Making resolutions for our personal lives during the new year is a time-honored tradition, and for good reason – It is smart to take time to reflect on how we’ve progressed in the past year, and where we see ourselves this time next year. Resolutions allow us to examine where we made the most improvement, as well as the areas that we should spend more time focusing on.

A new year presents us with the opportunity to reflect on the past to help us make better decisions for the future.

Each January we recognize and reflect on the passing of our most important unit of measure. We look back on our year, on the time we had, and how we decided to spend it. As we consider our success, our failure, and our missed opportunities — We put together resolutions to make the best of our next year. Our resolutions should inspire and motivate us to be better than we were the year before so we are always improving, always moving forwards.

A new year, and in this case a new decade, also marks a good opportunity to reflect on your business in 2020, and help you look forward to 2022.

Its not easy to step away from the day-to-day business operations to gather all your thoughts, so we’ve come up with a list that will help you assess your previous year, and a number of resolutions you can make to improve your business in 2022.

Let’s dive in:

What is Marketing?

Some people would say “advertising” — but its much more than that. Let’s help clarify what marketing really is.

Marketing includes your advertising, but it also includes your branding, your product or service, pricing, placement, targeting, messaging, and your sales and customer service teams.

Do you offer “Plumbing Services”, or do you offer “Affordable Drain and Clog Plumbing Services for Local Homeowners”?

Your marketing should help you understand who your ideal customer is, the price you should offer your product or service at, where you should advertise, and how your business positions itself in relation to your competition (this is closely tied in with your branding).

Your marketing is also the story you tell, both to your customers and to your employees. This story is the “Why” behind everything that your company does. Watch this video for a deeper dive into why your “Why” is so important:

Marketing Resolutions – Answer these questions

1. What is your story? How do you talk about your business to your employees and to your customers.
2. Who do you serve? Who is your ideal customer? What are their needs, hopes, and fears? What do they expect from your business? How does being a patron of your business solve a problem in their life?
3. What is your why? WHY do you do what you do? Your why should be based on some core belief about the world.

Is Your Brand Really a Brand?

Your brand is more than just your logo and the colors you use – it is the driving force behind everything that your organization does, from the CEO to the receptionist. A new year is a great time to take account of whether your organization truly embodies the ethos of your brand, and how you can realign your purpose to fit with that mission.

Its about WHO you serve, WHY you serve them, the CHANGE that you seek to make in your customers lives, and the PROMISE that you make to your customers and your employees.

Are there areas of your business that don’t stand up to that scrutiny? If not — don’t blame the receptionist: accountability starts at the top. Focus on having honest conversations and honest assessments about the attitudes and mindset of your team as they approach their work. You may find that aligning their purpose with a real brand message will have resounding effects on your business.

Brand Resolutions

1. Write a list of your brand values.
2. A fun exercise you can do is to imagine your company as a person, and your brand as their personality. Would they be the fun and affable, or more on the serious side? How would they speak? What would their style be? Knowing the answers to these questions will help next time you need to have something designed, or you are developing new marketing collateral such as copywriting.

Unique Selling Proposition

Your unique selling proposition plays an important role in your overall positioning strategy, your branding, and your advertising strategy. What makes your business unique and special? Why should a customer work with you rather than your competition? These aren’t rhetorical questions —

Is your customer service the absolute best in your industry? Can you beat any of your competitors on price? Do you offer a warranty unlike any other?

USP Resolutions

1. Write a list of EVERY Unique Selling Proposition for your business that you can think of.
2. Narrow the list down to your top 5 USPs.
3. Focus on your strengths – how can you leverage these selling points in your business? Tell your sales people to make sure they include new language in their conversations or highlight these strengths in your social media posts… take action on what makes you special!

Advertising

When all your homework is done and you have a deeper understanding of your company, your offering, your customer, and your brand; its time to create some advertisements.

But first, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane so we’re all on the same page.

The oldest form of advertising (as you may have heard) is word of mouth. That actually hasn’t changed much, but now we use our keyboards instead of our mouths (more on that later).

Sometime between the dawn of time and the rise of digital marketing were the “traditional” marketing mediums: Print, Broadcast, and Direct Mail.

Recently these mediums haven’t gotten as much attention as digital formats, they still employ the same building blocks and strategies. Digital ad campaigns still use audience targeting, copywriting, creative images, design, video, and sound to connect with customers.

Based on the homework you did above, you should be able to say where your ideal customer can best be targeted with an ad – perhaps you buy an ad in a local paper or magazine, send out a postcard to a list of zip codes, or play a video ad on a local station. These methods are still in use because they work! Like anything else, there are benefits and drawbacks.

So why are businesses increasingly growing their digital advertising strategies, and why are more and more advertising dollars moving away from “traditional” advertising towards digital?

To answer that, let’s dive a little deeper into the biggest differences between traditional and digital advertising:

Measurement & Key Performance Indicators

It’s important to emphasize how crucial measuring your advertising is. In an ideal world you would be able to analyze your advertising data with a fine tooth comb and know how many people saw your ad, how much each lead cost, how old they were, what day of the week it was, etc.

This is possible with digital advertising, and is one of the big reasons that marketers and business owners are moving more of their dollars over.

Cost & Wasted Ad Spend

If you advertise in a newspaper, it is only useful if your customer sees it the day its published… maybe a day or two after. Digital ads can be running any hour, of any day.

You’ve probably heard the term “PPC” or “pay per click”, as the name implies you only pay for the people who are taking an action on your ad. There’s no guess work wondering what percent of magazine readers saw your ad.

Testing

Can you change an ad on the fly? Can you test two pieces of creative or copy against each other? With broadcast and print advertising you’ve got one shot to produce your best advertisement.

Want to show a testimonial instead of an ad focusing on your service benefits? With digital advertising you can run both at the same time and see which one is performing better in real time.

Targeting & Personalization

TV stations and magazines can give you estimates on who’s eyes will be seeing your ad, but they probably look like this:

Monthly Readers: 160,000

Readers Age: 25-65+

Readers Gender: 56% Female, 44% Male

Reader Income: $45,000-$150,000/yr

Region: State Wide

With digital marketing platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can create ads targeted at much more specific demographics, such as –

Viewer Age: 30-55

Gender: Men Only

Income: Top 5% Of Income

Region: 10mi radius around business, or specific zip codes.

Occupation: Business owner or executive

Interests: UH Football

Demographics: Has children and is married

Display Time: Between 6am and 6pm

Daily Viewers: 5,334

Can you see how this would help you shape an advertising and messaging plan that is highly targeted towards your ideal customer?

Action

On a print or broadcast advertisement you are mostly hoping for someone to call your business, sometimes you want to send leads to your website, and occasionally you want them to come into your store.

BJ Fogg, a human behavior researcher at Stanford, put together a formula to explain why people take action.

Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger

Essentially, you can get customers to take action by increasing their motivation, and/or by reducing the amount of effort required to take the action.

See the graph below:

The point we’re getting at is when you’re using a digital advertisement it becomes a lot easier for someone navigate to your web page to fill out a form or to place a call when the action threshold is as simple as moving their thumb.

Advertising Resolutions

1. Identify your primary key performance indicators (KPIs) – phone sales, customer inquiries, average life of customer, return on ad spend (ROAS), etc.
2. Use the Fogg Behavior Model to see where your company is on the Motivation and Ability graph. How can you adjust your marketing to increase motivation and reduce your activation threshold?

Are You Profiting From Your Data Collection?

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is not collecting their customer’s data. The second biggest mistake is collecting the data and then IGNORING it.

If you aren’t already collecting customer data, start today.

If you are collecting it… are you doing anything with it? Or is it just sitting in a database somewhere collecting dust?

Throughout the 2000’s and 2010’s none of us could escape the headlines constant humming about the age of Big Data which would solve all of our business problems. Come 2022, many businesses have realized that the data is only as good as what you do with it, and any dreams Artificial Intelligence and automation are at least a few more years off.

So what can businesses do to take advantage of the Big Data opportunity that we are presented with? Well for starters, if you aren’t already capturing as much data as you can about your business, you need to make a resolution to start doing so, and begin organizing it into a useable framework.

Every business is different, but think about the specific data that drives your business forward and how a greater understanding of your market and your customers could help you make more strategic decisions.

Some questions you could ask are, “What is my customer acquisition cost?”, “What is my sales team’s closing rate?”, “What is the lifetime value of my customer?”. If you can’t answer questions like this about your business, it is probably a sign that you need to start taking your approach to data more seriously.

Data Resolutions

1. Identify the most important data for you to capture. Obviously their name and email address are the most important, but could your service improve by knowing whether they own a home or rent? Do you need to know their whole address or will just a zip code suffice?
2. Create a system to capture and organize your customer’s data. Whether you’re entering in business cards manually (Stop, there’s an app for that – ), have a form online, service management software, POS System, or CRM: unify your data as much as possible. Make sure you have a Master Database with customer info and purchase data.
3. Calculate your closing rate as a percentage of people who make first contact with your company.
4. Calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC) based on your current advertising spend and closing rate.
5. Calculate the average lifetime value of your customers (LTV) – how long the average customer stays with your company and how much they spend over that time period. This will help you benchmark a good CAC so you can work to improve it.
6. Write down the top 10 questions you’d ask an oracle who knew everything about your business, then analyze your data and find the answer! There are some great free reporting tools online like Google’s Data Studio that you can use to analyze any Excel or CSV format data, but if that sounds too intimidating, find a data professional! Compare quarter over quarter sales! See how many incomplete customer profiles you have! Calculate your cost per lead! It is not enough to just collect the data – Do something with it!

Correctly Managing Your Online Presence

Whether you like it or not, your business is judged by the way it carries itself online. You may have told your children something similar, but do you take your own advice when it comes to your business? Much like we tell teens about Facebook and being careful about what they allow online – businesses too should take heed of this advice. Your online presence is your reputation. In most cases, its the only way that your potential customers will be able to get to know you prior to engaging with you professionally.

We aren’t just talking about your website. Everywhere you have a digital footprint from your social media channels to review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and HomeAdvisor — is your business putting its best foot forward?

Lucky for you, we’ve written a mini-guide to managing your online presence for business success.

Website

The year is 2022. More people view websites on their phone than on their desktop computers, laptops, and tablets combined. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile browsing you’re just asking for high bounce rates and low conversions.

Not only does a mobile optimized site provide a better customer experience and conversion rate, it will also improve your SEO rating! Google incentivizes businesses to make their websites more user friendly by improving their search ranking.

Speaking of SEO – whether you engage an SEO professional or not, there are some simple things you can do to improve your ranking, that you definitely should be doing.

1. Use meta-tags and page descriptions to tell Google what your website is about.
2. Submit your sitemap to Google so it knows what pages are on your site, and what they’re all about.
3. Make sure your web developer is using header tag hierarchy properly. You shouldn’t be using H1 tags more than once on a page.

This is a google time to circle back to collecting data. Are you tracking who visits your website using Google Analytics? If you’re using social media like Facebook and Instagram as a marketing platform, do you have the Facebook pixel installed?

Think about your CTA – is it obvious what action you want your customers to take when visiting your site? They shouldn’t have to search for how to contact you to request a quote or a demo – MAKE IT EASY and you will notice a big difference.

These are the BASICS of having your website optimized for user experience and are the foundation of good digital marketing strategy as we head in to the next decade.

Resolutions

1. Make sure your website is mobile responsive
2. Make sure you use meta-tags for all your pages
3. Make sure your sitemap is being shared with Google

Review Sites

It’s a love-hate relationship – more so with Yelp than Google My Business, but it never fun when Joe Nobody leaves a bad review when he’s either

A) Never visited your business, or

B) Was a complete jerk when he visited, and leaves a review that makes it seem like they were an angel.

Despite the negatives, review pages will not be going away any time soon – at least not in our lifetime. So how do businesses respond?

The first thing to do is not get mad – that’s what they want. You need to read a negative review and give it an honest assessment. Did your team fail to maintain the high standard that you set for them? After you’ve done an internal investigation and learned everything you can to know about the situation, keep a cool head and respond to your negative review.

Sometimes you’ll find that mistakes we’re made. In these situations own up to them. Be honest and forthcoming: “Joe, we regret that you had the experience that you did. It does not represent our business or the quality of service that we provide. We hope that you’ll give us a second chance to change your mind. Send an email to service@businessname.com and we’ll send you a coupon to try us again.”

If the comment was completely off base you should still respond cordially. You don’t want to be dragged down to their level, but you DO need to respond.

“Joe Nobody, our records indicate that our team member explained to you that your request was impossible, and after getting into an argument you stormed off premises and decided to write this untruthful review about our business. We take pride in the work we do and always do our best to be honest with our customers.”

When it comes to positive reviews – thank them for the opportunity to serve, talk about how happy you are that you made a good impression, and express how excited you are to continue to provide your superior service.

Images & Business Info

Your image online is related to your brand. It is made up by things like colors, pictures, laouts, etc. It is important to put your best foot forward on the web, whether you highlight your team, your workspace, your equiptment, your process, or whatever it is that makes you unqiue – don’t be just another boring faceless company. Show your customers who you are! It business trust which is crucial to developing and maintaining relationships.

Make sure that your contact info — website, phone, email, business address, and hours of operation — are correct and consistent across your channels.

Resolutions

1. Make sure all review sites and social media have the same business information – name, address, phone, website
2. Gather high quality pictures of your team, your equipment, your process, or your products that show your business in a good light. If you don’t have good photos, hire a photographer! Make sure you update all your profiles with the new photos.
3. Focus your review gathering on just 1 review site. This all depends on your customers and where they hang out online and which site they would find the most useful to them. This isn’t saying you shouldn’t have profiles in as many places as possible, but when you’re requesting reviews from customers, focus on just one.
4. Set up review request automation. After a customer interacts with your business you should try to send them a request to leave a review either through email or via text message. One trick you can use is to ask them if they had a good experience first, and then link them to your review site of choice. If they had a negative experience, link them to send you an email directly to address their concerns.
5. Take the time to respond to each review individually, don’t just use the same canned response every time. Getting lots of reviews is a good problem to have!

Listening To Your Audience

Are you spending time actively listening to your customers? This is more than just Its not always fun asking for feedback when it might be negative, but by reaching out to your customers who have left or decided not to work with you for whatever reason, you are able to gather invaluable insight into what you are doing right and what you could be doing better.

It may be as simple as sending out a quick email asking why your customer chose another company, or if you find difficulty getting a response you could ask them to answer a survey in exchange for a $10 Starbucks card to hear about their experience with your company.

You should also ask your current customers what they think — is there any better way to improve your customer experience than by asking the people who are currently customers? You will be able to identify what your customers like and what they don’t, and then apply it to your business and to your marketing message.

By honestly listening, by showing empathy for your customer, you will be able to see either how your business succeeds – highlighting your organization’s strengths and giving you your roadmap to success, but also by identifying weaknesses you are able to approach those areas of your organization that need some restructuring in order to become the company that you envision.

Resolutions

1. Reach out to 5 past customers about why they decided to leave your business.
2. Reach out to 5 current customers about what they like about doing business with you, and what they think you could improve upon.