Usually, we see the start of the new year as a chance to reinvent ourselves, show our better side, and set our expectations for what we want to happen in the next 12 months. If you’re the owner of a business venture, you will likely have some goals for your business that you want to set and hopefully achieve in 2022.
The last two years have been rather tricky, especially for small businesses. Because of the pandemic and the required social distancing and quarantining, most ventures started moving online and making crazy adjustments so that they could survive the COVID period.
Now, at the start of 2022, we are all hoping we can return to “normal life,” and so it’s time to consider not only how to make it through the year but how to potentially grow your company.
In this article, we will discuss some goals in business you can set for the coming year to ensure that it will be more successful than the previous two years.
10 Business Resolutions for 2022
It’s easy to set goals in business that aren’t attainable. You can say things like, “I want to triple my revenue” or “I want to grow the number of employees by 50%”; however, those aren’t really goals; they’re aspirations. There’s no set plan on how to achieve them, and that’s why most of the time, they remain just a wish on a list you wrote at the beginning of the year.
If you genuinely want to set goals that you will reach, they have to be action-related: things you can do, measure and finish; for example, “Write two blog posts per month” or “Run three e-mail advertisement campaigns in each quarter.” That way, you will know what you have to do, and you will see if you’ve done it.
In this blog post, we will only talk about action-related goals – things that you can write on a piece of paper and begin ticking off the list as soon as the new year comes around.
Now without further ado, let’s get started.
Become More Active on Social Media
The power of social media platforms has only grown during the pandemic. Nowadays, every brand needs to have a profile on each app, as it’s been proven that social media marketing is one of the best ways to advertise your business and its products/services.
It’s vital for you to make your company even more visible on social media. You can do that by running campaigns with influencers, collaborating with other businesses in your niche, and, most notably, being more active on social media. If you’re consistent with your posting schedule and put effort into creating valuable content, you will soon begin growing your following and building your brand on social media.
Additionally, you can use social media to promote your website and online store, which can further help you generate traffic and get more sales.
If you need some tips and tricks on how to better manage your social media profiles, we have a few articles that will help.
Start a Business Blog
Even though blogging sounds kind of old school, it’s definitely not a thing of the past. Creating a blog that’s related to your business’s niche gives you a powerful way to interact with your customers and provide them additional value by sharing your opinions, expertise, and helpful advice.
Have you heard the saying “content is king”? Well, it’s true. Having a blog is a terrific way to improve SEO, bring traffic to your website, and build your brand.
If you’re new to blogging and you need guidance on how to begin, you can check out our article for some much-needed tips and tricks.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Elon Musk said it, and it’s true – our mobile phones have become an extension of ourselves in the form of a small device. Everyone’s constantly on their phone, whether a person is at the gym, out walking, at the dinner table, or riding the subway. We’re constantly browsing, looking, chatting, scrolling – all the time. The only rest is while we sleep.
Getting your website to be optimized for mobile is crucial. If your website is not optimized for mobile, then it’s not helping your business; in fact, it’s likely harming it.
61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that has issues, and a smaller percentage is likely to go to a competitor’s site instead. Additionally, Google rewards mobile-friendly websites by ranking them higher on its search engine. That means that a large percentage of sales, traffic, and conversions depends on how well your site performs on phones and tablets.
What’s more, it seems like mobile e-commerce is king. Statistics show that 66% of online shopping time is spent on smartphones, and that number is only growing each year. Along with that, more searches are being performed on mobile devices, which leads to more purchases being made on phones and tablets as well.
When you take these numbers into account, you can clearly see that optimizing your website for mobile can positively affect nearly every aspect of your company, which is why it has to be a top priority for next year.
Improve Your Customer Service
Excellent customer service is something most young entrepreneurs don’t pay attention to and don’t invest in. However, you shouldn’t make the same mistake.
Nowadays, outstanding customer service practices are becoming more and more essential to businesses, and it’s expected that soon they will become as important as the prices and products you’re offering. In fact, statistics show that 71% of customers have stopped buying from a company due to poor customer support. This is something that you surely want to avoid.
Having sound customer service principles such as professionalism, excellent communication, and active listening helps your company become more profitable and make a lasting impression on first-time customers. Building your customer service is something you definitely should aim to achieve in 2022.
Create a Staging Site
Having a terrific website takes a lot of time and testing to really get it done right. Having a staging site is a must-have, as it’s a great way to test and fix errors without harming your business by causing downtime on your actual page.
What’s a staging site?
It’s mostly known as a development or testing site, and it’s basically a copy of your website that you can use to test out changes such as new themes, plug-ins, or bug fixes before implementing them on your actual website that’s publicly available. The whole purpose of a staging website is to serve testing purposes, and so it’s accessible only to a chosen group of people that should be able to work on it. Staging websites can be stored on a local computer or hosted online; however, it should be marked as private.
As you’ve probably guessed, there are a ton of benefits of using staging sites. The main benefit is that you can use a safe environment to implement any kind of changes to your website without harming its public version and causing disruptions to your service. Using a staging website gives you the opportunity to test new things until you get them to work perfectly, and so when they go live on your site, they begin to function seamlessly from the start. Furthermore, you can learn more about creating websites by using staging sites as a staging site becomes a kind of low-risk, no-pressure playground.
Additionally, when it comes to maintenance with staging websites, you can try implementing different bug fixes until you’re absolutely sure they will work. Then you can make the changes to your live site without causing any downtime.
Test Out New Software
A new year represents plenty of new opportunities, and for you as a business owner, it might be the best time to test out new software that you otherwise were hesitant to invest in.
Testing out one or two new tools each year is a terrific way to keep your business progressing as technology is constantly advancing, and it’s vital that you’re up-to-date with the latest trends.
Here are some ideas on tools you might want to try out in 2022:
- WordPress, if you still don’t have a website and want to create one from scratch
- WooCommerce or Shopify, if you’re going to start your online store
- SemRush, if you want to improve your SEO
- Mailchimp, if you are ready to begin e-mail marketing campaigns
- Canva, if you want to take your designs to the next level
Begin Giving Back to Your Community
Most goals in business we set are related to growing the company, earning more money, making more sales, and getting new customers while retaining old ones.
However, it’s good once in a while to strive to do things with your business that help others and not only you. It’s a great idea to think about ways to give back to your community. Choose causes close to your heart or that have something in common with your company, and then think of ways to support them – either by donating funds or promoting them to your customers.
Not only will giving back feel good, but it will also increase your brand awareness and introduce your company to new audiences that might have otherwise not heard of it.
Start Interacting With Your Customers
Currently, businesses are all about technological advancement: new and improved websites, better marketing campaigns, and alternative ways to automate processes. Along with that, thanks to the internet, we have the opportunity to connect to people from all around the world with just a few clicks. However, even though there are many benefits to technology, we still need to spend time talking to our clients, so we can better understand exactly which technological improvements will actually matter to them.
A good goal for the next year is to start creating a connection with your customers. Get creative and organize online workshops, webinars, and even informal get-togethers. In these meetings, express your gratitude towards your loyal customers who’ve been supporting the brand for years and ask them for their opinion on what you can do better. By doing so, you will show them that you’re a brand that genuinely cares about becoming better and responding to its customers’ needs.
Improve Your SEO
If you’re a small business, it’s clear that your main goal will be to grow. This means that you will need to begin attracting larger audiences and increasing your online engagement. That can be done through your blog content and social media profiles; however, those aren’t the only two ways to reach your target audiences.
In fact, one of the best ways to reach new customers is through having a high rank on search engines. Statistics show that most people do online research before making a purchase, and additionally, 75% don’t ever go past the first page of search engine results. Those numbers indicate that if your page manages to rank highly, this will dramatically increase your chances of getting more sales, higher revenues, and more site visitors.
Improving your SEO should be at the very top of your goals for the new year. It’s a terrific way to grow your company while making a good impression on your target audiences and increasing the trust in your brand.
Work on a Crisis Plan
2020 showed us that you should always have a plan B, as you never know what might happen in the world. One of your main goals in business should be to be prepared for any looming crisis that can occur.
If you own a physical store, you should be ready to make the transition to e-commerce at any given moment. That means having an online store ready for use, as well as processes that your employees have to follow when operating entirely online. On the other hand, if you work entirely on the internet, then you should have backups of all your websites and your e-commerce stores, as you never know when a malware or hacker attack may occur.
Remember: it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
Final Thoughts
The start of the new year is the perfect time to start implementing fresh ideas for your company. It’s also a terrific time to set goals that you want your business to achieve in the next 12 months.
Focus on setting attainable objectives for you that are also practical. Don’t do wishful thinking and start describing dreams. Instead, think of your “goals in business” list as an action plan that you have to be able to attack from the first day of January.