What Goals Should You Set for 2021?
A mom and a daughter enjoyed their weekly powwows over Zoom to “talk business.” (That’s not a euphemism for their underground crime business, by the way.) With just one in-person visit a year, they made a point to connect often via these virtual reunions.
The mom had worked for years for a toy manufacturer where she quickly climbed the ranks to the head of sales. She loved the joy her brand’s best toys could bring children, and she took pride in helping the company look strategically to the future.
What she never could have strategized for was the impact of the 2020 pandemic on her brick-and-mortar sales. She quickly steered the company to ecommerce, but things hadn’t exactly taken off.
The daughter, for her part, had enjoyed success with her own digital marketing business. Even before the pandemic, income had grown 50% year-over-year since she started the firm. Then, once the pandemic struck, growth had accelerated as brands like her mother’s scrambled to get a foothold online.
The two had their weekly powwow so that the daughter could act as a sounding board for the mother. It was fun for both of them, especially with the criss-cross relevance of their expertise.
On one of their calls, they talked about their goals for 2021. It was the way the conversation panned out that surprised them.
Here’s what this mom and daughter learned about goals
It was the mother who brought it up, sharing a list of goals she’d crafted for the new year. She wanted to rank the company’s best Amazon listings on Google, double referral traffic to the marketplace storefronts, and work improved SEO strategy into the brand’s online content.
The daughter’s goals, on the other hand, were all personal: up her running mileage, run a sub-3:10 marathon, take more trips, better manage her stress.
They noticed the divide immediately. Mom’s goals were purely business, as though her legacy at the company were at dire risk. The only thing that merited her attention was what lasting impact she would leave—and right now, that impact appeared to be broken processes, a failed venture to ecommerce, and a library of spreadsheets with endless lines of product data in disarray.
The daughter, on the other hand, had no work goals. She was happy letting business “do its thing” while she focused on improving herself.
"It's because your business is secure enough that you aren't worried about it," the mother joked.
The two decided that some people are prone to think of personal goals first, while others focus on business and work goals. That’s fine in the grand scheme of things, but if we’re looking at 2021 with a certain “20/20 perspective,” it’s wise for us to take it all into account.
Keep reading as we break down the goals we believe are most important for brands this year considering the state of the world—and, in particular, ecommerce.
1. Show up early
This one is a business goal and a personal one at once. In all things in life, show up early.
Before you cringe, it really doesn’t have to be THAT early to make a difference. Just be sure to be an early adopter in business as well as someone who shows up a few minutes ahead of every appointment. (Last time we checked, airports weren’t very forgiving about arriving late to the ticket counter.)
In ecommerce, if there’s a new channel to sell on, show up early. If you get there before the competition and get your products listed, you can dominate the space. Other brands will have a hard time matching your footprint. This early-adopter technique does mean you’ll need a fast way to optimize product data and get it loaded to the new marketplace or platform, but that’s what a PIM was designed to do.
2. Do your homework
If you haven’t dug deep into analytics (on your site, your marketplace listings, your ecommerce storefront, your social media), you’re past due. Make it your goal this year to get savvy in all the above (which includes knowing what to do with those numbers, too).
Interestingly, we still look at the ecommerce industry and see loads of opportunities missed with data that isn’t getting analyzed by brands. The State of Ecommerce Report for 2021 found that 56% of ecommerce professionals are allocating funds to data and analytics, which makes it the number-one ecommerce service that brands are budgeting for…but we want to know about the other 44%! That’s a lot of brands doing little to nothing with available data.
To optimize anything, you need numbers. In ecommerce, specifically, brands have more access than ever to numbers that can point them toward turbo-powering their sales.
“Doing your homework” doesn’t stop at analytics, either. Just look at how augmented reality (AR) and social selling are changing consumer expectations today.
What are you going to do about it?
The first step in any 2021 strategy is to do your homework. Read. Test something. Mess up. Fix it. When you proverbially hand your homework in, it just might be in the form of a 2021 business review depicting your legacy in clever business decisions and unprecedented success.
3. Manage your time
If you’re going to be doing ambitious things like “showing up early” to new marketplaces and adding new homework to your to-do list, you need to find ways to better manage your time.
Maybe you’re part of the 22.5% of the population who’s already got time management pretty well down, or has so little to do that they just don’t worry about it.
That 22.5%, by the way, is the percent of the country made up by kids 16 and under.
For the rest of us, time management is a beast. We do our best, and most of us work off checklists to keep track of it all. Things always take longer than expected, however, and unexpected tasks are always piled on top of it.
If you’re running around at work stressing about fulfillment, marketing, product development and your bigger business strategy, there is a better way to get through each day. The first step in managing your time is saving it wherever you can. Then those essential, just-gotta-be-done tasks are batched and improved accordingly. Using tools designed to save you time on these is a big deal for stuff like managing your product data (yes, we’re talking about a PIM again.)
4. Get organized
This is the goal that makes all other goals possible. If you get to the game early on a selling channel, for instance, it will be the direct result of getting organized efficiently and with specific goals in sight.
You probably have some of these tools at your fingertips already to do just that:
- Your CRM
- Your PLM
- Your ERP
- Your PIM
Acronym soup makes our point abundantly clear: there are solutions designed to keep things organized for you, so you don’t reinvent the wheel in spreadsheets. Take a CRM. All the lead tracking, task assigning and sales monitoring you can do there has taken commerce to a new level. One of these solutions integrated with your ecommerce product listings is a combination as powerful as New York’s fireworks shows on the fourth of July, and just as beautiful.
By the way, if you’re selling products on multiple marketplaces, that requires a whole new level of organization to reach your sales goals. Your product listings will need different optimizations on Amazon than they do on Wayfair or Wal-Mart based on each product page structure, search algorithm and more. You’ll want to know how to choose the right marketplace for your products, but also recognize that you’ll be better positioned for today’s market if you sell with a multi-marketplace approach.
Getting organized means you’ll oil the cogs of interdepartmental collaborations, too. You don’t have the time to play the middleman or crack the whip every time multiple departments have to work together. If you get organized with these cloud-based software solutions, you won’t have to play that middleman part anymore.
5. Reduce returns
Returns are a natural part of selling products. In ecommerce, they’re an even bigger consideration, with about three times the number of returns from online purchases as compared with in-store purchases. One of the biggest reasons for this spike is that consumers aren’t able to try pieces on or touch and test them before buying.
The returns trend has a big impact on every industry and results in around one trillion dollars in costs to sellers, manufacturers, brands and merchants each year.
One of your 2021 goals can be to reduce the impact of returns on your business.
It’s best to tackle this one through an improved buyer journey. For starters, it’s not just the bottom line that returns impact—it also damages your brand with disappointing customer experiences. Optimize how you display each product with more product media (photos and video) and better-optimize your product data, and you’ll do several things to combat this:
- Give buyers an experience as close as possible to the tactile one they’d have in-store
- Highlight your products over the competition
- Improve your brand image
- Improve your SEO (so the buyers who really want your product find it and those looking for something else don’t mistakenly consider yours)
By adjusting your buyer journey on the front-end, you’re able to minimize the negative impact on the tail end of the customer experience. Returns often come as the result of poor or incomplete product data because the descriptions, sizing variations, images and videos are ultimately all a buyer has to go off of when shopping online.
6. Update your SEO
Speaking of SEO, the one thing all businesses have in common in ecommerce is that they must be findable.
Findability is described as whether (or not) consumers can find you. If you sell photo albums for scrapbooking, anyone typing in “scrapbooking materials” should be able to easily find your listings. Part of SEO, however, is ensuring that you strategize your keywords based on all likely intentions behind them. For example, you wouldn’t want to show up for a search like “photo collage,” because most users will be looking for a digital collage builder instead of a scrapbook.
The other part of SEO to be extra strategic about in 2021 is that of “discovery search.” Yes, you want to set up your website and product descriptions with intention-based keywords. However, you also want to think about users searching for ideas and inspiration before they even know that it’s your product they’re looking for. Returning to scrapbooking, useful search strings could include “family memorabilia ideas” and similar.
When it comes to SEO goals, be sure you plan them for a year or less. By the time you assess your performance against those goals, it will be time to set new ones because SEO is constantly evolving. There’s also the reality that you’ll be optimizing content for different channels, so your strategy has to be platform-specific. (Hot tip for 2021: consumers are increasingly using social media platforms for inspiration and discovery search, so focus your SEO goals there on the more open-ended search strings.)
Now that you’ve done some soul-searching on your goals for 2021, it’s time to prioritize, enlist others, delegate and get things moving. Reaching your goals is a whole other conversation for another day, but to get started, you can share your goals with collaborators and staff to get every player on the field fired up. That will add accountability and help you build momentum, too.
After sharing your goals, monitor your progress based on thoughtfully-picked KPIs. Otherwise, you’ll never know where to readjust the course, and you’ll be left scratching your head at the end of the year as to whether you met goals.
Give yourself the satisfaction of well-crafted goals, and you’ll have double the satisfaction when you meet them.
Alex Borzo
Writer at Amber Engine
A brand can only communicate with messaging behind it, and that's where Alex Borzo comes in. A digital content marketer with a decade of experience, Alex's expertise shines in the research and writing she does for dozens of clients. When she connected with Amber Engine, it was a natural fit—AE had ambitious plans to provide their audience with even more valuable content to win in ecommerce, and Alex's background working with SaaS innovators positioned her to jump right in. The result? Brands and distributors are now discovering AE and all the best tactics to get to Amazon and other online marketplaces in weeks instead of months.