It’s the holiday season! The time of year when most of your days are spent entertaining family and friends, hunting for those last few gifts, and trying to get through the endless dinners, desserts, and candies generally unscathed. This is also the time of year where we think about ways to improve for the upcoming year a.k.a. New Year's Resolutions. This age old tradition is something that can be implemented into the business world and can help get you results. To help with this, we’ve come up with 3 ways that will help ensure your business resolutions are a success!
As you already know, business can be pretty hectic sometimes. A lot of your time is allocated to developing and capitalizing on sales, handling customers/employees, and even dealing with an emergency or two. Throughout all of this, however, we find we sometimes put less time pressing tasks on the back-burner, forget to update our marketing content, and don’t have the time needed to review our processes to evaluate their effectiveness.
So how can you combat this? One of the best ways is to set schedules and lists for when to review your company’s tasks and processes. It may seem childish, but these schedules and lists help you stay on track by telling you the frequency at which you need to review a task or process and what you need to exactly look at so that you never forget anything. For example, say you wanted to look at ways to improve your quoting process’ efficiency every once in a while. You set an annual frequency and then schedule it into your calendar. As the months pass you won’t have to worry if you’ve reviewed your quoting process. Once the time comes to review it you can then handle the task and, upon completion, know whether you are maximizing its effectiveness or if it needs improving.
When most business owners think of marketing, they think of traditional mediums such as TV, radio, print media, and direct mail. However, in the past few decades marketing has evolved, so much so that it can now be defined as every single interaction consumers have with your brand. This is why it is so imperative to ensure that all of your marketing efforts positively reflect your brand. The problem is that marketing is quite the anomaly, as it seems to be the task that everyone knows they need to work on, but never strategically plan out. This usually results in marketing tasks being done quickly and without ensuring that it fully represents your brand.
A great way to stay current is to ensure that all items in your marketing mix that are exposed to consumers are up to date. Items include, but are not limited to your website, print media, social media marketing, SEO, sponsorships, and any guerilla marketing tactics that you may employ. It doesn’t stop here since, as stated before, marketing is every brand’s interaction with consumers. Let’s take a look at how your employees are interacting with consumers. How are they communicating with them? Are they positively reflecting your brand and trying to further it? Are they trying to show how your products or services add value to the lives of their consumers? If you can say yes to all those questions, then you are definitely on the fast track for future marketing success!
You’re now maximizing your effectiveness and taking every opportunity to market your brand, so now what? Let’s take a look at what your consumers are actually coming to you for, your value adding services. However, as times change, so does your company. A good question to ask yourself is “am I always trying to showcase my most profitable services to both my existing and potential client base?” If the answer is yes, then great! However, if the answer is no, then you should probably start shifting your marketing efforts towards said service(s). The end reality is that, as business owners, you need to be profitable in order to remain in business and a great way to do so is to focus on your core service(s).
A new year means new opportunities for your company, so keep these 3 points in mind over the holiday season so that you’re ready to get off to a fast start in 2015! If you get stuck and need some help we’re here! We’d love to sit down with you and play a part in your success story! From the Symetric family we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Don’t forget to have a few extra servings for us!