Plan For Success

What will your business look like six months or a year from now? Unless you plan for success, it will probably not look much different. In fact, it will likely take a turn for the worse. Why? Your competitors are planning for success. New businesses are planning for success.

Top Four Areas to Plan For Success

Marketing Plan

Not the actions, but the plan. How will you market your company to find new business? How will you expand your business with your current customers?

The days of ‘build it and they will come’ are long gone. Without a marketing plan to promote your business and your website, you will never gain any traction. Marketing plans and their execution take a lot of time and effort. If it was easy, everyone would do it. If you don’t have a marketing staff, find a good marketing company you can trust to help you. They will bring expertise and a perspective to help your business.

Review Your Products and Services

Take time to review your products and services. Is pricing appropriate? What trends are occurring in your market? Have competitors made any important changes?

Take time to talk to your sales people and your customer service reps. Ask them if your customers are asking for new or different products. Is there an ancillary product they need or currently get from someone else that you could offer?

Expanding your offering and selling more to your existing customers is 7 times less expensive than finding a new customer (source: ThinkJar). Take time to find this low hanging fruit. It will increase both your revenue but also strengthen your relationship with your customers. A true win/win.

Website Upgrades

Keeping your website updated and current is important for many reasons. They provide fixes for security problems and add new functionality. The server your website is hosted on is continuously updating. Third-party services keep updating their services and adding new features. These include shipping partners, plugins, fulfillment services, vendors and many more. If you do not keep up, one day a fatal error will break your site and it will simply stop working. This may sound extreme, but it has unfortunately happened.

Zen Cart – the current version is 1.5.7.b. It comes with better spam protection, admin page widgets, support for PHP 7.4 and a long list of bug fixes. See our blog post on Zen Cart  1.5.7 and the 1.5.7b update. If you are running Zen Cart 1.5.5 or older, you should budget for an upgrade this year. Plugins are rarely written or updated for older versions leaving you falling behind. When doing an upgrade, the bigger the jump between versions the more difficult, and expensive, the upgrade will be. This is another reason to keep up with the current versions as they come out. There is no official release schedule, but a good rule of thumb is to budget for one upgrade per year.

WordPress – updates to WordPress, plugins and themes come fast and furious. Each month, you can expect to have several updates due. Whether you do them, hire us or hire someone else, getting them done monthly will help prevent problems from happening. WordPress is the most popular website platform used on the internet. This makes it a very popular target for the hackers and why doing the updates is so important.

Big Commerce/Shopify – since these are SAAS (Software As A Service) the updates are done for you in the background. It’s one of the benefits of using a hosted solution.

While there is no immediate downside to not installing an upgrade or update but not doing them will sneak up on you. Things that once worked will stop working. The longer it’s been between upgrades, the more difficult it will be and the more likely you will run into problems. Read more about why updates are so necessary.

Lastly, not doing updates means you are running old, outdated software. Old software is one of the most common ways for a website to get hacked.

Write Down Your Goals

A plan without written goals is just pie in the sky thinking. Creating proper goals is the key to success. Goals that are written down are 42% more likely to be achieved than those not written down (Source: Dr. Gail Matthews, psychology professor at the Dominican University in California). When you do write down your goals, be sure they are SMART goals. We have a full blog post on SMART goals. Here is the short version:

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Assignable – specify who will do it.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

Conclusion

Running a website takes constant time and attention. If you let it sit, it will eventually die. A website than runs flawlessly gives you peace of mind in knowing it’s working hard doing it’s job 24/7/365. It can be your best employee. A Plan for Success is the first step, and a necessary step, in order to achieve success.

Contact us to learn how we can help you to be more successful.

* image used under license from Pixabay.