3 New Year’s Resolutions for Your Small Business

3 New Year’s Resolutions for Your Small Business

As January 1 approaches, now is the time to get everything from the next budget to taxes in order, and companies around the world are setting goals for 2016. Add these three resolutions to your financial goals for a bright and prosperous new year.

Follow a Content Marketing Plan

Modern marketing, when done effectively, is completely organic. Social media is now the prime landscape for marketing, becoming more popular than conventional forms of paid advertising — especially for small businesses. But with this new opportunity to reach a wide audience comes new challenges:

• It has to be authentic. Followers won’t engage if they feel like they’re being “sold to.”
• It can’t be bought. Followers very rarely engage with any sort of sponsored content on social media.
• It has to always be fresh and new. Social media is constantly updated second-by-second, and companies who want to stay on top cannot fall behind current trends.

A content marketing plan is essentially an editorial calendar which specifies what content you will post to which social channels. A 2014 study by the Content Marketing Institute found that 93 percent of marketers use an editorial calendar and that number is growing closer to 100 percent in 2015. Create a plan, but more importantly, follow that plan in 2016.

Reconsider Company Technology

Call this an early New Year’s resolution, because any technology you upgrade in 2015 is possibly tax deductible on next year’s taxes. Not every upgrade is a major system overhaul and even the smallest additions could be major investments towards your company’s future. Take your new content marketing plan, for example. It could take a team of people to manage content for a handful of social media channels, or you could hire one person and sign up for a Hootsuite account, which will do most of the dirty work for you.

Even the items around the office that seem like basic housekeeping can save you thousands. Businesses that operate in a safe, low-crime area of town might not consider security cameras for safety purposes, but companies like grocery stores and retailers are now using them to watch foot traffic and better arrange products for sales.

Reinvest In Your Employees

How happy are your employees? Just because the business is running smoothly doesn’t mean the people making it happen are satisfied with their jobs. Employee happiness is crucial to company success and longevity, and it’s better to be proactive rather than reactive. Assuming your business doesn’t face any major issues that could negatively affect employee happiness, here are some easy ways to improve morale (and ultimately productivity) around the office:

• Give employees ownership over more flexible work hours, locations, and even work styles.
• Off commuter assistance with reimbursement for carpooling, public transportation, and biking.
• Better project management software (see “Reconsider Company Technology”) to ease the stress of deadlines.
• Host more social functions so employees can get to know each other outside the office.
• Promote better health outside the standard benefits provided; host a health fair to better education employees and keep them healthy.
• Prevent routines by giving employees the chance to break up the day to prevent stagnation.