Reflection is vital in every business. You can’t turn your back on the past, you have to face it and assess your company. At the start of every year, it’s worth looking back over the last twelve months and seeing how things differ now compared to this time in 2019.
This type of reflection gives a good indication of how far your business has come. Ideally, you realise that you’ve grown so much. Even if you haven’t – and things are worse – then it’s still important. This gives you a chance to look back at what went wrong and how it can be improved.
Assessing business performance sounds like a monumental task. By all means, it does require a lot of work. However, you’re lucky in that there are so many ways you can measure your performance. Not only that, but it’s fairly easy to get your hands on the data you need.
So, here’s what you can do:
Check your website statistics
We’ll begin with a crucial area of your business; the website. A website can indicate performance improvements or failures by showing you stats about traffic, leads, bounce rate, and so on.
It’s not too difficult to find all of this, you should already have some sort of website analytics software that you look at when planning marketing tactics. Take a look at the last twelve months and compare where you are now to back then. If you find that every statistic has improved, then that’s awesome. It shows your SEO & marketing strategy is on point as you’re gaining traffic, people are clicking on links, you’re generating leads, and so on.
If things are wrong, then don’t fret. It’s common for websites to go through highs and lows. In this scenario, you need to assess your approach. Digital agencies like Boutique Digital Media offer SEO audits specifically for instances like this. An audit shows you where you’re going wrong and how you can improve. Now, you can implement changes, then check back in a few months to assess how things are.
Look at customer satisfaction
One thing you should do every year is send out a customer satisfaction survey. Try and get this to as many of your customers as possible. The easiest approach is via email, but you could also create a survey online. Then, you could post a link to it on social media/your website, getting your customers to fill it in. Add an incentive to get people to complete it – like a discount code for their next purchase.
The idea is that you get a sense of what your customers feel about your business. Are they happy with your service? What can you improve? How would they rate you out of ten? If you sent one of these out last year, then you have something to compare this one to. If the satisfaction rates have increased, then you know you’re on track.
Again, if things haven’t improved – or they’ve got worse – then look for the positives. Go through the results and see what people disliked and liked about your company. You’ll soon find things that keep cropping up over and over again. As such, you know what to change to improve customer satisfaction.
Look at your finances
While the two previous ideas will show you how your business has grown, you can’t really measure success without looking at money. After all, the whole purpose of a business is to make as much money as possible.
Therefore, you should check your finances at the start of the year. Look at how much money is coming into your business, and how much is leaving. You could view your sales figures, but this doesn’t always indicate success. For example, you may have sold more products/services, but didn’t make more money. How? Because it cost more money to create those products, or they weren’t that valuable. By contrast, you may make fewer sales than last year but generate more revenue because you boosted prices or created new products that were worth more money.
Inevitably, viewing your financial statements is the best approach. You can clearly see where your money is coming and going. If you’re making less money than last your – or generating a loss – then things have to change. Survey your outgoings and work on reducing your expenditure. Look at the money coming in and figure out how you can get more of it.
It can take a while to do all of this, and you may want to look at other things as well. For me, the most critical performance indicators are these three.
- Please note that this post has been written by an outside source – See Disclosure Policy
