No matter how well your business is doing or how fast it might be growing, it is important to always strive for further improvement. Industry, business processes, employees and the general world around you is constantly changing and you need to keep up. A major area where companies have been falling short in recent years is marketing. The face of marketing has changed almost beyond recognition with people’s newfound reliance on the internet and more specifically, social media. You can arrange for a digital marketing strategy audit to identify where your marketing is failing you and where it is excelling. Here are some of the basics for how to monitor and improve your business on a daily basis.
1) Identify your strengths and weaknesses
To improve your business performance, you must first understand where you are currently at and recognise your potential for the future. You are more than likely familiar with the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and whilst you may use this to assess individual staff it can be an excellent tool to apply to the wider business. Compare your performance with similar businesses, conduct market research and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Hiring a consultant can help you to create a new business model, taking trends and other data into account.
2) Create a Plan
Once you have identified where you are excelling and where you need work, you need to set clear goals for the future. It is important to pick just a few well-defined goals to truly focus on or you may find your attention and resources stretched a little thin. Choose around 3 to 5 goals and ensure they are measurable, achievable, and don’t forget to set deadlines for them.
Some objectives may take priority over others so you might want to order them according to importance and relevance to improving the business. Identify the necessary actions and tasks entailed in achieving each goal, set start and end dates, and allocate responsible personnel for each task. Setting a budget for each of these tasks is also essential – the size and importance of the task usually dictates the resources allotted for it. Finally, you must determine how the end results will be measured in order to define their level of success.
3) Pick the right people for the job
Part of your plan outlined above is the allocation of responsible personnel and like any other aspect of your business, success is based on the skill and dedication of the staff in place. You need to be familiar with your staff and their capabilities, it is important to encourage collaboration between your staff – communication problems and lack of interdepartmental collaboration are a huge issue for many companies. Employees do not necessarily need to have the skills down straight away, when hiring new staff you should also seek out those who are keen to learn and improve.
4) Monitor Progress
Using the measurement criteria laid out in your planning, you must monitor the activities and progress. Individual tasks may be as simple to monitor as complete or incomplete but wiser goals will need a clearer way to depict success – possibly by using a measurement such as percentage increase in profit.
