Hello 2020! It’s time to set your vision for the year ahead, think about your marketing planning, get focussed and put an actionable strategy in place to help you reach your goals!
You may or may not already have a marketing strategy in place. Still, at key points in the year, it’s crucial for you to review and analyse the success of any marketing activity to date, and hone in on what works for you and matters to you in the coming months. Trying new ideas, tactics and initiatives are also vital to the success of your strategy, so remember to keep things fresh and don’t be afraid to try a new approach.
We’ve set out some key factors to consider as part of your 2020 marketing plan below, all of which can be used to create a plan from scratch, or update and refresh your existing strategy too:
1 – Do Your Research
Keeping up with the latest trends in marketing is instrumental. Is there a new social media platform or tactic available that you’ve not tried before? Have you read any case studies from other businesses similar to yours to get an idea of what’s working for them?
It’s so important to question and try and understand what’s in front of and around you and look to implement different tactics into your strategy; you could strike some marketing gold!
2 – Identify Your Goals and Plan How You Will Achieve Them
Having a vision for your business is excellent, but if you’ve no plan of action as to how to realise it or your marketing objectives, your big-picture ideas will be unachievable.
Begin by breaking your objectives down into a five year, one year and quarterly or 6-month plan. Create a document that details all of the targets you want to hit and how you plan to go about achieving them. What marketing tactics will you test and use? What would success look like to you? If you can answer these questions and format your thinking into a clear working roadmap, you can easily monitor your success and feel good when you see your actions starting to bear fruit.
3 – Reassess Your Target Audience
If you’re using customer profiles from 3 years ago, it’s highly likely that during that time interests, buying behaviours and specific demographics will have shifted. It’s crucial that you keep your customer profiles up to date, and take the time to review them every 6-12 months, as part of your planning. Your customer profiles underpin all of your marketing activity, so they must be relevant.
4 – Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
An oldie but a goodie! With more and more businesses launching every single day, keeping an eye on the competition, old and new, will pay dividends and is an essential part of your marketing planning. Look to similar companies for inspiration and identify those you aspire to, what are they doing right and why?
From a social media perspective, there are many tools, including Sprout Social and Hootsuite, that enable you to benchmark the success of your social campaigns v that of your competitors too!
What are the latest trends that your business should be looking to implement, but equally, what is your USP and what sets you apart from others? Are there any threats in the road ahead you need to prepare for or prime opportunities that you need to grab hold of?
5 – Is Your Brand Promoting Your Business in the Right Way?
Keeping your branding and marketing materials fresh and up to date and having a consistent and streamlined approach to these activities will increase engagement from your customers, encourage brand loyalty and keep you looking ever professional. Your brand and how your business appears from a look and feel point of view is the first thing your target audience will see of you. Making the right first impression and continually ‘dressing to impress’ with your branding and marketing activities will pay dividends, trust us!
While the end of the year is fast approaching, it’s not too late to get your 2020 marketing planning into shape. If you don’t know where to start, our team of expert professionals can help develop a strategy that’s actionable and right for you and your business. Would you like to find out how? Request a call with us today!