After spending time with your loved ones during the holidays, it’s back to the grind, usually with mountains of work waiting for you. Rather than consigning your end-of-year work to your post-New Year’s resolution self, why not consider integrating business planning for the new year into your pre-vacation operations? This means that whatever workload you expect to find on your desk when you return will be something you’re completely prepared for. The sooner you establish your business plan, the sooner you can go enjoy the season worry-free or even excited for the new year.
Next Year Kickstarter
Start the next year right by giving everyone the push they need to strive for excellence. This can be done through a simple yet very important part in the preparation process: information distribution.
First of all, this keeps your team on the same page and allows them to communicate better, especially across different groups or departments. Think about the number of projects for the next year that require collaboration between teams: as more members join, the chance of miscommunication increases exponentially. You need to make sure that discussions are, from the start, as clear as possible to leave no room for error.
The second benefit is making it clear to everyone where they should focus their efforts for the best results. To do this, they need to know the data—which areas are lacking in attention, what needs more funding, which departments are understaffed, etc. Visual aides can help make your data much easier for everyone to understand the situation of the company. The holiday season is the best time for companies to come up with strategic business plans because of the data they’ve gathered over the year. At the end, you are rewarded with more informed decision making on every position and rank in your company.
Presentations like those mentioned above can come in many different forms to better fit any given meeting. It could be a professional presentation to breathe more life into a speaker’s words or appeal to more visual-oriented learner. Other viable choices would be a video with different tones to fit the atmosphere or a PDF that you could easily share through email or social media. As long as it works toward your goals, your data can come in many different formats.
Start Something New
The start of the year is the perfect time for your business to try something new. Chances for improvement are always present, you only need the attention to notice and the time to act on it.
To find these channels for improvement, you need to examine your business and those of competitors. Browse through their web pages, their downloadable content, and any other value that they offer, but you do not. Here is a checklist of things you should be doing because of all the benefits they bring, but perhaps haven’t had the chance to start on:
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Blog
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Newsletters and other email direct marketing
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Landing and thank you pages
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Downloadable content (eg. eBooks, whitepapers, case studies)
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eSignatures
Find anything in the checklist? It doesn’t have to be something that your competitors already do. Actually, it may even work more in your favour if they don’t yet. That may be your chance to be an industry leader by tipping the scales ever so slightly. Either way, you should make sure that you take advantage of every opportunity to get ahead, or at least catch up.
New Year’s Resolutions
Resolutions are usually related to improving a person’s character. It could be working out to get in shape, eating healthy or even taking classes to pick up a new skill. You could do the same on the corporate level. This works much like the previous point, but instead of looking for gaps to fill, you look for opportunities for improvement.
If you can’t find these yourself, then ask one of the best candidates for the job: your customers. They’re the ones with first-hand experience operating your website, receiving your messages, and using your products or services. Of course, not everyone can properly express the trouble they had with your company or may have not noticed it at all. That is why you need to ask them with carefully chosen and specific words. These will lead you to your answers.
If not your customers, then why not source a new perspective on your design and content—especially one with knowledge and experience in that field? Outsourced marketing services can review your marketing strategies and recognise exactly where you can develop. Make a new year’s resolution for your company for this year!
Did this blog entry give you an idea to work on that calls for some extra hands? Don’t worry, because even Santa’s workshop is open to consultation! We have a handful of elves ready to answer any of your questions or help develop your ideas for this holiday season and beyond.
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