5 Actions You Can Take To Improve Your Business By The End Of The Day

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Big goals breed big results. To achieve massive success, you need both the foresight to plan ten years into the future and the tenacity to take action on those plans every single day.

But the day-to-day can often get monotonous. When you’re bogged down by the everyday processes of running your business, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture goals you’re working to achieve.

If you need a little spark to reignite your motivation, here are five things you can do right here, right now to push your business forward.

Conduct A Marketing Audit

Marketing your business is essential to helping it grow and to establish your tribe of loyal fans. But if you’re not constantly checking in on your marketing efforts, measuring them and making tweaks, a small discrepancy in spending can quickly turn into an avalanche of cash out the door.

Conducting a marketing audit will tell you exactly which efforts are breeding which results, which can help you either cut costs or maximize profits almost immediately.

You can do your own marketing audit using a simple spreadsheet.

In the first column, make a list of everything you’re doing to market your business. This will include things like social media, email, ads you’re running, fliers you put in mailboxes and so on.

Then, create three more columns: time investment, financial investment, and return. For each of your marketing activities, go through and asses how much time and money were spent on each and what results they yielded during a set time frame.

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Now you’ll want to do a couple calculations: your revenue per hour invested and your return on each dollar spent per medium. Comparing these figures will tell you where your marketing is paying off—and where it’s not moving the needle whatsoever.

If you don’t know the results in any one area, that’s a big problem. A quick win will be to set up a means for tracking the direct results from each marketing medium, whether it’s using a Google tracking link to track sales or the use of a coupon code that’s unique to the medium.

Talk To Your Customers

There’s no better way to identify new opportunities and fix holes in your systems than by asking the people who know your customer best: your customers.

Set up a survey using a free tool like Survey Monkey and ask existing customers to weigh in via email, social media and word of mouth.

Ask open-ended questions designed to gather insights like:

Why did you choose to patronize our business over the competition?
In your opinion, what’s our strongest quality?
Are there any parts of our job we could be doing better?
Were there any negative parts of your experience working with us?

You’ll be surprised how much you can learn simply by asking for input. Helpful hint: studies have shown that beginning your survey with positive questions (i.e. “what went right?”) before asking about the negative aspects can yield better results.

Schedule A Meeting Of The Minds

Sometimes you run into the same problems because you’re working on the same things with the same people day in and day out. Breaking out of your routine and meeting with a colleague or mentor you haven’t seen in a while can help get your creative juices flowing and shed new light on old problems.

Who are the three most creative, positive or encouraging people you know? Pick up the phone and schedule a lunch date.

Run A Win-Back Campaign

It’s a common business tenet that it costs much less to keep an existing customer than it does to attract a new one. Get to work breathing new life into the customer relationships that have flatlined in your business.

One way to do this with little effort is through a win-back campaign. A win-back campaign is simply an email specifically tailored to re-engaging old prospects.

Win-back campaigns have an average 12% open rate, but it’s what happens after the initial outreach that’s meaningful. In one study of more than 30 brands, 45% of subscribers who received a win-back campaign opened a subsequent email. That’s a major leap from zero engagement before!

Email Monks have a great list of 10 win-back campaign examples to help you get the ball rolling.

Optimize Your Office

Clean desk.jpg If your office is, um, a disaster, it can put a damper on your progress. It’s a toss-up whether a clean desk is actually better for work than a messy one, but you have to admit that when there’s clutter everywhere, it can be distracting.

Spend 20 minutes doing an office clean sweep: recycle old papers, trash or donate knickknacks that are collecting dust, and tend to anything that’s been sitting in your ‘later’ pile for longer than you’d care to mention.

I’ve found that when I’m feeling stuck, the best thing to do to kick progress back into gear is to achieve a quick win. Which one of these five will you try?

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