4 New Year's Resolutions Your Business Should Make Want to grow your business in 2020? Then make New Year's resolutions for your business, not just yourself.
By Syed Balkhi Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
With 2020 just around the corner, many people are planning their New Year's resolutions. In fact, you might even be thinking about how you want to learn a new skill, travel more or get in better shape in 2020. But what about your business?
If you want to continue to grow your business in 2020, then you should be making New Year's resolutions for your business, not just yourself. By making New Year's resolutions for your business—and following through with them—your business can reach new heights this coming year.
Here are four New Year's resolutions your business should make.
1. Provide 5-star customer service
Providing outstanding customer service is essential to any successful business. While your customer service may already be great, it's important that you continue to work on ways to improve so that you can keep your customers happy for years to come. After all, investing in new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones, according to Harvard Business Review. So, make a New Year's resolution to bring your customers even better service in 2020.
Related: How to Make Eating Healthy Your Easiest New Year's Resolution of All
Most consumers have come to expect 24/7 customer service in recent years. Because of this, many businesses have implemented chatbots on their websites to answer customer questions and they've started to provide customer service not just on their own websites but on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter too. If your business hasn't done this yet, make a point to do so in 2020 so that you can keep up with the competition and delight your valuable customers.
2. Boost your marketing efforts
With each year comes new marketing trends you should be aware of. If you don't keep up with these trends and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly, you won't be able to capture the attention of users online or turn them into customers. For example, with the introduction of Instagram's new "Checkout" feature, more and more consumers are going to be shopping on social media platforms in 2020. Is your business' social media marketing strategy ready for that?
Take a look at your marketing strategy from 2019 and analyze what worked and what didn't. Then, you can replace the tactics that didn't work so well with some new strategies in order to reach new audiences effectively in 2020.
Increase productivity
Many business owners wish they had more time in their day to get things done, so why not make a New Year's resolution to increase productivity in your business? To make your business more productive, you don't necessarily need to work on becoming a faster, more organized worker (although it helps)—all your business needs to do is automate processes.
With the right tools, you can automate mundane and tedious processes like invoicing, social media scheduling, email marketing, tracking and nurturing leads and more. Automate the easiest tasks first and go from there. With some of your most time-consuming tasks automated, you and your team members are free to work on bigger and better things.
3. Delegate more tasks and grow your team
As a business owner, you might feel like you need to do everything yourself. But in 2020, you need to start delegating, hiring more staff or outsourcing so that you can stop focusing so much on the day-to-day and focus more on truly growing your business. Think about all of the tasks you do in a day: Are there any tasks that you dislike doing? Are certain tasks too overwhelming or time-consuming for you? Is there anyone else on your team that could handle those tasks? If you answer yes to those questions, then you need to pass those duties on to someone on your team.
Related: Make Saying 'No' More Often Your New Year's Resolution
And if you're in a position to do so, you may want to focus on hiring more staff in the new year. But remember, even small businesses with tight budgets can hire remote freelancers for tasks like social media marketing, copywriting, email marketing and so on. Hiring remote freelancers will allow you to get work done on an as-needed basis rather than having to worry about accommodating new full-time staff members.
4. Over to you
These New Year's business resolutions will help any business grow in 2020. But whatever your business goals or resolutions are this coming year, make sure that you give yourself the best chance at achieving them by making them SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Setting SMART goals will prevent you from giving up on your New Year's resolutions in March and instead, you'll achieve your resolutions and become even more prosperous in 2020.
