We’ve witnessed some great achievements in technology like triple camera iPhone, Tesla Cybertruck, 5G, etc. in 2019. But that was in the past. 2020 has now arrived, and it’s flooded with new resolutions. Everyone is taking a vow to fulfill their resolutions and so as the business owners.
So have you set your business resolutions for 2020?
Yes? Oh Great!. Go read further and cross-check them once.
No? Don’t worry we are discussing this ahead.
But first, you need to understand where these business resolutions will come from.
It requires a deep marketing and website data analysis of your previous year’s data. You analyze every single piece of data you collected last year, such as your revenue, conversion, user behavior, traffic and lots of other different things. On behalf of this data, you identify where you fell short and create a strategy to complete those targets in the coming year.
So, let’s get started!
Why do you really need to have business resolutions in 2020?
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To fix the mistakes you made last year
Perfection is the thing you can only chase, never achieve.
Unfortunately, that’s true. No one’s perfect, not me, not you. You must have committed some mistakes last year like doing everything on your own, not focusing on customer experience, showing ads on irrelevant websites, etc. And the resolutions you set for the new year will help you rectify those mistakes.
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To prepare a killer ROI roadmap
The business resolutions you set determine the next year’s goals of your brand. These resolutions will also have revenue-centric goals you want to achieve. Once you have those goals, you’ll be able to create a proper revenue or ROI roadmap to achieve those goals.
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To get the desired results
Business resolutions will help you achieve the aspired goals in the following year. However, you cannot set goals that are unreachable for you. To define achievable goals, you must analyze your previous year’s data. There is ROI, bounce rate, unique visitors, abandoned carts, and tons of other things you should analyze before setting your resolutions for the next year.
But there are many brands who did the same mistake of setting impossible goals in 2019. And failed to achieve them. Let’s look at some of those goals or resolutions and see where did they lack:
Resolutions you must have taken in 2019 to improve your business
Make most with PPC advertising
PPC or pay-per-click advertising is something that can bring a lot more traffic to your website in 2020. It can diminish your loss, increase conversion, and reduce cart abandonment. As per a Formstack report, PPC ads are the third-highest lead generator.
Have you leveraged PPC advertising in 2019? Maybe you’ve missed a few of these points that must’ve resisted you accomplishing your 2019 business resolutions.
Where did you lack in 2019?
Parked Domains: Parked Domains are those domains that are parked for future use and are not associated with any kind of service. Sometimes, Google displays your PPC ads on these domains too, which is a complete waste. Since these domains don’t get traffic, no one’s gonna click on the ads Google is displaying on these domains. Enable parked domains from Google Adsense setting to display your ads only on the active domains.
Frequency Capping: Frequency capping determines the number of times a visitor will see the ads you’re running in a certain period. Sometimes it can irritate users if they see an ad, again and again. Pay attention to your frequency capping and tweak it accordingly.
Placement Exclusion: Placement Exclusion enables you to exclude those websites or placements where ad your ads don’t work. Like if your ads are being displayed on a website with a different niche, it’ll be worthless. You can use placement exclusion to exclude those inappropriate websites.
Remarketing: Remarketing is a vital part of PPC advertising, but it won’t give you the aspired results if you don’t do it right. Depending on your products and your audience, change the duration of your remarketing audience.
Read Also: 7 Best Remarketing Strategies
Narrow Targeting: Everyone isn’t gonna buy your product. Narrow down your audience and target only those who are more likely to buy and convert instead of pitching everyone.
Be more SEO friendly
You can publish your content for a lifetime but will not get any traffic if you don’t optimize it for the search engines. And only optimizing for the search engine doesn’t work. You must do optimization to make your content rank first on Google because only 0.78% of the browsers click the results on the second page.
Common SEO points like using keywords, page load time, etc. are well known. Here are some deep points that you must have not focused on in the previous year and failed to rank high because of these.
Where did you lack in 2019?
Cannibalization: Cannibalization is a process where your website eats its own traffic. For instance, If your website contains few posts on similar topics, the better post will rank higher on SERPs and others will rank low. Hence, the good post will slay the chances of getting traffic from the low-ranking posts.
To avoid the bad effect of cannibalization, you can create a post where you can combine the content of the low and high-ranking posts and publish it. You can then delete the old, non-performing content so it cannot harm your website’s SEO.
Kill the zombie pages: Zombie pages are those pages that have no value and doesn’t perform at all. They hurt your website’s ranking and there’s no sense of keeping those pages on your site that doesn’t perform.
Delete those zombie pages or update their content so that Google can crawl it up on the result pages.
Nofollow: When you don’t want Google to crawl the page you’re linking in your content, you use “rel=nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag.
Identify when to use nofollow. There are many cases where people use nofollow at the page level, meaning all the links on the page are nofollow. Sometimes, people use nofollow on external or outbound links that redirect the user to another website.
Apparently, both practices are not wise. In a nutshell, you should not add nofollow attribute on your own website’s links. You can sometimes avoid adding nofollow links to authoritative websites since Google knows you’re still linking to them.
Content gap analysis: Content gap analysis involves the practice of identifying your content goals, target audience, analyzing competitors’ content for a specific keyword, and then prepare content to achieve the desired objectives.
Many businesses don’t do a content gap analysis before writing an article they want to be ranked for a specific keyword. Make sure you don’t forget to do content gap analysis when you’re preparing content.
Linking to HTTPS sites: Even I’ve done this mistake. We try to include stats and data in our blogs and sometimes we use stats that belong to a site that is not SSL certified. I recommend it to link your content only to https sites. Have you linked your content to a website that isn’t SSL certified? If yes, then remove or replace that link immediately.
Keyword linking: Keyword linking seems to be easy, but it is complicated. If we go deep in this, then I’d suggest you always link your content with a keyword you’re already ranking on. And link to a keyword that is describing the page reader will be redirected to. One more thing, don’t add a link of another content on the focus keyphrase of your post.
Google uses the linked text as an indicator of the title of the linked page. Yoast
Yoast has explained why you shouldn’t link to the focus keyphrase and the reason is valid. Try to avoid this.
Bing analysis: As per a 2017 report, bing accounted for 7.27% of the searches of all desktop searches globally. This looks less, but the good part is that Bing has less competition than Google. Thus, it’s easier to rank on Bing as compared to Google.
Make sure you perform a Bing analysis before picking up a keyword. Ranking high bing search results can get you a big number of traffic in 2020.
Understand Your Business Data
Your business collects tons of data in a year. And you must understand these figures and stats to achieve results you failed to achieve last year. However, this sounds too damn easy, but it’s actually not and only a proficient expert can deal with this.
There are plenty of minor yet crucial factors you can analyze your business data on to get coveted results in 2020. Maybe you didn’t focus on them in 2019, so I’m mentioning those so you can analyze them this year.
Where did you lack in 2019?
Top devices: Have you looked at the sessions coming on your website from different devices? This’ll look like a common thing but actually, it’s not. The sessions tell you what device your audience prefers to visit your website and when you know that, you can run your ads on those devices to target the audience.
Bounce rate: The bounce rate shows the percentage of those visitors who leave your site without interacting with it. Check the bounce rate of your site now. If it is somewhere between 40 to 55% (but may vary depending on various other factors), it’s fine. If it is going above than that, identify what pages have more bounce rate and then update those pages as per the user’s behavior.
Traffic source: Are you tracking your website’s traffic source? It shows the platforms your website is getting traffic from. If users on your site are coming from Twitter, it means your Twitter campaigns are working. If your LinkedIn marketing campaigns aren’t performing well, you have a scope of improvement there.
Segments: Segments are important in fetching various kinds of user data. You can use filters to retrieve different segments of customers. For instance, you can identify what users are coming on your site by clicking on ads, or by reading your blogs, what users are spending the most time on your site, etc. You’ll be unaware of your users’ behavior if you don’t use segments.
User behavior: Are you tracking your users’ behavior? By analyzing user behavior with Google Analytics, you can track the data like New vs Returning users, duration of sessions and pageviews. This gives you the idea, how your customers are interacting on your website and make improvements as per it.
Improve Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social Media Marketing can play a protagonist in your business’s growth in 2020. 54% of users use social media to search for products they can buy. And 91% of businesses in the United States leverage social media marketing.
Perhaps you’re using it for your business too. But if you didn’t get the desired results from it in 2019, here are some points where you must have fallen short.
Where did you lack in 2019?
Posting Time: This is crucial for your social media marketing. If you’re promoting your brand, pay attention to the time you’re posting. I have some data for the perfect time to post on social media, but it will be worthless. Since every country has a different time zone, the perfect posting time will be different for your brand.
Analyze what time your audience is interacting with your brand the most and make posts on social media to get the most engagement. However, experiment with your posting time.
Posting Frequency: Every platform has a different way of interacting with the audience, hence, posting less or loads of posts will not come up to your efforts. On Facebook, you can post 1 and a maximum of 2 posts a day. You can post 10-15 posts on Twitter a day. 5-10 posts are enough for Pinterest. 1 post for LinkedIn is more than enough whereas 2 posts for Instagram are fine.
Hashtag Usage: This depends on the platforms you’re posting. On Instagram, you can use a bunch of hashtags (approx. 8-10) but on Twitter, this number is reduced. You should try to avoid using over 2 hashtags on Twitter, otherwise, your posts will look unprofessional. And using less popular but niche-focusing hashtags will deliver your message to the right audience instead of a trending hashtag everyone is using to tweet.
LinkedIn: You must publish guest posts and articles on the LinkedIn pulse. It can drive traffic towards your site.
Types of posts: Many brands don’t try different things because of the sake of their formal image or tone? You must be publishing many posts but the audience will like, share, retweet, or react only on the posts they’ll find engaging. You can post polls, memes, live videos, etc. to drive more engagement on your posts.
Provide Best Customer Experience
Customer experience is a delicate and crucial part of every business. Since customers always expect the best from the brand and every customer has different interests and needs, pleasing every customer is a tough cookie.
Despite being a hard job, you still can provide a great customer experience in 2020 to your customers. But these are some minor details you must’ve missed and because of it, failed to serve your customers well.
Where did you lack in 2019?
Shipping: What makes customers abandon a website or cart the most is the shipping charges. A few days back, I too abandoned the cart after adding a shirt to it just because the shipping was one-fourth of the product.
Are you also charging a lot for shipping? If yes, then play cleverly here. You can include the shipping or taxes in the product itself. This makes the customers think you’re not charging additional money and make them buy the products, hence resulting in a great customer experience.
Discounts: Customers are fastidious and even a minor reason can turn a good experience into a bad one. You should try to give discounts cleverly. If your customers have purchased a product from your store with the original amount. And you’re now providing a huge discount on that product will cause a bad experience for those who paid a high value for that product. Place your discount offers sensibly.
Checkout Registration: Customers need a seamless, fast, and hassle-free checkout process. They don’t even want to provide too much info to buy products. You can facilitate them to shop as guest users. This can enhance the customer experience since their buying journey will be much smoother without even registering on your site.
Easily Accessible Support: Customer Support is something that everyone needs whether he’s your customer of just a user who’s looking to buy something. By easily accessible support, I mean to providing your contact info on your site in such a way they don’t have to look for it.
You can place your support email and freephone number in the header of your website so visitors easily get it.
Payment Methods: Different users have different preferences and customers prefer various methods to pay. Your website should be compatible with various payment methods so the customers don’t abandon your site just because their preferred payment method isn’t supported.
Before moving further, here are some additional tips you can try that have worked for us.
What worked for us?
Apart from the above tips, here are some extra tips that helped MakeWebBetter to grow. You can also try this in your business and if they work, you can tell us in the comment section.
Ad Creatives: We analyzed and found that the content in the ads that convert most is the problem-solving content. If you’re running ads, you can also try to write a problem-solving content for your ads to convert more users. Also, don’t use the same ad copy or the same content for a long time.
CTA Placement: It may feel like an insignificant factor but can be crucial. Placing CTAs at the right position can help you in lead generation. Add your CTAs on your posts or pages so they don’t interrupt the visitors’ reading flow and also prompt them to fill their contact info in it. This worked for us and you can also try it.
Landing Page Content: We viewed the heatmaps of our landing pages and found that the content written on it is confusing the visitors. So we updated the content of the pages, which resulted in an increase in pageviews of those pages.
Resources you need to fulfill your business resolutions in 2020
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An expertise in everything
Your business resolutions need some technical support and help to be fulfilled. And only an expert can provide you that. Hire people who have expertise in their fields who can catch the details and fix it so that everything works well.
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Plenty of time, and you don’t have enough of it
The data and facts you analyzed last year and created your next year’s resolutions on behalf of that needs enough time to be achieved. This identifies every single mistake and rectification of it. Hence, you must give lots of hours if you need to fulfill your goals.
but even if you have time and experts
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The analytical headache is unbearable…
This is a game of analytics. You analyze your previous data and set goals based on it. And then run campaigns to meet those goals and analyze their performance simultaneously.
This is not cushy. There are hundreds of different factors you have to analyze with Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc. I have seen many of our clients have told us they tried to analyze their business data deeply but gave up to some extent. This shows that understanding data with Google Analytics is not everyone’s cup of tea.
What I want to say is that an analytics expert or a team of it will be capable of doing this with no hassle. Consult Google Analytics experts if you want to identify the mistakes
with the help of your brand’s data.
How MakeWebBetter will help you accomplish your 2020 resolutions
Holidays are about to start and our clients don’t want any interruption between their ‘fun-packed family time’. They ask us to help them in setting kick-off business and marketing goals for 2020 and we do exactly what they want.
Our data-driven approach suggests businesses what steps they should take to reach their goals. We analyze every single aspect of your business like SEO, Content, performance, etc. and then provide you with the most suitable advice for your business.
The customized reports on marketing suggestions bear your business context that makes our clients happy.
Coming to the end
Resolutions make you and your employees work with dedication and direction to achieve something. It’s not something you should set and forget. It is something you should set, chase, and achieve. And if something can help you move closer to your target, leverage it.
The above tips can make you reach your business resolutions in 2020. Don’t miss the chance to leverage them if you want to be successful this year. Basically, this article results from our research and experience. Hope that will make your new year.
Still, need help to find your business resolution for 2020? Write to us below!