The New Year’s resolution is a beloved tradition for many of us, even though chances are we won’t live up to our promises. As the year goes on, our determination falters, and we end up only doing a part of the things we promised, at best. Well, not this year, and not when it comes to business! The business version of New Year’s resolutions are simply the goals you plan to work towards in the next year. If you’re looking for some inspiration for business goals for your website, social media, online presence, or the online side of doing business, here are ten you should do your best to reach.
1. Increases Across the Board!
Why not aim for the stars and set your goals on improving the most important things for your website, online marketing, and business in general? There’s nothing like setting difficult goals to make you determined to succeed.
Here’s a difficult goal for you: try to increase website traffic, visitor engagement, as well as conversion rates. A website is a work in progress, and you should always find different ways to make it more efficient at attracting, engaging, and converting visitors.
2. Submit to the Customer-Centric Business Philosophy
Anyone who followed the retail business in the United States over the past couple of years should understand just how important it is to put the customer in the center of the shopping experience. It’s not about buying the most retail space or being in as many locations as possible.
Modern business is about letting people discover and shop the way they want, and they usually want a mix of online and offline. Find out what your customers want from your business, and then center your sales and marketing strategy around their wants.
3. Mind Your KPIs
Where would be without our KPIs? The key performance indicators are what tells us how successful our business activities are. They are the measures that power the analytics processes we use to improve our business.
The only problem with KPIs is that there’s so many of them it’s sometimes hard to keep your eyes on the right ones. So in 2019, make sure that you completely remove the useless, vanity KPIs from your radar. And then replace them with the KPIs that tell you specific things about specific actions you are performing.
4. Grow Your Email List
The email proved to be a very resilient piece of tech. Year in and year out, new online marketing fads come up, grow into legitimate strategies, or die off, leaving email completely unphased by the passage of time.
Email leads are still among the most valuable leads your business can get. Increasing the effort to grow your email list is as good as a goal as any for 2019. Rethink how you approach building an email list, and look over all your forms, landing pages, and front pages for areas that need improvement.
5. Up Your Email Content Game
All the people who sign up for email list will expect to see something useful in their inbox from you. Or at least the percentage of people who read newsletters will. But if you want to increase that percentage, including high-quality content in your newsletters is a must.
Different types of content do different things. In email marketing, the emails usually contain articles. And that’s fine, but you should also consider at least embedding videos in your email. You’d be surprised by how much people might like it.
6. Show Your Website Some Love
Of course, the website is the central hub of any well-developed and thought-out online business presence. As such, there’s plenty of tinkering that goes on with and around the website. And if you’re doing that, great! Keep calm and carry on.
But do something to make your website prettier. Web design can be an art form if you let it. But even if you don’t, it can still do plenty to make your website more interesting and attractive. Appearances matter for websites just as they matter for people.
7. Review Your Hosting
Hosting plays such an important role in the well-being of your website that you always have to keep an eye on it. It’s tricky, however, because migrating to a different host can be a difficult process.
But you should keep a review of your hosting among your goals for every year, not just the next one. If your hosting is holding the website back, you’ll have no chance, but to take the jump and change the provider.
8. Are You on Instagram Yet?
If you’re not, you should be. Instagram has really been hitting its stride this year, especially now that Facebook is seeing its numbers change.
It’s not that hard to produce content for Instagram now that every smartphone has a decent camera. However, if you don’t want your business to have things like shoppable posts and followers, you can at the very least find some influencers to work with.
9. Be Strategic
Everything that happens online should be a result of a strategy commissioned by you and developed and implemented by professionals. There’s little room to winging it when it comes to online business, e-commerce, or digital marketing.
There’s only planning, measuring, testing, and analysis. Your business depends on your ability to perform these activities well or hire the people who can if you can’t. Make 2019 the year your website, online ads, social media profiles, content, and everything else worked together like a symphonic orchestra.
10. Have Fun!
Running a business is stressful. There are glitches, missed forecasts, goals you fail to reach, and all sorts of unexpected events that are beyond your control that can affect your business. You learn to take it on the chin as years go by, and that’s good.
But when things are going well, remember to have some fun. A business is not a toy, and running one is not a game. But you should find it enjoyable, and you should do things that feel new and exciting and worthy of getting to the office in the morning. Find some aspect of it that’s just fun for you, no matter how small and insignificant it might be. It’ll make your whole year slightly better.
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