Meet Bobbi Baehne

Bobbi Baehne is the founder and CEO of Think Big Go Local, a digital marketing agency that helps small businesses succeed in their local communities by leveraging the power of online marketing. With over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, and small business development, Bobbi has a passion for helping small businesses grow and thrive, and has worked with hundreds of clients to develop successful marketing strategies. In her current role, Bobbi leads a team of digital marketing experts who provide personalized support to small businesses. She has done a TedX talk, has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, and more, and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, sharing her expertise and insights with audiences around the country.

What are the top three trends that small business owners should consider integrating into their marketing mix right now? 

So there are so many things and so many trends we could talk about, but there are a few that I think are top of the list.

So first is something we're hearing so much about, and that's artificial intelligence, right? How to use AI effectively. That that is definitely one of the things small businesses need to keep top of mind, because one of the challenges I hear so frequently from my customers is the bandwidth to do all the things that need to be done in their business.

And as a small business owner, sometimes you don't have a team built yet. And so figuring out how to make the most effective use of your time so that you can run your business and market it effectively is kind of top of the list for me. 

The second thing, which has been a thing for a while, but it's just not going away is video. For a while, we were all talking a lot about short-form video, reels, TikTok, and those are so relevant. But I also think business owners need to step back and notice a couple of things. 

There's still so many small businesses not leveraging the power of YouTube. And we're finding that a lot of people we talk to are using YouTube in such different ways that you have such a larger opportunity to leverage that. I can go to YouTube and get the small sound bites for the things I want to know and that I'm looking to learn so quickly, and it's opened up an entire new market for YouTube content. 

For a while there, we were talking about really short videos. So a TikTok video, eight to 15 seconds, right? These platforms are starting to incentivize creators to do longer videos, a minute or more. So in 2024, we're going to start to see the length of those shorter vertical videos start to shift a little more. Small business owners should be paying attention to those kinds of changes so they can kind of get in the favor of those algorithms, and just be putting out more content that the platforms wanna show to more people.

And then finally, a place that many small businesses aren't leveraging, and that's paid promotion. It is so difficult for a small business that doesn't have a ton of name recognition or brand recognition yet to get their content seen. Facebook doesn't show anything on a business page to anybody if they can help it. They're in the game of wanting a business to pay for that type of attention.

And yet so many business owners either aren't doing it or they're not doing it right because they've only extended their knowledge base to how to hit that blue button and boost a post versus getting into ad manager and learning to develop a variety of different types of campaigns, leverage different types of audiences and all the tools that Meta is offering.

What social media platform do you plan on using more right now? 

So, I have never been a big fan of LinkedIn. When it came out, I'd been doing this digital marketing thing for quite a while and it just was no fun. That was just the way it was. And I was having so much fun on the other platforms. And it's ridiculous, and shame on me, because I am a B2B organization. So that should be my place, but I just never enjoyed it. And over the last couple of years, it has expanded to be such a phenomenal platform with so many fantastic tools. Things like events and live streaming.

So, I tried to jump in a little bit last year and get more active, but this is the year I'm going all in on our LinkedIn marketing and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. My audience lives there and that's where we need to be. So we're going to be leveraging some of those great new tools that they've launched over the past couple of years and spending a lot more time there.

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