The ‘New Year’ is the ideal time for a fresh start. It’s an opportunity to give up bad habits and bury those jobs that didn’t quite go as planned. And, it’s a time to set some solid goals and resolutions for 2020.
But what does a ‘marketing’ New Year’s resolution look like? Here our marketing experts share their recommendations for New Year marketing resolutions for 2020!
Healthy Eating
‘Feed’ your customers with valuable content – quality over quantity
You may think that feeding your customers with regular content a few times a day is the way to stay relevant. But you don’t want to over saturate your channels with pointless posts and messages that confuse your audience. Everything you’re putting out there must be relevant and have a purpose to your brand.
Make sure you stay in your lane, don’t comment or write about topics that are outside of your target audience just to gain a few likes or views. Ensure you’re keeping both your target audience and your brand in mind when creating content.
‘Healthy’ organic search results with SEO
You show up in Google or any search engines’ organic search results when your website is relevant to the search term; this is down to great search engine optimisation (SEO).
The position of your website when certain phrases are searched is important; if you’re too low down in the search results you won’t be seen by your potential customers. Building good organic traffic to your website isn’t easy, but you can ensure that you’re practicing good SEO to get those healthy results.
This can be anything from fixing technical or content aspects, to finding keywords that your audience is searching and implementing them throughout the site. Want to know more? You can read our beginners guide to SEO here.
Exercise more
‘Stretch’ your social ad budget to drive results
With the wonderful ever changing ways of social media it can be hard to keep up, but regardless of how big or small your ad budget is, make sure you’re stretching it as much as you possibly can to drive results.
Start by looking at your audience, is it too broad? Is it targeting the correct people with the right interests? Budgets can be wasted if adverts aren’t shown to the right people, so take time to research your audience. What are their interests? Where would they work, live, eat? Try and find out as much as you possibly can, because your ad will have a better chance of getting shown to the right people if you narrow down your targeting.
Take a look at the ad message, is it too pushy? Are you promoting the company or product too much? It’s easy to get caught up in this, but get your customers attention by explaining how your product or service could help them instead of what you do and what the product does. You could even promote an offer to grab their attention even more!
‘Work out’ which of your marketing efforts is bringing ROI by ‘running’ regular reports
It goes without saying that successful marketing relies on reports, without these you wouldn’t know what’s working for you and what’s not. Make sure you’re regularly running social reports, checking your website analytics and running SEO reports – run reports on every stream of marketing that you have, so you can work out which one is giving you the best return of investment (ROI).
If one form of marketing is working more than the other, it’s time to put more focus into the one that’s working for you.
Quit bad habits
Quit procrastinating – by failing to prepare you prepare to fail
Preparation is the key to success in anything, but especially with marketing. If you don’t have a plan how will you know what you’re doing next? Make sure you’re looking ahead at the year for all of your marketing efforts and putting together a plan of your next steps. If you’re looking to focus on editorial next year, it’s time to start gathering features lists from magazines and noting down the relevant features for each month along with the deadlines so you know exactly who will be interested in what and when.
Or maybe you want to focus on social media, why not get ahead of the game and start researching any relevant ‘Days of the Year’ or local business discussions so you can get involved in relevant hashtags and start conversations with new potential customers.
Quit the ‘smoke and mirrors’ – only send out PR when you have something newsworthy to say
Keeping your customers or target audience up-to-date with your business is great, however in order for you to be heard you need to ensure the press releases you’re sending out are relevant and interesting.
Ensure that your PR relates to the feature your chosen magazine is writing about that month, and that it’ll appeal to the readers of the publication. Check the subjects for each publication within your media platform and their features lists if you’re unsure. Remember ‘quality over quantity’ is the key to successful marketing.
Savvy spending
Take advantage of offers when trialling something new
Looking to try something new in 2020? Many companies offer free trials to get you on board so use this to your full advantage, they are a great way to try out a new platform or service without having to commit or spend any money before deciding whether it’s for you. If you’re looking to gain more sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great way to target new prospects, and they offer one month for free!
Many sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google offer vouchers for free ad spend so you can try out their platform – make sure you sign up to their mailing lists and look out for them in your emails.
Consider outsourcing to a marketing agency
Sometimes hiring a full time in-house marketing expert can be expensive, and most small businesses just don’t have the budget for this. Outsourcing your marketing to an agency can be cost effective and give better results – you tell them your budget and goals, they will tell you realistically what they could do with your budget and what you could expect back from their efforts so you know exactly where your money is going.
Out with the old, in with the new
‘Cleanse’ your data regularly to ensure you remain GDPR compliant
All marketers know that the dreaded GDPR came into effect in May 2018 (how could we forget!), but still some companies aren’t putting it in to practice. It’s essential that you’re ‘cleansing’ your data regularly to ensure its GDPR complaint but also to ensure your marketing efforts are getting seen by the relevant people.
Check your email marketing lists, are you getting lots of hard bounces? It’s time for a clear out! Or perhaps your direct marketing campaign had loads of returns; make sure you’re removing these from your database to ensure your data is as squeaky clean as possible.
Don’t get left behind – keep up to date with the latest digital marketing trends
It can be difficult to keep up with the times, especially as the digital world changes so rapidly and so often. But it’s important that you’re keeping up-to-date with the latest digital marketing trends to get the most out of your campaigns and drive website traffic or enquiries.
You can keep up-to-date by signing up for various e-Newsletters that give you tips and tricks, watching regular webinars, attending various events and also reading blogs on the latest trends.
