Disclaimer: We may serve as an affiliate for some of these products or services on this website. As an affiliate partner, we might profit from your purchases from third-party websites, however, we do not charge you extra in the process. Read my Disclaimer Policy here.

When you start a business, you are faced with so many aspects ranging from social media marketing to blogging to gaining a profit.

When I started my blog over the last year and grew my confidence to grow my freelance business, I knew I had some goals that I was interested in meeting. Some of my small business goals expanded over a year-long process. Some of my business goals had no time limits.

I started with my goal for my blog. I wanted to improve my daily and monthly viewership of my blog but I soon realized I had nothing to measure my improvement.

I soon realized my goals were unattainable if I didn’t have any attainable, reachable goals.

The great part about learning about how to start a blog is that many people are trying to achieve the same goal. Joining a few Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, and connecting with a few email lists allowed me to have multiple perspectives on how to reach multiple goals I set for my business in its first year.

With the new year approaching, it’s a perfect time to find tips that work for reaching your small business start-up goals. As a new business owner, you can set your focus on as many goals as you want for 2020 and new goals each year after.

Not only is the new year great to set-up new small business goals, but it’s also a great time to reassess your business start-up’s goals.

Improve Client Retention

There are many ways business owners can improve their client retention rates.

Client retention can also mean many things. At the heart of this small business goal, you want your clients to remain with your business, rather than finding a reason to go with another business.

To start with this goal, you might start assessing your current clients. By seeing what is retaining and pushing away your clients to your business, you know how to proceed.

Some common ways to lose clients are:

• Being too expensive

• Bad customer service experience

• Bad product or service experience

Find out how your small business is lacking so you can improve your small business’ client retention.

Clarify your target audience

I tend to prioritize my small business services towards my target audience as well as create market strategies catered to their needs and wants.

When you clarify and improve your target audience, you both improve your marketing strategies as well as your SEO. Your keyword optimization will help attract your ideal clients to your website and digital marketing efforts.

Creating a goal to clarify your target audience can be measured in many different ways. By clarifying your business start-up’s target audience, you can manage your success by readership on your website, social media interaction, or client retention.

By defining and staying within your small business’ target audience, you will be able to predict and reliably create new products and services for your business start-up. While not always a success, your target audience will be one of the best predictors of your business’ services and products.

Audience Engagement Ideas

Audience engagement can be the same, but also different, from improving client retention. Audience engagement can mean several things depending on your focus.

Audience engagement can usually be seen when talking about blogging and websites. Most business owners and entrepreneurs want to engage their audience when their target audience visits their website, engages with their social media, and engagement with marketing materials.

If you are wanting to increase your audience engagement, you should focus on a percentage or number to identify your small business start-up goals.

You should also clearly identify where or how you can acquire your audience engagement. It can be from a variety or multiple avenues like social media likes, website comments, email list retention, or marketing for new clients.

Sometimes audience engagement can be synonymous with client retention. If your small business goal is to acquire clients, audience engagement could revolve around acquiring free consultations for creating new clients.

Social Media Marketing Goals

For a new start-up small business, social media can be an easy way to acquire clients and your target audience.

Easy ways to achieve this small business start-up goal is to set your sights on a certain number of likes, comments, or impressions for any of your social media channels. Here are some of my favorite engagements from various social media platforms:

• Comments on your Facebook or Instagram posts

• Increase your Facebook group members

• More retweets from your Twitter followers

• More link clicks on your Pinterest pins

• Consistently posting or posting more throughout the week to any social media platform

Social media marketing goals are easy and definable to reach. They might take some more forethought into reaching and achieving but they tend to be fairly easy in creating and ways to reach them are abundant when looking for tips and ideas to achieve them.

Create an Email Marketing Strategy

It’s predicted that you gain about $40 more when clients open an email from instilling offers, products, and services into email marketing strategies.

While email marketing strategies have been known to go extinct, they have also been proven to be profitable and helpful to many businesses. Many members of Generation Z and Millenials have been known to revolve around emails due to their work and school. It’s a fair bet those demographics will rely heavily on small business’ emails marketing strategies to keep them informed of various business start-up’s plans and offers.

Starting with a weekly email about your plans this week, recommended reading material, or your thoughts on practices within your niche are great starting points for your email marketing strategy.

If you can’t manage a weekly email, start smaller. Creating a consistent and thorough email marketing strategy is better than not having one at all. I’d start with Mailchimp if you’re new with email marketing. Its free plan gives you a few templates to work with and your first 2,000 list subscribers are free.

How to Increase Profit Margins

Profit Margins can be tricky. I’ve come to realize you tend to have to put money in before you can get money out of your small business. Free will only get you so much assistance.

While starting your small business start-up with free or cheaper tools, sometimes it’s time or worth the extra investment. You might be expanding quicker so you need more help or you might need to upgrade your email marketing platform due to more subscribers. No matter the reason, free comes at a cost eventually.

Every small business wants to improve profits or acquire more sales. In my experience, increasing your sales to paying for expenses is usually a timing issue than anything.

If you’re able, try making sure you are putting in less than what you get out. Try not to over exceed your profits by overspending for some class or investment. I tend to wait a few months before buying anything, especially if the service or product I’m buying is more expensive than a predetermined threshold.

Some of my next steps for my small business start-up will be installing Tailwind, Hootsuite, or Mailchimp upgrades.

Outsourcing Business Services

When I started my small business, I quickly found out that I do not enjoy social media. I stick with one or two platforms and even then have inconsistent results.

If I could grow my business start-up more, this would be one of the first services I would outsource to another company, agency, or freelancer. There are many others that other small businesses might outsource if they had the chance.

Many small business start-ups are looking for individuals to take care of various tasks concerning their small businesses. If you want to offer a service to a small business you might consider offering some of the following to build your own small business:

• Email Marking Strategy

• Social Media Management

• Graphic Design Products

• Copy-writing or blogging services

• SEO writing services

• Accounting or Book-keeping

• Sales and client acquisition

There are many services you can outsource for your small business especially if you don’t know or don’t enjoy the service yourself.

If you want additional tips and goals for the new year for your small business start-up, join my e-newsletter for advice on email marketing strategies, marketing products, previews of additional content concerning Creatively Working!