9 questions to ask yourself:
It’s fast approaching the time of year when we take a break (if you’re one of the lucky ones), reflect on the highs and lows of the year gone by, and start to consider the road ahead. As you start to think about your business goals for 2020, there are some key questions you should consider. In this article, we have outlined what you should be asking yourself to ensure 2020 is a year full of success.
1. Who is your ideal customer/target market?
Ideal can mean many things — who you can deliver the greatest value to, who you enjoy working with or those who need what you do the most. Use your best customers to help think about what makes them “ideal”. Hint: they should be profitable and recommend you.
2. What core problem do you solve for ideal customers?
Think about what your customers’ core problem is. This question lets you discover the real value that you, your services/products and your company deliver. Write a description of the problems you solve for ideal clients.
3. Who are your primary competitors and what are they doing?
Successful business owners and marketing professionals employ some form of competitive research in an effort to better understand what products and services, pricing models and value propositions they are up against. Are your competitors utilising marketing channels to reach a target market that you haven’t tapped into? Do they seem to be active on social media with good engagement (likes/shares/comments)? Have they just upgraded their website to look more modern and professional? Have you started losing work/customers to them?
4. What is your primary competitive advantage?
Trying to figure out how to be better than the competition — better product, better service, better features, better price — is worthless. We suggest focusing on building better processes or better relationships to create a competitive advantage.
5. What is your maximum cost to acquire a new customer?
The cost of acquiring a new customer is important to understand in any business. Once you understand the lifetime value of a customer, you can determine how much you’re willing to pay in new customer acquisition costs. For example, if the lifetime value of your average customer is $1,000, you’ll need to spend less than that in acquisition costs in order to make a profit.
6. How many new customers can you handle per month?
The customer experience is everything today. You must ensure your organisation is equipped to handle in-coming enquiries and on-boarding new clients. Get this stuff wrong in a social driven world and you’ll never hear the end of it.
7. What channels will be the best to reach your customers?
While having a marketing budget is important for any business, it’s equally important to spend it in the right places to make the most of every dollar. Leveraging the right marketing channels in order to reach out to your target audience and convert them into leads or customers is the key to success.
8. Are you happy with your website performance?
Taking the time to understand your web performance data is often overlooked but can be a really useful exercise to get an objective, data backed idea of how much traffic you are getting and how engaged your website visitors are. Your analytics can reveal so much, whether it is your most popular page, most common age demographic of visitors, what external source is sending traffic to your site, and what channels send you the most visitors.
Ask yourself what impact getting more qualified enquiries through your website each month would have on your bottom line.
Number of monthly website enquiries x conversion rate x 12 months x average annual customer spend/revenue = annual revenue generated by the website.
For example:
20 (leads) x 0.5 (conversion rate) x 12 (months) x $500 (spend/revenue) = $60,000
If we increase the number of quality website enquiries per month by just 5 people: 25 x 0.5 x 12 x $500 = $75,000
9. How up to date is your website content – when was it last updated?
If you do not have an internal marketing resource or you have just been a little neglectful of your website, now is the time to check that all the information, design and structure of your website is fit for purpose. We know that businesses change and grow due to industry/market pressure, customer demand, competitor landscape, legislation changes, etc. It is important that your website reflects your business and your future aspirations. We find the most commonly ignored areas of websites are:
- Staff profiles – role changes, people leave, surnames change etc.
- Contact information – email, phone number, PO box
- Services – have you changed the direction/focus of your offering, has the market demanded that you focus on a particular service/product?
- Blog – if you have a news feed (blog) or portfolio section on your website, we know that it is VERY LIKELY that you have neglected this part of your website for quite some time. If your last article was posted last year or earlier, then think of the impression you are giving to your website visitors.
We look forward to hearing all your digital marketing and website goals for 2020. Look out for our new year newsletter that will delve deeper into some digital strategy advice.
