Now that 2010 has arrived, it’s time for business owners to take stock of their marketing – assess what worked and didn’t work the year before, and determine what, if anything, new to try in the coming year. In an Entrepreneur.com post 10 Marketing Trends for 2010, marketer Susan Gunelius lays out the top 10 trends that will affect all areas of marketing, advertising, branding in 2010 and beyond.

The article is certainly worth a read for any small business owner grappling with marketing strategy and priorities. We spend considerable time focusing on how SMBs and local businesses can leverage online video marketing, and certainly appreciate that online video made the list “Both online video and mobile marketing are set to explode, and we’ll really start to see that happen in 2010″.

However, we were even more excited to read Gunelius’ first point: Transparency and trust are paramount. She wrote, “[Companies] that … make a concentrated effort to be honest and open in their marketing communications will generate positive consumer responses, which can lead to brand loyalty and brand advocacy.”

These words echo the real-world results we see each day when it comes to online video that works. Today’s consumers are savvy. They’re highly attuned to weed out sales pitches. And the Internet puts them in full control — they can instantly navigate away from something that rings hollow or sounds phoney.

As a result, we find that small businesses are most successful with authentic videos where the company owner, employee, or customer tells their story in their own words. Less reliance on scripts and a more organic production process result in an honest, emotionally engaging product. This personal approach differentiates a video from the clutter of marketing jargon on the web today – compelling viewers to want to know more.

In case you needed any more evidence that ad dollars are moving to the online world…GroupM, a media buying agency, released a new study that projects online advertising to account for 15% of the global ad budget in 2010. That’s up from 13% this year, and from 3.1% in 2001.

The study was reported in Variety – you can check out the brief article here.

In terms of dollars and cents, GroupM believes that close to $65 billion will be spent globally on digital ads next year. And for those of you interested in the U.S. market, this same study projects that online advertising will grab 17% of the total ad spending next year (up from a projected 15.4% this year, and 13.9% for 2008).

But here’s where it starts to get interesting. GroupM also looked at how ad money will be spent online. They found that display ads are declining, while search, video and mobile ads are all on the rise. According to the research firm, display ads will account for 34% of online marketing spending in 2010, and will be overtaken by search advertising, which represents 43% of the online budget.

It’s easy to see why search advertising can be so effective, and popular among marketers. It gives brands and companies a unique opportunity to communicate their message to those very people who are actually looking for their solution (whether it’s a widget or widget repair), and at the exact moment of time that they’re actively seeking and needing the solution.

And search ads don’t just have to be limited to the four short lines of text in Google Ad Words. There are other places and ways that people search for services or products on the web — for example, Yellow Pages and other online local or niche listings — and these present powerful opportunities for any marketer.