9 Tips for Achieving your Business Goals

July 28, 2021 - Victor Rogers

Running a small business can be difficult and overwhelming. Having goals for your business can help you stay focused and make a step-by-step plan to accomplish those goals.

At every stage of a small business, the owners need to evaluate their goals to make sure they are working in a way to reach them. This helps to motivate, maintain, or improve their success as a business.

FreshBooks gives some helpful insight and 9 tips on how to attain the goals you set for your business.

Break down your plan

Once you have your goal the next step is to break down your goals into steps. This is extremely helpful for short-term goals and essential for successful long-term goals. In order not to be overwhelmed, focus on what you need right now.

A great way to break down your goals is by creating an action plan. This action plan can be made up of individual tasks with a specific action, this will help with daily progress.

Track your Progress

This is to help you see how far you have come as well as how far you have to go. This can be a great motivator and help you from being discouraged.

This is best attained if you schedule weekly and monthly check-ins to track accomplishments and see where there is room for improvement. Also, create milestones based on your progress to make it easy to see when you are achieving your goals.

Commit to the Process

Be clear with yourself what your goals involve, what type of effort will be required to achieve them, and why that goal is important to your business. Knowing these can empower you to make a plan to accomplish each step towards your goals.

Make sure your team knows the goals and has a commitment to helping you reach them. It will be difficult to achieve your goals if you do not have a set plan.

Create a Support System

A support system can help you in a number of ways. Knowing you have a dedicated team behind you can motivate you and help you broaden your business’ perspective by learning and applying the skills and experiences from your team.

Your team can also be there to keep you accountable for your plans to attain your goals and be there to celebrate your success.

Be Flexible

Very few things go exactly as we planned. During the times when things aren’t going the way we hoped it is so important to modify your plan as necessary and not lose momentum.

Although you should know what your plans are, avoid rigidity. The more flexible, the quicker you can change directions when you need to as well as keep your progress steady in the face of the unexpected.

Remember the Big Picture

Through all the daily plans make sure you are keeping your long-term goal in mind. This helps you to stay motivated and focused. Envisioning what your goal will look and feel like when you have accomplished, will help you maintain perspective on why this goal is so important to you and your business.

Don’t let Perfection Slow you Down

Thinking you need to do every single step correctly can be a huge obstacle in attaining goals. Fear of failure and the idea of perfection can keep you obsessed over every moment and potentially keep you from making progress.

Remember when it comes to goals, moving forward trumps mistakes. Don’t wait until the circumstances are perfect because you might risk throwing away chances to grow. Think of mistakes as opportunities to learn which can give you new ideas and alternative approaches.

Stay Positive

Your confidence in the ability to achieve your goals is a key to your success. You need to have faith that you are capable of attaining these goals.

Encouraging yourself, positive thinking, and support from your team are vital. This attitude will carat you through the stumbling blocks, unexpected changes, and other bumps on the road.

Celebrate Success

Through the small and big wins, celebrate your success. Taking time to recognize your business’ achievements and the effort it took to reach them. This is a good way to get closure on the stages in the process to refocus and continue towards your goals.

For more insight into these 9 tips, read FreshBooks full article here.

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12 Tips in Social Media Marketing for Small Business

July 17, 2021 - Victor Rogers

Coming out of the Covid-19 Pandemic, small businesses are eagerly reopening and ready for the long awaited customers. But picking back up your clientele might be difficult after so long. “How to use Social Media for Small Business: 12 Simple Tips” by Christina Newberry gives helpful insights on how to build up your clients through using Media Platforms.

Start with a plan

Even though Social media may be familiar to you and is a free way to market your business, it is still an investment of your time. You want to make sure you are being efficient by setting your business goals.

Creating a plan will make it easier to work towards how you want your business to be known. Base your plan on setting social media goals and objectives; research your competition; conduct a social media audit; create a social media calendar; and don’t forget to get inspired by other competitors online!

Decide which platforms are right for you

Find what age groups use certain platforms. This could be vital to your success in media marketing. You want to use your time wisely by using the platforms that your audience will be spending their online time on.

Know your audience

The amazing thing about Social Media Marketing is you have the ability to micro-target your audience, but you need to know your audience first.

A good way to start is by compiling data on your current customers. After this, dive deeper by using social media analytics. These two things will help you understand who the people are that are buying and interacting with your business online.

Once you have a good understanding of your audience then you can create buyer personas, this can further help you find the best ways to speak to your audience.

Expand your audience

Once you know and understand who your current customers are you can use that data to increase your clientele by reaching out to people like them . You can use your social media to expand your clientele to people who are near you but maybe have not had the chance to know about your company.

Build Relationships

Social Media Marketing has the unique potential for small businesses to engage with their customers and followers through comments, posts, and messages. This helps you to build a relationship with them over time, rather than just being seen as a store.

When people engage with your posts and ads make sure to engage back to build trust and loyalty. As people like and share your content it will give your business free, new exposure. Remember that even though new clients are great, maintaining current clientele through relationships is just as important!

A few ideas on getting started on creating relationships with your audience on your Platforms are: Create a Facebook group, Connect with other Entrepreneurs and influencers in your niche, mention followers in your posts and stories, and use the social platforms’ built-in interactive tools.

Pay attention to trends

This does not mean jump on every little thing that goes viral, but pay attention to popular trends. This can give you a valuable understanding of what people are looking for on their channels and can help you create appropriate content for your audience.

Let’s be honest, the five reasons that people use social media are: to stay caught up on news and current events; find funny or entertaining content; kill time; stay in touch with friends; or to share videos and photos. With these in mind you want to make sure the content you are giving is fresh, popular, and tied into the current trends.

Sell your stuff with social commerce

Online marketing has recently included social commerce: the ability to sell your products right from your social channels.

This allows you to sell your products and services without having a website, and it is effective. Over 29.4% of U.S. adults made purchases from Facebook and Instagram in 2020.

Mix up your formats

Make sure your audience isn’t seeing the same old style posted over and over again. If you normally post still images and GIFs, try posting a video or JPG. Always take advantage of the variety that Social platforms have to offer to give your company a clean fresh vibe.

Not only does this give a refreshing change to your marketing strategies, but by exploring all the different formats you can find the one that best suits your business. Plus some algorithms used for media platforms, such as Facebook, use “content type diversity”, to mix up a person’s content. Changing up your format may help boost your content’s reach.

Also be sure your posts are inclusive and accessible by adding alt text to images and adding captions to your videos. Make sure you represent your audience in the content you share.

Focus on quality over quantity

It is more important to have quality content on a select few platforms than being present on all channels. Make sure your posts offer value, if you only pitch and sell people won’t be encouraged to follow you. Make sure your content is organic, not fake. People will be able to tell the authenticity from what you post.

Just focus on a couple channels and matter your style and content. Then later you can choose whether or not you want to take what you have learned to expand to other platforms.

Use the right tools

The secret to success with Social Media Marketing is to take advantage of the tools that automate or simplify the majority of the work.

You don’t have to have a full-scale media team, there are loads of tools that can boost your productivity. Here are a few ways to do that: engagement management, analytics, graphics, and content curation.

Use scheduling and automation to free up more time for engagement

After creating a calendar online (which was suggested earlier) you can create posts and use scheduling tools to post them automatically at the times you want. This lets you get work done in a block of time instead of finding time each day to create posts.

Track and refine your performance

As you are putting yourself out on the platforms, it is so important to see what does and doesn’t work. By using analytics tools that were mentioned earlier, you can improve results by fine tuning your efforts.

Once you know what is working then you can start moving forward to find new ways to improve. One of the great advantages for small businesses that Social Media Marketing provides is the tools in whatever is best for your company’s style and budget!

To get examples of these strategies, resources, and further details feel free to read Christina Newberry’s full article on Hootsuite Blog!