2020 is quickly approaching, and will no doubt be one of the most important years for businesses (y’know, considering… br*xi*), so here are some tips for creating your 2020 marketing plan.
I don’t really think it hugely matters when you plan your marketing campaign for the following year. As long as you have a vision for your business, and can strategise how to achieve your vision, you have the basis of a plan already.
Top Tip 1: Creating 3-5 key objectives
It’s important not to overload yourself with objectives you want your business to achieve. Creating between 3 and 5 key objectives to achieve before the year is out will probably be more than enough to work towards, particularly if some of those objectives are sales and/or revenue related.
When creating your business objectives, think about how many new customers you’d like, or how much revenue you’d like to generate compared with the previous year. Make sure to keep your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART). This just makes it easier to track progress and ensures your chosen objectives are in reach for your business.
Top Tip 2: The strategy to achieve your objectives
When creating the strategy around how to accomplish your objectives, keep in mind all of the tools (digital and traditional) at your disposal. There are a variety of marketing methods out there which are perfect for small/medium businesses and start-ups to utilise in order to grow awareness, generate sales, and track leads and customers. Display advertising, social media advertising, search engine optimisation, are just a few services to mention that are readily available for businesses to take advantage of.
Of course it’s understandable that not all business have the budget available to use all of the marketing tools out there. Creating social media pages for your business however, is something that’s free and relatively simple to do. It does take time and effort to keep social media pages going, but it is worth it to build interest and create greater awareness for your business. Having a separate social media plan will help make sure you’re posting regular content, and keeping your followers up-to-date with the latest news regarding your business (creating more engagement opportunities with your customer base).
If you do have the budget available for marketing campaigns, think about integrated marketing campaigns. Encapsulating print advertising, social media and digital marketing methods, helps generate maximum awareness for your brand, and solidifies your business in the minds of your target audience. It’s also worth noting that going through a marketing partner to carry-out your campaign takes the pressure off yourselves and places it on the experts to deliver the results you’re aspiring for.
Top Tip 3: Ways to measure success
Once your strategy is up and running, there needs to be a plan of how to measure its success. This is so you can make any updates during the run of your plan in case monthly targets aren’t being met, or results are going over and above what you expected.
There are a number of ways to measure the success of you marketing efforts, so you can better understand whether you’re on track to reach your objectives. Google Analytics is a free and useful tool to track visits to your website. It can show you which pages individual customers have clicked on, and how long they stayed on those pages for. You can also see if traffic to your site has spiked because of a campaign.
Another tool that can help you understand how your campaigns and wider strategies are going, as well as track and communicate with leads and customers, is the LOCALiQ Client Centre. It provides your advertising analytics in a simple visual way, making it quicker to understand results and track progress.
Top Tip 4: Don’t be complacent
It’s easy to think once your business has reached its goals, or once it’s on target to reach its goals, that marketing isn’t needed anymore. This isn’t the case.
Businesses need to be dynamic with their marketing efforts in order to stay competitive and keep their awareness increasing. And I know this is a typical thing for a marketer to say, but honestly I can’t stress enough how quickly consumers are changing the way they shop and take in information, meaning businesses are always having to keep up their efforts to encourage people to shop with them. There are always articles being written about the latest marketing trends, or the latest ways for your business to appeal to new customers, and they are definitely worth a read (… most of them anyway).
If you’d like any advice on where to take your marketing in 2020, speak to us today. We’ll always be around to help your business.
