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If you’re running a business, you want it to succeed. It’s not just a measure of how well you’re running it; the success of your business is what gives financial security to you and everyone you employ, as well as providing an important service to your customers.
It’s not enough to want to be successful and to hope for it. You have to plan for success, anticipating the issues you will face and ensuring you have contingencies in place that let you face them. Today we’re looking at some of the ways you can plan for success in 2020, and have more than hope to rely on as you go into the new year.
Marketing Inspiration
There are two aspects that play into marketing success: how you target customers, and the creative content of your advertising materials.
Targeting is best handled by data-driven marketing experts — contracting this out can be very helpful if you can’t financially justify hiring your own team full time, and employing ROI metrics to measure their performance will quickly show you how good an investment you’re making.
The creative side of your advertising is something you need to have a clear view on, even if the work of writing and designing the adverts is being done by an agency. If you know what you want to see from your advertising, what key aspects of your brand it communicates and the sort of form it should take, you can give clearer briefs to your agency and get results you like faster.
There’s no harm in being inspired by the best. Research some of the most creative ad campaigns 2019 had to offer and come up with top level plans for the key campaigns of 2020.
Expanding Your Business
Expansion is something you should always consider, and the end of the year is a good time to take stock, look at what worked and what didn’t in the previous year, both for yourself and your rivals. This reflection helps you make better plans for the next year.
If you undertook a notable project to expand your business, like opening a new store, this is a good time to look at how it performed: Did it find the audience you expected, fall short, or surpass your hopes? More importantly, why? Try to combine market research that reaches actual customers with your own financial data to build a true picture of the reasons behind your success and failure in the year to date and take those factors into account as you set targets for the next year. There’s no use setting targets you know can’t achieve or planning on a growth in revenue that experience tells you won’t materialize.
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