The new year is a great time to reflect on your business’ progress and determine how you want to grow. Whether it’s through revamping your online presence, expanding your product line, or simply wanting to organize that one filing cabinet, we know that you want your business to succeed. That’s why we’ve put together this list of ways you can set your business up for success in 2021:
1. Clean your office
Despite the notion that a desk covered in paperwork and clutter equates to an employee hard at work, it is usually those with cleaner offices that are more productive. Research shows that our physical environments significantly impact our cognition, emotions, and behaviors, which in turn impact our decision-making abilities and relationships with others. This definitely rings true for our workplace. Have you ever found yourself feeling overwhelmed and stressed by the sight of paperwork piling up on your desk? Let’s change that! Here are some quick tips to clean and purge your office:
- Purge, sort, and clear your space – It’s time to bust out the trash bags and recycling bins! Remove everything from your desk and determine if each item should be kept at the office, taken home, donated, or tossed. (PRO TIP: those takeout menus from that one restaurant you never got around to trying can go in the bin!)
- Find a home for everything – With all of this newfound space, all of your “keep” items can find their new home! Keep similar items, such as books, with each other and make sure frequently used items stay within reach. We suggest something like this organizer set to keep your desk neat and tidy!
- Organize the documents on your computer – Yes, you need to clean digitally, too! It’s all too common that we find ourselves searching through a list of documents for that one file we haphazardly named “aksfvbna”. Save each file under a recognizable name and in the appropriate online folder. You can organize your documents by client, by month, by department, and a variety of other ways!
- Maintain, maintain, maintain – What’s the point of cleaning if it all builds back up in a month? Set a few minutes aside once a week (or even once a day if you really want to commit) to take inventory of any paperwork that needs to be filed away or trash that can be tossed in the bin. Small windows of maintenance will keep you from having to do another overhaul again in a year!
2. Evaluate your offers
Take the time to reassess the services, products, and sales that your business is offering. You may find that there’s a product going out of style, a new service that people are searching for in your area, or a limited-time discount that drove sales through the roof! You can evaluate your product through means of market or product-based criteria to determine its viability. Your decision to keep, add, or completely remove a product or service from your business plays a big role in your sales, so be sure to conduct thorough research!
3. Update your website
When was the last time you made sure your website was up to date? Besides updating your site with new information, it’s important to ensure your website security and maintenance are up-to-date. Without updating web hosting services, like WordPress, older websites are susceptible to hackers, not to mention plugins that no longer work.
To guarantee your website is up to date and secure check the following:
- Ensure the software that powers your site is up-to-date and secure.
- Verify your contact information, business hours, privacy policy, and social media links and copyright information are correct and updated for the new year.
- Test all your contact forms and email capture methods to verify they are working, and the emails are being delivered versus being redirected to the Spam folder.
- Check your Google Analytics and Google Search Central to make sure they are working and resolve any errors found.
- Check your Google Ranking to make sure all your site pages are properly indexed.
- Clean up your sitemap and remove any pages and information that no longer apply or are no longer needed.
4. Generate a marketing budget
A marketing budget documents how much your business plans to spend on marketing costs such as paid ads, hiring costs, marketing tools, or website maintenance expenses over a specific period of time. Creating a marketing budget helps you stay on track financially and plan long term goals. You can also consider a marketing budget as an investment in your business’s growth, as a successful marketing strategy will convert more prospects into customers. Planning a marketing budget will save you from the dreaded question, “Can we even afford this?” and will ensure that you stay within your means.
For help creating a marketing budget that works for you, give us a call!
5. Create a marketing calendar
Simply choosing your marketing strategy and creating a budget won’t get you very far. You need to have a plan! Consider your marketing calendar to be a roadmap for marketing activities over a specific period of time. For your marketing plan to succeed, your calendar should contain the following purposes:
- Plan ahead to meet your goals.
- Use it as your team’s hub for your marketing activities.
- Share information for campaigns with your team.
- Track the performance of your marketing actions.
- Make it easy to develop a strategic plan for the future.
If your New Year’s resolution is to spend more time doing the things you love, leave the marketing to us. Save your time and money and let our experts manage your marketing projects. Contact us today to speak to our team and start your marketing plan for 2021!
