Survey Reveals the New Year’s Resolutions of Entrepreneurs

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A popular practice before every New Year is making a list of resolutions. The purpose of this activity is to keep you focused and to remind you to aim higher and become a better and more successful individual. Entrepreneurs also have their own New Year’s resolutions. A new research outlines them and reveals many interesting information about the 2014 plans and strategies of SMBs.

According to j2 Business 2013 Year-End SMB Survey, some of the resolutions of business owners for the New Year are rather surprising. The leading one is not even directly connected with business. The majority of business owners want to improve their health or to exercise more (43%). The second most popular resolution which entrepreneurs will try to cover over the next one year is to be more open-minded towards new ideas (23%). Many of them also want to take a deep break and count to ten more often in 2014 (16%). A little over 4% of entrepreneurs will try to always be on time. Others aim lower by choosing to give up coffee as their New Year’s resolution.
The research also found that many businesses owners plan to introduce some changes. For instance, about 27% of them want to replace their fax machines with web fax services. Also, another 23% of them will try to change their office landline for virtual phone systems.

However, the biggest change for small and medium business is predicted to come from the growing popularity of cloud services. Almost 60% of business owners believe that cloud platforms will help them save money in 2014.

Despite the changes, some things remain the same. Emails continue to play an important role in business marketing campaigns. Around of 44% of all business owners will continue to rely on email marketing, as well as email automation tools.

Even though mobile device usage has greatly increased over the past one year, mobile marketing is expected to enjoy a share of only 14% in 2014. Social media marketing will continue to be popular among SMBs. Most of the companies either use social media platforms for marketing or plan to do that over the next one year.

In addition, SMBs have shared that their biggest marketing priority will be to increase their online presence (29%) and using email marketing (24%).

Although 2014 is expected to be a challenging one for small and medium business, some business owners will try to hire new talent. The main thing with which they will attract new employees is flexible work policy (36%), as well as by allowing casual attire at work (28%).

The survey shows that the concept of internship is starting to evolve. The majority of SMBs pay salaries to both their full-time and part-time interns. Still, almost 74% of small and medium business avoid hiring inters for one or another reason.

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