Mid-Year Review
Half the year has passed, so it’s a good time to conduct a review of your company’s key metrics and create a simple action plan that should yield improvements for the second half of the year. This periodic review and action plan process leads to continuous improvement in your company’s performance. Here are our key metrics for the Diamond Certified Resource. As you can see, comparing the first half of this year to the same period last year, we had a 10% gain in our number of consumer fans and a massive gain in the number of times these Preferred Consumers engaged by reading our email newsletters.
At the center of what we do are the consumers who care about and are willing to pay for quality Diamond Certified companies’ services. So, each year, in addition to printing and mailing 1,566,000 Diamond Certified Directories to quality-seeking consumers, we’ve really ramped up our digital engagement activities to great effect.
An interesting aspect of the Diamond Certified Resource’s power to influence consumers is the daily grassroots customer engagement by our 750+ Diamond Certified companies. We had sizable double-digit gains in owners using their Diamond Certified Expert Contributor status to further differentiate themselves from competitors and prove quality-margin pricing is worth it. And, the big gains in Diamond Certified Widget usage on websites of Diamond Certified companies means these sites usually got better search ranking and the power of Diamond Certified helped convert more of their website visitors to new customers.
As our key metrics show, we’ve made good progress, but there’s always more to do. Just like your company, we are always improving. We got these gains because last year we focused on action steps that we knew would directly drive these numbers higher. Now, after reviewing our mid-year key metrics, we’ve created an action plan for the latter half of the year. For example, here are four of our action steps.
- To drive traffic and conversion, collect and create new Deep Info on each Diamond Certified company and present it to shoppers in a newly designed Diamond Certified Company Report.
- Continue to cut back from print newspapers and proportionally increase organic and paid search initiatives.
- Increase the number of channels presenting Diamond Certified Expert Contributor tips.
- Increase Diamond Certified Preferred Consumer engagement through the development of our newly designed website sections.
What are your company’s key metrics?
Your metrics will be unique to your company and industry, which means they’ll be different than ours. You may track sales, repeat customers, satisfaction, safety, web activity, financial targets and even usage of your Diamond Certified Award (if you qualify). Choose five to 10 metrics and start tracking.
Build Your Company by Adding One More Usage of Diamond Certified
COO Greg Louie is obsessed with helping companies use Diamond Certified to build a more profitable future.
Once you’ve tracked your metrics, what can you do to move the most important numbers? That’s where the fun begins. Do things that have the biggest impact on your most important metrics. If you’re not trying to improve every year, you’re falling behind some of your competition. So, my recommendation for one of your action steps is to look at the list of possible uses of Diamond Certified (see enclosed list of 21 uses) and add just one more usage in the second half of this year (if you qualify for Diamond Certified). It may be adding a website widget, using your brochures better or putting your Diamond Certified Video Profile on your website.
