Take account of your year in its entirety and outline everything your business has been through over the past 12 months. Find out the things that worked and didn’t. Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, offerings, products, services, internet marketing campaigns in Miami, and many more.
It’s the key to maximizing your business’ growth and preparing your business for the challenges and opportunities that the following year may bring.
How to Perform an End of Year Review for Small Business
1. Go Back to Your Short and Long-Term Goals
Before the beginning of the year, your business needs to set clear short and long-term goals. Figure out if you want to hit a certain sales target or earn a prestigious award in your industry and whatnot.
At the end of the year, go over these goals and assess how many of your objectives you've reached and start to prioritize the goals you haven't achieved in the following year.
Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to help your organization meet overall goals, targets, and objectives at an individual and team level. For example, if one of your company goals is to provide great customer service.
Use a KPI to target the number of unsatisfied customer reports at the end of each week. This will provide you with insights into your performance and progress towards your objective.
It’s important to set organizational KPIs that measure the suitable action for every area of your business because it helps drive organizational performance. When you’re focused on your KPIs, you and your team can prioritize doing tasks that will help your company move forward.
There are two things you need to keep in mind when selecting the right KPIs:
Make it as simple as possible so your employees understand what they need to do.
Set SMART KPIs. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
To define effective KPIs for your organization, here are some questions you need to ask yourself:
What is your organization’s vision? What is your course of action to achieve that vision?
What metrics will help you identify that you are successful in pursuing your vision and strategy?
How can these metrics be cheated and how will you guard against this?
Below are a few methods of measuring business performance at your small business:
Check if your customers feel satisfied after buying from your business. There are different ways to measure customer satisfaction, such as reviews and surveys.
The average number of new customers you generate in a month. Getting new customers is vital to your company's growth.
Conduct employee performance reviews to see if they're happy at their jobs and to check how effectively they complete tasks.
Stay current on market health. How well the economy is doing also impacts your profitability.
Assess your happiness and expectations. It's crucial when measuring your business' success. How do you feel your business is doing? Is your organization anywhere where you want it to be? It's crucial that you're happy with your progress to encourage overall success.
2. Examine How Well Your Business Is Functioning
Year-end reviews are the perfect time to reexamine how well your business is performing, how you can make the most out of market opportunities, and how you can take your business to the next level.
Assess how your offerings, products, and services are functioning, and dive deep to find opportunities for potential improvement. Below are the basics of your business practice that you want to examine at the end of every year:
Core activities - Asses your core activities, from the products you make to the services you provide. Ask yourself what makes them successful and if these value propositions are still intact. You also want to check if they match your intended audience’s needs and wants. It’s also critical to analyze how they can be improved and whether launching new products or complementary services will boost their value even more.
Business efficiency - A lot of small businesses focus on their day-to-day operations and achieving short-term goals that they sometimes forget about growing and developing. However, it’s important to strike a balance between responding rapidly to the ever-changing consumer demands and focusing on your long-term goal. For example, it’s important to think about modernizing your equipment, expanding your current facility to meet forecasted demand, how you can fund improvements, and how you can stand out from your competitors.
Competitor analysis - Gather more information about your competitors, what they’re doing, and their SEO strategy. There are three ways you can find out more about your competitors: what they say about themselves, what their customers have to say about them, and commission market research.
Customer and market analysis - At the end of every year, it’s important to revisit your markets and check for changes in their needs, emerging trends, external factors that may impact market behavior, and changes in competitive activity.
3. Review Your Financial Position
Review your financial position. It’s one of the most important parts of your year-end review. How much money is going in and out of your business? Are you profitable? Although it may take time to begin making a profit, documenting your progress is still important.
When reviewing your finances, consider looking at the following:
Cash flow - Balance of money flowing in and out of your business. Review and update your forecast constantly.
Working capital - Asses if your required working capital has changed and where you can source it from.
Cost base - Keep your costs covered in your sale price. If your costs increase or if you’re scaling your business, then it’s necessary to increase your price but don’t expect customers to pay more for poor service or any inefficiencies. Make sure your service or product is also at par with your new pricing.
Loans - Assess your credit and loans. Find out if there are cheaper forms of financing you can use.
Growth - As your business expands, ask yourself if you have plans in place to adapt your financing to accommodate your business's need for a larger staff, a second location, new technology, and other needs.
It’s great to have a financial expert on board because while you may have a good idea about where your business is standing financially, an expert will be able to paint a clearer picture of your year in review.
4. Analyze Your Company’s Annual Data
Take a look back at your company’s annual data and analyze it to identify any red flags or hard-to-track successes.
Create a system that works for your business or consider updating the one you currently use to make data-driven solutions that provide the best results.
To help you get started, review the following data:
Engagement levels - Whenever you send out promotional materials, it’s important to determine how many of your customers are clicking. You want to keep tabs on every campaign’s engagement levels and sales to see which internet marketing strategies in Miami were most effective in the past year. Use this to inform your marketing plans for the next year.
Location data - Find out where your sales and leads are coming from. This will give you insights into your demographics and general customer base for a more personalized marketing strategy.
Customer feedback - Get to know your customers and what they have to say about your products and services. It's one of the easiest ways to access actionable data. Create online or in-person surveys and tweak your offerings and service according to the feedback you receive. Showing that you listen to your customers and act upon their complaints and feedback is a great way to make them feel heard and important, and motivate them to continue providing feedback that will improve your business.
Visibility - Find out how your customers discovered you in the past year. Is it from a search engine search, personal referral, email, or a social media platform? Know what platforms and avenues guide customers to your business to help you redesign your internet marketing in Miami for the next year.
5. Study Your Target Market
At the end of every year, it’s important to study the market since it’s highly likely that a lot has changed since you’ve done an initial analysis.
Here are the different aspects of your target market that you want to study:
Customer needs - Your customers' needs, preferences, and wants to evolve. Find out how you can better support your customers' new pain points and provide them with a solution.
Economic changes - Focus on changes in your local economy since it has more impact on how your business performs. More job opportunities and the general increase in local wages can lead to positive effects on your business.
Competitor status - Has the number of competitors in your area increased? It's crucial to review where your business stands in comparison to your competitors. It gives you an idea of why consumers choose you over your competitors and vice versa. It also allows you to find ways how to stand out from your competitors and carve out a new competitive advantage.
End Your Year Strong and Take Your Business to The Next Level with Internet Marketing in Miami
If you're serious about growing your business, it's important to review your progress every year. Doing so will help you determine how well your business is performing, discover market opportunities, assess if your business plan is out of date if your business is moving in the right direction, if your company has become unresponsive to market demands, and set the direction to push your business forward.
At Digital Resource, our internet marketing experts in Miami and small business specialists will work with you to create a custom marketing plan that will help you get more customers online and grow your business.
Want to know the practical ways you can push your business forward? Contact us today! We can help.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
