The midnight bells have barely been silenced, and we’re already here, talking about New Year’s resolutions for small business owners. Why would we do that? Because it’s important.
You don’t want to spend your first or any other quarters of 2024 wondering what you should focus on this year. You want to be up and at ‘em, ready to go with your goals already laid out.
While businesses do tend to set goals rather than New Year’s resolutions, they’re really the same thing and the exercise is still a good one to do for your business. You can jump right in when you come back from your well-deserved break and get straight to work without wasting any time. You’ll know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. And more importantly, why?
When you know what you want, it’s far easier to aim for it and get it. It’s also far easier, if we’re being practical, to measure what you’ve done against what you wanted to achieve and see if you made it when it comes to this time next year. With a clear vision, it’s also far easier to carry your staff and any partners along with you and get them involved and enthusiastically participating.
New Year’s Resolutions
Here are our suggested resolutions for 2024, all aimed at building your business and bringing you huge success:
Resolution 1: Get more visibility
Who doesn’t want more online visibility? With a bigger presence online, you can more easily reach new customers and get found across Search and Maps.
Optimize your website
Take a look at your current website. Does it “spark joy” as Marie Kondo would have it? If not, it’s time for a refresh. Start at the beginning and work out what your ideal website would look like and how it would work. You’ll want to involve your customers here as well as internal staff and get feedback and suggestions on your current setup.
Check your content and see how you could pep it up and make it better. How could you organize it better, so it’s easier to read and to find?
Look at your online appointment scheduling process if you have one and see how well that works. Is there any friction? If so, deal with it now for a seamless experience your customers love.
Ensure it’s clear where you want visitors to go and what you want them to do. Also, ensure that it’s clear what you do and what you offer immediately.
Maintain your directory listings
Directory listings can gain you great visibility quickly. Many directories have been around since the internet began. They are well-respected by the search engines and will appear above your website in the search results.
Get yourself listed in as many directories as you can, with the same accurate information on all of them, then keep them updated regularly with posts, news, new images, videos, and other things to attract your ideal customers.
Many directories also allow reviews, so encourage people to visit them and post for you.
Ask for online reviews
Speaking of reviews, online reviews provide vital social proof that you’re a quality company that does what you say you will. People trust these as much as they trust personal recommendations from friends and family. So don’t skip on getting and replying to your reviews regularly.
Make a plan for this and stick to it. You need recent, quality reviews as most people won’t look at anything older than a few weeks ago.
Be engaged on social media
Do your customer research and ensure you’re providing quality content and meaningful posts on your social channels. Focus on where your customers are and ask them questions, run polls, ask them for feedback, and what they’d like to see. They will answer you and you might be surprised at what you haven’t thought of.
You also need to answer their comments and questions and interact with them. Engagement goes both ways.
Write relevant content
Again, this comes down to what your audience is looking for and what will entice them to move through your sales funnel and convert. You need the right content at each stage of the buying funnel, so don’t skimp on quality, and don’t forget your keywords.
Create visual content
When posting images, graphics, and videos, you can accompany your posts with relevant descriptions, with the right keywords and hashtags to gain visibility.
Use the best quality images and graphics you can. No one wants to see blurry, rubbish images in their feed, unless you’re making a deliberate point.
Optimize for voice search
Find out what people are searching for with voice search. Optimize your copy for natural voice search by writing naturally, for people first and search engines second. Be aware that if you add your opening hours to your Google Business Profile, you will then come up in voice search when people search for your type of business “open now.”
Resolution 2: Get more positive online reviews
Reviews are your bread and butter for convincing potential customers to shop with you and not the competition. You have to have a good stream of recent reviews coming in as they are excellent convincers for people thinking of buying from you.
Claim your profiles & listings
Claim your Google Business Profile, create a page for your business on Facebook, and don’t forget your major online business directories, such as Yelp and Angi.
Each one of these allows customers to leave reviews for you and they can’t do that if you haven’t claimed them and set up your information on them.
Ensure great customer service
Great reviews start with great customer service and these days customers expect a lot. They want a superb customer experience from start to finish, from when they first find you right through to customer aftercare.
Give it to them and you’ll have very few problems. Though, don’t beat yourself up if you do get the odd poor review. Remember that you really can’t please everyone.
Make it easy for your customers to review you
Tell your customers where they can review you, tell them why, and give them the direct link to the site you want them to use. Don’t make them search for it. They won’t do it and then you’ll have lost out.
If you ask for a review and they haven’t done it, follow up with a quick reminder. Have a system in place for this so you don’t forget to do it.
Post replies and show you care
People love to see companies interacting with their reviews and saying “thank you.” They want to see what they can expect if they buy from you, so reply as if it’s part of your customer service, because it is. This is especially true of negative reviews. People look at these and particularly at how you react. Take a breath, take your time, reply politely, and do your best to get the customer to talk on the phone so you don’t end up having a public row online. Then listen to what they have to say and do your best to fix their problem and delight them. Then ask if they’d mind changing their review.
Resolution 3: Get more quality leads
More leads = more chances to convert = more income = a more stable business. Need we say more?
Optimize your Google Business Profile
You need to be highly visible online if potential customers will find you. Optimizing your GBP will do that for you. You’ll be easier to find in search, and your completed profile will appear higher in the search results than your website, simply because it was provided by Google.
You can also find yourself listed in the Local Map Pack at the top of Google Maps if your GBP is good enough and that kind of visibility is hard to beat.
Maintain a consistent and accurate online presence
Most of what we’ve talked about so far is intended to establish your online presence and build your visibility, so you can attract more quality leads. Keep building your online presence and over time, you will start to see increased leads.
Get more online reviews
Make a plan to keep getting excellent reviews and build your star rating, preferably higher than a 4. The more high-quality reviews you have, the more you’ll attract quality leads.
Optimize your website
Your website must be ready for your quality leads when they arrive. There must be a clear path for them to follow so they know what you want them to do next and so they can find the right information. You also need quality content to keep them interested at each stage of the sales funnel.
Resolution 4: Get more repeat customers
It costs far more to bring in a new lead than it does to keep a repeat customer happy and coming back for more. Therefore, you need to increase the amount of repeat customers you have.
Set up proper lead nurturing
Keep your leads interested at every stage with the right content at the right time. Provide them with exactly what they need to move on to the next stage of the buying process. You can do this through email, text message, and a section dedicated to customer support on your website.
Utilize email marketing
Continually send useful, high-quality emails to your list with good offers, useful information, and exactly what they need to stay informed and intrigued.
Create relevant content
All of your content has to be top quality. It’s all you’ve got to persuade people to make their original purchase and then to buy again. Keep using your content to link to upsells, downsells, and related products or services.
Ask for online reviews
We’ve talked about customer reviews and they are extremely important. Again, they matter here too as they can persuade a previous customer to look again at what you’ve got and buy again.
Resolution 5: Get more revenue
More income? More profits? Happy New Year to you! That’s exactly what most of us want for Christmas 2024.
Track customers and revenue dollars back to the lead source
You can keep better track of where your income is coming from with the right software to allow you to track your customers and your revenue back to your lead source. You can then focus more on sources that bring in the most quality leads and reduce focus, or even stop altogether, on sources that really don’t move the needle.
Rely on marketing analytics and reporting
Back to those goals you’re dreaming of achieving, the only way you’ll know for sure if you’ve reached them is to look at your KPIs and compare them with your real results at the end of 2024. But, keep an eye on your marketing analytics and reporting and you’ll be able to see what’s going well and what’s not and adjust your marketing to help you stay on course and reach your goals.
Gain insights into the channels/platforms your customers come from
Again, you need these insights so you can focus your attention right down on the things that really work. There’s no point at all in spending hours posting on Instagram, for example, if you get very few leads and convert customers from doing that. The right reporting can tell you where your customers are coming from and where it’s worth spending your time.
Maximize your marketing budget
You can see where we were going with the last few points, can’t you? If you’re spending your marketing budget on what really works and stopping as much wasted in your spending as you can, then you will maximize your marketing budget and get the most “bang for your buck.”
Know how to attract the right customer
This comes down to knowing your customers and knowing how to maximize your ads with great content. It’s also knowing that testing and continually optimizing your ads is critical to your success if you hope to increase your lead quality and conversion rate. Don’t leave your ads alone once they’re up and running. Keep testing and improving. And that goes for the rest of your marketing too. There’s always room for improvement.
So, there you have it. Those are our recommended New Year’s resolutions for small business owners. We hope you have a wonderful 2024 and we wish you every success
Partner with Surefire Local
We’re Surefire Local, and we’re all about helping small businesses establish their online presence by creating local signals across platforms and profiles in the form of content, photos, reviews, ads, etc. that make it easier for new customers to connect with them. We’re also the #1 marketing platform for local businesses, giving you all of your marketing in one place: Check-ins, Ads, Social Media, Website Analytics, Content, Google Business Profile, Business Directories, Chat, Text, Email, & more.
We can save you time and effort with your marketing, ensure you maximize your marketing budget, and help you make all of your New Year’s resolutions come true.
If you’d like to know more, why not book a Surefire Local demo and see what a difference we can make to your marketing?