Goodbye 2016, helllloooo 2017! It’s a new year and you have returned to work all refreshed and ready to rock this year. Did you resolve to kick your marketing game up a notch? Before you run ahead full throttle with the new idea you had after a few bevvy’s on Christmas, stop. Slow down and start with a solid marketing strategy. Business owners and employees know that they need marketing, but many don’t have a solid strategy in place.
To ensure the success of your super great marketing ideas in the year to come, start with your strategy – and no, replicating what you did last year probably won’t cut it. Marketing is constantly evolving and so should your strategy. So, what should your marketing strategy include? Well, it really is dependent on what your marketing goals are, what your industry is and so on. We do still have a few tips to help you update your plan.
Grab the Segmentation Bull By The Horns
We started seeing the slow death of the one-size-fits-all marketing approach a few years ago. By the end of 2017 segmentation may be the new norm, so if you haven’t already, start investing in it now. Put a little time, energy and money into finding out who your different customers are and how they want to interact with your business. Segmentation may help you save money in the long run, by helping tailor your message and targeting the people that are the most likely to buy into your brand.
Trend It Up
Look at some of the upcoming trends in the digital realm and see if you can work them into your marketing strategy. For instance, video is not a new trend, but live streaming just started to find its legs in the last quarter of 2016, it is set to really blow up this year. If video was already a part of your marketing strategy, making the leap to live streaming isn’t really much of a jump. If video isn’t part of your plan, it really should be.
Measure That Return On Investment
People are often preaching about measuring the return on investment. It makes sense. You are spending time, energy and money (blood, sweat and tears) on your marketing efforts, you want to make sure they work. Measuring your ROI is not the only reason that measuring the impact of your brand communications is important. It will help you find out what is working and what is not, it will also help with the segmentation we were talking about all the way up there in the first tip. Every year social media and email analytics get better and better, so your strategy should be evolving with these updates. Also, Snapchat introduced some pretty interesting analytics to help entice marketers onboard, just in time for the new year – 2017 could be the year of Snapchat, ya never know.
Optimize
Optimizing your strategy should happen every year, not just in 2017. As marketing trends come and go, so does their efficacy. Look at your marketing strategy from past years (or what you did for marketing in past years) and clean it up. Check out what was working for you and what wasn’t. If Twitter used to be your most active channel and now it’s barely getting any traction try to find out why and don’t be emotional about it – it’s ok to cut the marketing dead weight.
Want a marketing plan and still don’t know where to start? We can do it for you! Check out our super reasonable social media plans and get in touch! We can chat about it.