Now that we have entered 2018, it is a pivotal time to start thinking about what you would like your business to achieve this Year. Here are 5 resolutions that will definitely help your Business enter 2018 with the sort of momentum that will help you not only reach, but exceed your targets this year.
1. Make your Business Customer Centric
This should be obvious, but a point that’s often very much overlooked.
Making your customer the centre of everything you do as a business is pivotal, there is no better way to truly understand what makes your target audience tick, as well as what turns them off!
The best way to build a strong business brand is to completely immerse yourself in what your customers are doing. This will allow you to see what they like or dislike about doing business with you and give you some idea on what you need to do to improve or maintain customer retention.
Improving your business with feedback from good customers can seriously give your business a huge uplift in customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
It is a well-known fact that it can cost 5 times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one, so this is an important factor to consider in 2018.
2. Allocate some time for Good Content Creation
Generating content is not always the easiest thing to do and often gets pushed to the back of the queue as it tends to take a bit of time and is not always the most exciting task.
However creating good quality content to use for online marketing collateral should now be an integral part of any marketing strategy.
Good quality, relevant, content that looks to excite the reader is not only an essential factor when it comes to keeping your website fresh, but it also helps with SEO, and more importantly it can be the difference between visitors to your website transitioning to a customer vs just leaving the website after not being satisfied with what they saw when they got there.
Also by investing a small amount of time into generating good content your company will gradually be seen as an authority in the industry or area that you are writing about. Users will naturally gravitate towards your website as a point of interest online.
By attracting more visitors comes the potential to convert more customers.
3. Set Clear Goals, Measure & Improve
Again, setting clear goals is a very simple concept, and you would assume that most businesses have this in place, however you would be wrong.
Putting some time aside to properly understand what your business is trying to achieve is critical. When we say put some time aside, we don’t mean a 30 minute meeting where the outcome is to ‘earn more money’, but a workshop where you can truly discuss in depth, what your end goal should be, how realistic it is, as well as a breakdown of the stepping stones you will need to achieve to get there.
Setting crystal clear goals may not just be financial either, they may be cost efficiency, customer retention, improvement in customer satisfaction or happier employees, the list goes on.
Once you have these crystal clear goals in place it is then imperative to continually track, measure and report on the progress. It is far more important to identify areas that are not moving in the right direction and to rectify them quickly, as opposed to just blindly moving forward and not understanding what is actually happening.
Probably the most important point here is to use the metrics you obtain in order to improve as you go, this is critical to prevent falling back into the same traps again and again.
4. Spread you Marketing efforts in a multi-channel approach
It has become exceedingly difficult to distinguish yourself online in recent years, so it has never been more important to spread your marketing efforts in a multi-channel approach.
Simply putting all of your energy into a single online channel or solitary activity, will very rarely result in huge gains any more due to the sheer amount of marketing ‘noise’ currently out there.
It is far more effective to ensure that the message or material you are promoting is sent out through a multitude of channels, from website to social media, online publication, ezines, email marketing, blogs, paid media and directories.
By using a multi-channel approach you can easily reach out to a larger base of people, as well as learning which of the channels work best for you over time.
5. Stay ahead of the Curve
Technology and online trends have been moving at some pace for over a decade and they are showing no signs of slowing down.
It appears that no matter what industry you work in, there are huge gains to be made from staying ahead of the curve.
There are plenty of ways to achieve this, from making sure you have signed up to the latest industry magazines and newsletters through to keeping an eye on the market leaders in your sector.
The most important thing to remember is not to be afraid of change when looking to keep up with trends and adopting new ways of working.
Stay in touch with us for more great blogs and articles as we move into 2018.