If you are looking to focus on getting your business out there this year, you should make one of your top priorities: marketing. There isn’t just one way you will succeed in marketing, but many, there are unlimited ways you can market your business, but it’s best to choose a few appropriate for your business. When you have decided what you’d like to focus on, you can start your marketing plan. It’s often useful to start planning before the New Year in November or December. Here are some tips on how to create an exceptional marketing plan…
1. Outsource your marketing plan for the year
One method some businesses take when it comes to marketing their company is to outsource their work to digital professionals who have multiple years of experience. This can be useful for smaller teams who don’t have a marketing department, or bigger teams who only want to focus on a few forms of marketing. It’s best to go for companies such as Absolute Digital, that offer SEO, PPC, PR, social media marketing and much more. Choosing a few ways to market your company is beneficial and will be a good test to see which forms of marketing direct the most traffic to your website and convert to sales.
2. Repeat successful marketing tactics from the past
If you have had some success by using specific forms of marketing in the past, you should plan to repeat them in the future. Analytics are always helpful to have for each month to indicate where you are at with marketing and business progress. For example, if you usually get a reasonably strong click through rate when posting images and engaging captions on Instagram, keep doing them.
Furthermore, if your email marketing campaigns have been successful, you can try changing things up by using an email-to-SMS service that enables you to send an email and have it received as a text message. By using these types of solutions, you can easily communicate with customers no matter where they are or what they are doing. Thus, you can be confident that your message will reach your audience, since SMS messaging has a 98% open rate.
3. Create themes for every month
Focusing on different themes throughout the month will help you make sure you aren’t repeating anything and boring your followers. Fresh, new content will always be more engaging and stand out. The trick is to keep your target audience wanting more from you, whether it’s social media content or tips and useful information in email marketing. If you are in the event industry, for example, you can have different themes related to your event every month and create more tips and advice when you are in the lead-up to the event. Before and after events are the best time to grab your target audience and keep them interested.
4. Jump on themes and national holidays
Make sure you jump on all of the bank holidays and create appropriate marketing posts or deals for around this time. People are usually on their phones more often during time off work, so use this to your advantage and use appropriate hashtags and timings if you are focusing on social media marketing. If you are running any discount deals and you’re thinking about when to add them to your calendar during the year, make sure they are after payday so people will be more likely to buy.
5. Don’t leave any forms of marketing out
Make sure you aren’t turning a blind eye to any forms of digital marketing and at least try them out. You never know what kind of results you might get from trying out new tactics when it comes to digital marketing strategies. Keeping an eye on algorithms is also important but can be difficult, this is when digital marketing agencies that specialise in SEO can be advantageous.
Businesses that take all this advice on board when creating their marketing plan will likely have success throughout the year and will stay organised. There is nothing like a plan to follow and update as you go along, keeping track of results is crucial to improving as a company. Whether you decide to take on your marketing plan yourself or outsource it to digital experts, good luck for the year ahead.
