With the new year upon us, it's a good time to look at which e-business categories are attracting the most interest from business buyers. We reviewed a snapshot of website data from 13,000 page views into the first week of January to answer the question: what digital business trends for 2022 can we expect in the year ahead? What we found is that there have been some significant shifts from last year’s report.
Some key findings before we count down to number one:
- B2B solutions continue to dominate the list.
- COVID impact: "interactive video" landed high on our rankings last year, but fell off the list this year as people may be anticipating the end of COVID.
- Recurring revenue (vs. transactional): buyers are seeking a model that continues to deliver dollars, versus one that is focused on individual sales.
- Lead generation debuts on our list as business owners look for more ways to drive targeted traffic to their sites.
- Niche ecommerce and cloud service providers dominate the list at #1 and #2 respectively versus enterprise software and interactive video last year.
Read on from #7 to #1 for insights into what business buyers are seeking now.
#7 Lead Generation Platforms: These are sites that offer incentives, aggregation, or expertise to help buyers find what they are seeking. Typically, they are in the form of directories, coupons, resume templates, etc., that offer convenience and information to the user leading to revenue when the user makes use of a service or product.
#6 Email Services: Email marketing services for businesses consist of ways to make outreach campaigns easier and more effective. They typically have a CRM and/or AI integration and consist of apps, plug-ins, and platform solutions that often employ a SaaS model. Email outreach is popular with businesses because it often has a higher ROI than other marketing channels.
#5 SEO Tools: Optimizing not just traffic, but relevant traffic to your website is the heart of SEO. A good Google or Bing ranking can drive organic traffic to a website. But the pieces that make up a good ranking rely on data analysis and an understanding of competitors. Software solutions for SEO are frequently SaaS models. Some of the big names are Ahrefs, Semrush and Ubersuggest.
#4 Content Platforms: These are content-based sites that could be blogs, product reviews, or articles. They usually focus on a particular interest or hobby and make money through the posting of display ads, affiliate marketing, paid subscriptions, or events. Content can vary from general consumer to technical professional.
#3 Enterprise Software: This is software geared to helping businesses manage their day-to-day business activities such as procurement, accounting, project management, supply chain, risk management, and compliance. Many of these businesses follow recurring revenue models and service SMB to large business organizations.
#2 Cloud Service Providers: These are network services provided to organizations, which can be application or data based. Essentially, these third parties are providing an infrastructure solution through their remote servers. Typically, companies pay for the data they use but applications are likely to involve a more set recurring charge.
#1 Niche Ecommerce: This includes Shopify retail sites and other ecommerce. These retailers either fulfill goods themselves or through a third party such as Amazon FBA or dropship warehouses. Offerings are often within tightly-focused niches, e.g. personal gear, pantyhose, or women's tunics. The majority of these sites are B2C, though there are many B2B niche ecommerce sites as well.
We hope you found the findings of our digital business trends for 2022 to be revealing. If the acquisition route intrigues you, search our latest businesses for sale.
