It’s that time of the year again!
Everyone is ready to whip out a few resolutions that they probably will fall short on after the first two weeks of January.
I know I’ve done it SEVERAL times!
Well, as a business owner, setting resolutions for your business is a MUST! However, these resolutions or strategies cannot dissipate after two weeks.
This is different from setting a weight loss goal. It determines whether your business survives another year. It’s SUPER IMPORTANT! Don’t get me wrong; weight loss is also important, but you get the point, right?
There are three things you need to do to improve your brand in the next year.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Step 1: Reflect
Step 2: Revisit
Step 3: Refine
Step 1: Reflect
Before you can take any steps forward, you have to take a look back and see what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what you can improve on. I guess this really isn’t the funnest thing you can do at the end of your year, however, it’ll help you tremendously. Analyzing data and trends helps you understand what you can do better, in order to get improved results.
Do numbers make you cringe? Not to worry, I sometimes feel that way also, however, here are a few numbers that you can look at:
Email List
If you have an email list, go through each of the campaigns you sent each month and check your open rates. Your open rate tells you how many of your recipients actually opened your email. That percentage is great if it’s between 20-30%. I know that sounds low, compared to 100%, but I promise that it’s good. You also want to check your click rate to see how often your recipients clicked the links in your emails. Did you use engaging headlines? Was your offer compelling enough? These are all areas that we can all improve in.
Website Views/Interactions
If you don’t have Google Analytics, you definitely want to get that installed on your website or utilize your website’s analytics, if provided. You want to take a look at the number of views you received during each month when you promoted your various offers. You also want to take a look at your bounce rate. The bounce rate defines the amount of people who enter your website and then leave without visiting any of your other pages. Also you want to check your links to make sure that they lead prospects to the specific place you intend for them to be.
Social Platform Analytics
Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you can take a look at the number of people who interact with certain posts or promotions you’ve run. Take a look at how many people actually moved on to click the links you provided, and if your audience felt compelled to respond. On Instagram, you can take a look and see the demographics of the people who are interacting with your posts. You can also see how your hashtags are doing in helping folks discover your business.
General Overview
Based on the type of business you have, you can take a look at additional data to see where you stand in those particular areas. How do you think the last year went? Be honest with yourself. What do you think you could have done better in? What kept you from achieving those goals? Identifying them now will help you avoid them in the upcoming year.
Step 2: Revisit
Now that you’ve assessed your past year, It’s time for you to gain some clarity on what your business provides and who your audience is. It’s time for brand strategy!! When strategizing, you first have to start with your purpose, vision, and values. Those concepts help you set a strong foundation for what you’ll be offering and how you plan to offer your services and/or products. So let’s do that now.
Offers
List all of the products you offer and what your audience is meant to gain from each. What “special sauce” carries through your products? Then think about how many of those products have actually sold within the last year. For the ones that haven’t sold, further audit them. Was it your messaging or was it an offer that just wasn’t related to your overall goal or the theme of your brand? When you’re in need of feedback, it’s always okay to ask your audience directly. It’ll also help build trust and allow them to see that you’re actually interested in providing them quality.
Now, although I briefly touched on this, you want to go through your offers and make sure that they align with your purpose and vision for your brand. If it doesn’t, you want to put that away or restructure it in a way that fits what you are setting out to accomplish.
Audience
Is your audience still the same? It’s okay for your audience to change. That’s what happens over the years as you get more clear on what you would like to do within your business. Now take a moment to look at the data from the past year and see who is actually interacting with your business and compare that with what you actually desire. You can either use that information to refine your audience or you can decide that the audience you have is not what you need and re-strategize to reach your ideal audience. Define the sex, age range, location, occupation/income, and education of your audience. You may also want to consider their characteristics, values, and lifestyle/preferences.
Voice
Now that you’ve been able to narrow down your offers, and your audience, it’s time to work on your personality and your messaging. In what way do you need to relay the urgency your audience needs to have in purchasing your offer? What type of voice should you be using to appeal to them? What story do you need to tell to get your audience to relate to your brand?
Clean Up Your Processes
Have you ever considered what your processes are and how they affect your sales? What does it take for your audience to reach the end goal? From point A to Z, you should draw out the journey your prospect has to take in order to reach your end goal. The end goal may be to purchase a product or to book a consultation. From your lead magnet to that particular end goal, how many clicks does your prospect have to endure? What maze do they have to survive, in order to experience your brand? If you find yourself recounting too many steps, then you should reconsider simplifying the process by implementing systems that can make the journey more exciting for your prospects.
Step 3: Refine
Now that you’ve filtered through your offers, consider the timeline you have for your business. What is the vision that you have for the next 6 months, the next year, 5 years, and then 10 years? What would you like your business to accomplish in each of those time frames? Now once you’ve figure out the 6-month mark, create a web (let’s take it back to elementary school) to plan out how you will achieve those goals. It’s important to use actionable steps that you can attach a date to. Don’t just blindly make goals without a way forward. For each thing you want to accomplish, assess what will be required in order to achieve that goal. Once you’ve done that, GET TO WORK! Plans don’t work unless you do, so put those plans into action and watch things change.
Wrap-Up
The key to your success is in finding clarity and actually taking the steps necessary to woo your audience and receive sales. Once you’ve figured that out, you just need to be consistent. I know consistency is not for the weak, however it really is the one thing that can completely shift your business. Just focus on being intentional! I wish you the best in the new year!
Please remember that if you need any help finding that clarity, you should absolutely book a brand strategy workshop with us. It’s a 3-hour long workshop where we dissect your brand core, your brand positioning, and your brand persona. We spend the first third of the workshop creating your core statements, such as your purpose, vision and values, and then move towards identifying and breaking down your target audience and the position you would like to hold in their minds. Finally, we give your brand a personality and a voice that you can consistently use in order to relate to your audience. This workshop will completely change the way that you interact with your audience. Book a session here!
