Whether or not you hit your goals for 2018, you want to think about how to move forward in 2019. Going into the New Year will open up plenty of new opportunities. However, you want to look at all your options carefully and use the right strategy to take your online business to the next level. Here are some of the things that you will want to do to ensure that 2019 will mean great things for your online business.
1. Upgrade to a Better Hosting Plan and Provider
If you’ve been relying on shared hosting, it might be finally time to upgrade to a better plan. A better plan translates to faster performance on your website. Faster performance means a better user experience, higher conversion rates, and more profits. If your web host is lacking, then you might have to transfer your website to a host that can deliver a better service. It can be a technical process to transfer your website, so you may want to go with a quality service provider that can help you through it.
2. Scale Your Advertising Campaigns
If you’ve been dabbling in some online advertising for your business and want to see some serious growth in 2019, you need to scale your advertising options. This means that if you’re spending $500 a week on Facebook ads, you want to bump it up to $1000. If you feel like you’re reaching as much of your target audience as possible on a network, you want to expand to another network. If you’re doing well on Facebook Ads, invest into Google Ads. If you’re doing well with Google Ads, try Pinterest and maybe even native advertising.
3. Get Serious About Your Data
To grow your business, you have to go beyond your traffic, conversion rate and sales/profit numbers. You want to think about the long term and figure out the value of a customer for a 3-month, 6-month and annual period. You want to segment your audience and find out how to promote to each group for increased sales. Go deeper into the sales process and study sales attribution. What factors play the biggest role when it comes to getting your prospects to make the purchase? You’ll quickly learn that the traffic to sales perspective is very limited in terms of helping you see better results.
4. Invest in a Better Marketing Automation Platform
A major part of being able to collect in-depth data, track user behavior, and hyper targeted campaigns is working on a high quality marketing automation platform. For example, an advanced marketing automation platform will allow you to build a sales attribution model and track every single action a prospect or customer takes. It will also allow you to set automation rules based on user behavior, allowing for campaigns that are dynamic.
5. Create Higher Quality Content and More Of It
It’s becoming more evident how powerful content marketing is. Many businesses are building powerful brands, communities, and relationships by consistently publishing high quality content. This trend is only going to continue. The biggest brands will soon be the ones that publish the best content and do a great job engaging their target audience. If you’ve published some decent content already or have published great content but haven’t been consistent, 2019 should be the year where you start to get serious about content creation and content marketing.
6. Build a Team and a System to Run Your Business
If you’ve been a one-man show for quite some time, it’s time to start building a team around you as build your online business. Start by finding freelancers you can rely on. When you have enough revenue to hire somebody part time or full time, you’ll want somebody that can take a vital position in your business. You’ll also want to systemize your business for efficiency. You want your team of employees and freelancers to communicate and collaborate together without having to rely on you all the time. This will give you more time and energy to focus on growing your business rather than working “in” your business.
7. Put More Focus on Customer Satisfaction
Too many businesses these days are overlooking the importance of customer satisfaction. You want to take some time and evaluate the quality of your customer support to see if it’s at a high standard. Then you want to look at how you can improve the customer experience. Can you add more value to customers? Can you improve upon your product or service? Can you better serve your customers needs and solve more of their problems? You may even want to build a customer loyalty program, especially if you have a large product line.
8. Expand Your Business Horizontally
Every online business owner is aware of the options they have when it comes to expanding their business vertically. But too many business owners don’t think about expanding horizontally. For example, if you’re doing well with a product or service, maybe you think about expanding into new audiences you haven’t targeted before. Maybe you should create new products or services related but not directly tied to your existing offerings. Sometimes expanding your business horizontally may prove to be far more lucrative than expanding vertically.
9. Educate Yourself with Other Channels and Expand Slowly
Constantly educating yourself about other channels and expanding your activity into new channels is vital to growth. For instance, if you’re already heavily invested in social media but not into SEO, it might be time to start experimenting with SEO in 2019. When expanding into new channels, it’s advised that you move slowly. You want to get a sense of how to make each channel works and integrate it with what you’re already doing before you invest a large amount of money.
These are just some of the strategies you can use to take your online business to a whole new level in 2019. As you head into the New Year, you’ll want to reflect on how the year went. Take a look at the things that have worked and not worked. Try to find a correlation into what has worked with some of the strategies discussed here. This may give you better insight into what to pursue in 2019.
