It’s the start of a new year and a time to reflect on the past year and look forward to the one ahead. This year we’ve spent a great deal of time looking at the services we offer and how we can better serve our customers in 2023.
Some of our customers have been enjoying the benefits of professional website management for many years now, and we’d like to thank them for your continued trust in us. To those businesses that have recently signed up for Care Plans, we look forward to a long and successful partnership in the years to come.
We’ve been under the hood of your websites
Our focus in 2022 was firmly fixed on ensuring our customers’ websites were kept secure and available, and we invested heavily in automation and monitoring to achieve this.
30,000 websites are hacked every day worldwide. A frightening statistic for sure, but with professional website management, our Website Care Plan customers already have a huge advantage over their competition taking the DIY approach.
Despite a global increase in website hacking activity, in 2022, of all the websites we manage for our customers, only three were affected by hacking, a significant reduction from previous years. Website hacking is a constant threat and can take considerable resources to clean up, which is not good for your business or us and the reason we focus so much on prevention rather than cure.
To further improve on WordPress website security in Q1 we’ll be adding further automated website checks for out-of-date and vulnerable software so proactive steps can be taken before the site can be compromised.
To understand more about the reasons for website hacking (and some prevention tips), see our post from November.
We’ve been listening to your feedback
This summer, Amanda joined us as our content marketing expert and account manager and has been speaking with our customers about their plans and how we can better support them. One recurring theme is a need for more help with marketing and website content – a topic not included in our Care Plans.
2023 is going to be a challenging year for many small businesses, and those that will find it the toughest are the ones implementing a cost-cutting strategy. Not only is this short-sighted, but the reality is many businesses have been focused on cutting costs since the Covid crisis, and there are likely not many areas that can be trimmed significantly to make a difference. By all means, review your costs regularly as that is good business sense but do not make that your strategy for riding the economic waves we are sure to see in 2023.
To succeed, there is only one sure-fire strategy: outgrow your competition. Invest where you can and work hard to be more visible than the competition.
Our 2023 plan
This year, our plans revolve around one simple idea – making your website work harder for your business. Your website is the only business resource that can work 24 hours a day promoting and serving your business, but most are woefully under-utilised.
We are on a mission to change that and want to work with our customers to grow their businesses through content marketing, social media and local SEO. These are proven and long-term growth strategies with the lowest marketing costs.
Why content marketing?
Because it works and doesn’t need a huge budget! According to DemandMetric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
We are really excited to be expanding our core services with plans to help our customers’ growth and I’ll be back in touch with some more on this in the next few weeks so, please let us know if you have any ideas on what would help you personally so we can include them in our planning.
Happy New Year.
