollars on Google pay-per-click or Facebook ads and things like that. So other ways to do that are partner with other small businesses, do like a sidewalk sale in your shopping center, get all the businesses to participate, and then everybody promote it on their social media. Doing things like that monthly or weekly can help drive more traffic into your place where your business is. You know, cross-promote products and services. So a lot of times businesses don't think about this, is that they might sell a product, but they also might sell services and try to combine those two together. Another great thing to do is do a giveaway at your location, whether you have a retail store or a restaurant, you know, giveaways. Host events is another thing. So it's super, super important to, you know, anything like the— any type of things that you can do to promote your business is, is, you know, and think outside of the box versus spending money on advertising dollars on Google or social media. These, these are ways to do that. And that's what's coming in 2025. These are the hot topics that everybody's talking about. And another big one is, you know, optimization, SEO, of your social media and making sure that your website is linked to your social media accounts and your keywords are mentioned in your description. Because the way apparently Google is updating their algorithm, these, um, these, these are going to be picked up in the searches. And I already noticed like a couple of our social media posts, you know, that because I have a Google Alert set up, that they get picked up every once in a while. So it's definitely happening and people need to look at it. Just Google how to SEO your social media, probably find quite a few new articles about that on on the internet. So that was our 2024 wrap-up and how 2024 went. It was very exciting in the way of technology. Technology is moving at a very, very quick pace, and 2025 is going to be very exciting here for B2B Vault and at Nationwide Payment Systems. And we look forward to you joining us for some of our new podcasts in the coming years. So share, like, subscribe. Peace out, carpe diem, and let's go everybody! Let's go make 2025 a great year.