Excitingly, the start of a new year brings fresh optimism and opportunities. It’s wonderful to hear stories of small business owners motivated to take their businesses to new heights after a well-deserved break, however, we also know that sometimes it’s challenging to identify a starting point, writes Elise Balsillie, Head of Thryv Australia.
To help, I’ve compiled my thoughts on how to leverage the fresh start and accelerate the growth of your small business in 2023.
- Establish smart goals and stay on track with KPIs
Key to the growth of any small business is taking the time to create a plan that will help measure progress and achieve goals.
Goals must be SMART:
- Specific – What are you looking to accomplish with this goal?
- Measurable – How will you know you’ve reached your goal?
- Achievable – What steps do you need to take to reach this goal?
- Relevant – Is right now the best time for this?
- Timely – When should you be done with this goal?
This can be a time-consuming process but establishing SMART goals is a worthwhile exercise to reach your next business milestone.
To monitor how you’re progressing in these goals, you can use Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs).
KPIs help you measure the level of success of your goals. Some examples of KPIs include:
- Decrease average time spent working on cars by two hours by end-of-year
- Increase guest spending average by $5 every quarter
- Reduce employee turnover by 70 per cent in the 2023 financial year
- Improve your online presence
Having a solid online presence will help get more eyes on your business. Not only will it ensure your business appears legitimate in search engine results, it’ll also (ideally) create a favourable impression amongst potential customers.
Ways to improve your online presence might include:
- Updating your website to ensure it contains vital information and a compelling call-to-action. It should also be aesthetically pleasing, load quickly and be mobile friendly.
- Getting intentional with your social media channels by creating plans that’ll ensure valuable content is served to potential customers regularly.
- Building a subscriber list to help retarget existing customers via Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) marketing,
- Develop an SEO strategy
Think about your own patterns of behaviour when it comes to finding information about a business of interest. What do you do when you want to know their hours of operation, how to contact them or even how to get to their shopfront? You’ll most likely type your query into a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo or similar.
This is why the development of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy should be prioritised by small business owners in 2023. As a space that is continually evolving, we understand how daunting this task may feel. To help guide your thinking, two of the biggest SEO trends for the year ahead will be centred around schema markup and local listings.
Setting up schema markup on key pieces of content featured on your website (such as frequently asked questions and contact details) will enable search engines to extract details that potential customers are searching for and display it in an interactive way.
Additionally, claiming your local listings helps to build links for display in search engines. Local listings share important details about your business with potential customers and includes Google Business Profile, social channels and directories. There’s a lot of admin involved in updating listing sites, so as a last point of advice, I recommend seeking out a software platform that helps you update all of these from one single place.