A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Whatever your business goals for 2014 — more sales, more profit, more employees, more advertising — you can begin to tackle the challenge by creating a comprehensive plan right now. By creating a list, you get the psychological advantage of listing goals and checking them off. What should your business goals for the new year include?
Plan Out The Budget
Have you projected revenues and expenses for 2014? Look for areas that proved effective last year and assign more resources; look for under-performers and consider trimming or even eliminating their funds. Return on investment metrics should dictate where you spend the majority of your marketing funds, since they allow you to cut through the subjectivity and get to the raw numbers of money in and money out.
Find Your Best Customers And Your Best Suppliers
It costs much more money to create a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. While this holds true, it’s also a short-sighted idiom that may harm your business plan, reports Ipsos. Instead of pursuing customer loyalty alone, use invoice software to track and calculate income from various sources so you can determine which customers need to be retained at all costs and which can be replaced. With the same software, a company can also calculate expenses and calculate cost per vendor.
Social Success
Every business should be on social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. With a new age of social media selling tools, you can plan your marketing online and see far greater returns on investment. The cost of a social media lead, reports HubSpot, can be as low as 45 percent cheaper than the market average, less expensive than any other type of lead except blogs. With the advent of social searches your company can show up in searches if you have enough members interacting with your pages. Search-engine optimization and social-media optimization will rely more heavily on the other than ever before as Google+ becomes a heavy influence in Google page rankings while Facebook unveils its own search criteria. Make sure your organization has enough resources to keep social media pages current to give lightning-fast updates and responses to customers and potential customers alike.
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