It’s a new year and the start of 2016 brings a new burst of personal and professional optimism. When you’re running a small business the business/personal new year enthusiasm can be especially powerful, but often it’s tough to direct all that energy. We’ve put together a few recommendations to help you focus all that new year energy.
Do a little digital house cleaning
Even for a small business there is often an accumulation of little things that individually aren’t incredibly essential, but collectively can have a negative impact on your brand and your ability to generate new business. Things like outdated content on your website or social channels, inaccurate collateral materials, still featuring photos or contact information for previous employees or a host of other things can reflect poorly on your business. Spend some time to tidy up all those little things.
Upgrade your website
After you’ve cleaned things up, consider adding something new to your site. Add new video content, shoot it on your phone and edit with one of the many easy to use video software programs. Add an email opt-in so people can get ongoing communications from you. If you haven’t already, be absolutely sure your website works effectively on mobile devices, there are a number of ways Bluehost can help optimize your website for mobile.
Stop it already
One of the best ways to free up time and resources for new things is to stop doing something else. Take a hard look at your sales and marketing activities and stop spending your valuable time and resources into programs that don’t deliver meaningful results. Even if something delivers a small benefit of some sort, often the effort you put in is not in proportion to the benefit it provides.
Try something new
If you do free up some time and resource, plan to try some new things throughout the year. Try new marketing programs, pricing, promotions or marketing messages. Mix it up a little. Be sure not to just do this at the beginning of the year, develop a plan to try something new each month or each quarter as the year goes by.
Find a new partner
Chances are good there are other businesses that share your focus on a particular location or have some type of complementary value. For example a bike shop and a restaurant that has a healthy menu or maybe a car parts store and a car wash. There are infinite potential ideas, but the point here is to think about a business that might be a good partner and per the previous point try to do some marketing or sales activities together. Do a co-marketing campaign, reach out to each others customers and engage like-minded potential customers.
2016 is going to be an exciting year. Update, upgrade, focus and try a few new things and you can make it a banner year for your small business.
