As 2013 comes to an end, it’s a good time to relax, take a breathe and enjoy yourself before us business owners start all over again come January.
It’s also a good time to reflect on the previous year and think about what you’d like 2014 to look like for both you and your business.
For me, 2013 was a really busy year. Lots of business growth and several new projects were started that were loads of fun. Some of them didn’t come to fruition (not yet at least), but some of them did (like my podcast), and it makes for an exciting 2014 as there are lots of new opportunities on the horizon.
So what lessons did I learn in 2013?
There is never a shortage of ideas and opportunities. You just have to carefully choose which one’s you’re going to dedicate your attention to. I love Derek Sivers philosophy on new opportunities, “if it’s not a Hell Yes!, then it’s a no”. I need to learn to say no to opportunities as I had several projects I started and then stopped because I ran out of time and enthusiasm. In the end, it created chaos with my time and attention and distracted me from doing other important stuff.
I suck at follow through. I love to start things. I love the excitement of creating something new, putting it out there and seeing if it works. What I suck at is the follow through. After the initial excitement is gone, I tend to move on to try other things instead of focusing on improving what I’ve already started. Like above, I need to choose fewer things to put my attention to and see them through. If I was growing up today, I would surely be diagnosed with ADHD, good thing for me the disorder wasn’t invented until I was older.
My messages weren’t focused. From my website copy to my advertisements to this blog, I didn’t take the time to tailor my messages according to my audience. I chose the lazy route and stuck with generic marketing messages to appeal to the masses and the results showed. My focus in 2014 is to really fine tune how I market my business and have a purpose for everything I do.
So what about 2014?
If you’re a small business owner, I think targeted messages and customer service are the keys to a successful 2014, at least for me. Take a look at some of the things I feel are worth looking at in the coming year.
Platforms
Think about going beyond traditional text based advertising like newspaper ads, blogs, direct mail, etc. Everyone owns either a smartphone, tablet, or both……there are plenty of different mediums to reach your audience.
Think about using video marketing either via Youtube or even hosting video on your own website (Wistia is great for hosting video on your site). If you’re audience are heavy iTunes users, consider creating a podcast to reach your audience, I recently launch my own podcast a few months ago and the response has been incredible.
Work on building your own audience, whether it’s through social media, your website or through email. If you have an audience, you’ll always have someone ready to listen to what you have to say. The key is to always look to add value for your audience.
Landing Pages
Creating messages and offers tailored for a specific audience. Landing pages created for a single purpose and audience tend to convert much (much) higher than sending people to a general page on your website. Think about the audience you are targeting and come up with a killer offer for them. Platforms like WordPress makes it pretty easy to create custom landing pages, but even if you’re still on an HTML website, you cans till create one off of your site using free web tools like Weebly or even Smore to create a one pager.
Reviews
Google is making a strong push to localizing their search results. This means your Google+ Local page can rank at the top of the search results, outranking higher authority sites. Reviews play a big part in ranking (among other factors) and people put a lot of weight on the reviews for a local business. Getting reviews isn’t easy, spend some time creating a system for regularly asking for reviews from your customers. Slow and steady wins the race.
Customer Service
The last several years saw businesses trying to reduce their customer support costs by taking advantage of technology and automating much of their interactions. Automated phone answering systems (auto-attendants), automated emails that pretend to be authentic and even automated hand written note cards (you’re not fooling anyone Send Out Cards) has resulted in decreased customer satisfaction, a disconnect between business and customer and just a really impersonal way of doing business. Unless you’re a telecom company and could care less about your customers, make an effort to reach out to them for real and let them know you appreciate their business.
Learning
If you’re an owner-operator business, your business can’t grow faster than you can personally. Make 2014 a year where you learn new skills that can help grow your business. This could be learning to use new technologies that can help run your business more efficiently, taking a copywriting course (will help you create really effective ads and web copy) or even a leadership or management course. Do something to make yourself better in 2014.
Wishing you the best
Here’s to a great 2014 for you and your business, cheers!
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Gary Shouldis
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