The trial period of 2025 is almost up and February is the time to actually start making some changes and honoring your New Year’s resolutions. For many people, especially entrepreneurs, these resolutions include a business aspect, too. This means it is time to start cracking, and here are some places where you can start.
Start from appearances
Every change starts on the surface. Just think of yourself and every time you wanted to change something about your life. We usually start from physical appearance. Coloring our hair is the best and clearest sign we wish to make a change. Plus, it is easy to do. It is not that we feel that hair color would make a change, but it can motivate a series of other changes.
It is similar with businesses. Changing your UI is not going to make some essential impact, but it is enough to trigger other changes and motivate new users to explore your website. It is a great place to start, whether you are doing it in house or hiring professionals. Outsourcing experts is a great option if your industry is very specific, such as oil and gas web design. In such cases, it may be better to look for ideas in more experienced sources. Of course, if you yourself are a web design enthusiast or have experts among your team, it only makes sense to do it in house. Either way, you will be on the quest to making some inspiring changes in your business.
Make noise in your marketing department
Now that you have a fancy new UI, it is time to spread the word. Have your marketing department diligently commit to advertising your business. Once you are able to reach a new audience, it is bound to give results by expanding the number of your clients. People will love the new UI and it will make them dig deeper to see what they can find.
As far as finding the way to reach a new audience goes, there are many ways to do it. Books and courses are there to guide you if you do not have your own marketing people. Educating your employees is always a good idea and if some of them are free, the main suggestion would be to take several and pay them a course and/or buy instructional books. On the other hand, if you are short on staff and lack the marketing expertise, wait until you make all improvements that you planned and hire an external marketing agency. It will cost more, but it definitely will spare you several serious headaches.
Work on automation
In order to maximize productivity, it is vital to automate anything you can. Not only it will save you from doing boring and repetitive tasks, but it will also leave you free time to do something more creative. So, what can you automate? Anything that has some sort of a pattern, for instance, many types of emails can be automated. Order confirmations, order tracking updates and thank you emails are the first thing you should automate. You could also automate some discount offers, create a rule that after every five orders, the user gets a ten percent discount, you would need a counter and each time it hits a number of orders that is divisible by five, you have the system send the discount email. This is the best application as it wastes a lot of time and does not require any creative effort.
Chat bots are another great example of automation. It is a way to automate your FAQ section, as well as free up your phone and email support systems.
Short and sweet is the way to go
If you are thinking about revising your content, it’s a challenging task, but it is also necessary from time to time. Many websites cannot withstand the time flow. If it has been a while since you revisited your written content, it is high time you did it now. Therefore, you would need to go through all the content which can be quite overwhelming. Luckily, there are a few simple rules to follow that should be enough to guide ou through the while process.
The trick is to keep it as short as possible. Nobody likes to read essays on the website of their preferred business. Short and to the point is the way to go. Use paragraphs and white spaces, they make it easier to organize your content and your readers will find it much more convenient to navigate. Moreover, the smaller the text, the more pleasant the page is to the human eye. If you feel a text is too long, you can also opt for a visual instructive manual. It can be an algorithmic image or an instructional video that is quite short, preferably less than two minutes.
Open up to using tools
Business tools are there to help us. There is no point in resisting it. If used smartly, they can be a great help. There is no reason to fear progress. The sooner you accept new things, the better your business will be doing. ChatGPT will probably not replace humans any time soon. It certainly can replace certain tasks and part of work that are not that interesting, but generally, there is no reason to fear it. Once you incorporate business tools into your work day, you will find it easier to function and your job will probably also become more fun as you would be spared of many tedious tasks.
in the end, any new thing you incorporate into your business should trigger other new things. It is an exciting time to be alive and run an online business. So, stay curious and inspired, get ideas and boldly work on them. As long as there is a will, there will be a way. If your spirits are high, there is nothing stopping you. Success will follow anyone brave enough to try and stay persistent.
