It’s 2015! Anyone who made a New Year’s resolution has probably been thinking about it for weeks and, in the coming months, they’ll either make that resolution stick or they’ll break it.
If you’re a business owner, you have the option of making two kinds of resolutions: those for yourself and those for your business. Here are five resolutions to consider for a better business in 2015:
1. Review
The best thing you can do for your business to start off 2015 on the right foot is to take a breather and look back on the past year. Seriously – take some time and review. Look critically at your initiatives and the results to determine what worked, what could be improved, and what should be scrapped.
If you’ve already been reviewing these things, double-check your work: review it again, add data where you can, and check the data that’s there for accuracy. Once all the loose ends have been tied up, you’re ready to start 2015 on a path towards progress and growth.
2. Start Planning Early
Plan early – this advice cannot be stressed enough. Holidays are always a busy time for marketers, so if you’re waiting too long to think of, create, implement, and test initiatives, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Great things can happen on short notice; there’s no denying that.
But, even incredible ideas can be destroyed by poor implementation – do you really want to risk scrapping an idea that could really make a difference for your business simply because the implementation fell flat somewhere along the way? If you plan ahead, as much as you can, you’ll ensure your ideas have a fair shot and any decisions you make for improvements and progress will be far stronger.
3. Get Social
It’s becoming easier and easier for ecommerce companies to dominate social channels. Social platforms are releasing and updating more and more features to allow customers to complete the buying cycle without having to leave a social platform. Social commerce is more than a passing fad, it’s an evolving trend and can be the foundation for reaching customers on a whole new level.
Even without the fancy commerce features, social media still provides ecommerce companies with opportunities for growth. By communicating with your customers on social media, on the channels they’re using, you can add a human element to your brand and connect personally with them. You can provide better customer service and participate in the conversations your customers are having, so that when it comes time for them to buy, they’ll think of you.
4. Build Better Communities
As a business, you have a unique opportunity to help make a difference in your community. Whether you have physical retail stores or only an online storefront, you can bring what’s online offline to interact directly with the world around you.
Think about it this way, your customers (and search engines too) like to know they’re dealing with real companies. Doing real company stuff helps provide solid evidence that you are a real company, run by real people, who are interested in real people. By building a better community, you can become a better business that inspires, encourages, and sets yourself apart.
5. Focus On Your Customer & Personalize
User experience can make or break an ecommerce company. If your customers are displeased, the experience you provide and their experiences with your brand and your site are the only things that keep them from bouncing off of your site and heading straight to a competitor. The easiest way to ensure your customers will stick with you is to get inside their heads as much as you can.
If you find out what they need (before they have to ask for it) and provide it seamlessly, then they won’t need to go anywhere else. Personalization, when done correctly, can help set your site apart from the rest (not to mention, personalized up-sells and cross-sells can help increase average order values and frequency of sales).
There you have it – five resolutions worth making (and keeping) for your business in 2015. Cheers to a year of progress, growth, and, of course, happiness!