Now that the chaos of budget season is behind you, it's time to strap on your forward-looking goggles and get excited about everything that the new year brings. Of course, winning the "marketing lottery" isn't very likely unless you've put some planning into your future campaigns. This why we're here to help you kick off your marketing strategies for the new year in style!
Keep the Holiday Funnel Flowing
Holiday shopping can be a marketer's dream when everything works as planned. Unfortunately, many companies lose marketing momentum just as soon as late-December sales start to fade away.
To give your brand the gift that keeps on giving, make sure you've got metrics in place to measure buyer behaviors when holiday shopping and searching is at its highest. Using consumer insights from this amped-up time of year, you'll be armed with fuel that can propel success.
Are you a B2B company? Don't negate the value of end-of-year numbers just because your bottom line doesn't rely on holiday hits. The precedents you set in December should set a baseline that sends you sailing in the new year, regardless of what kind of industry you're in!
Nothing kicks off marketing in the new year like well-placed strategies that play upon success from the preceding months.
Promise to Produce a More Productive Work Environment
For clarity, we're certainly not saying that this is the year when you never look up from your keyboard.
We happen to believe that happy, engaged employees make for productive workplaces. When the environment is just right, staffers feel supported and empowered, which builds loyalty to the company, thus reducing the costs of turnover while enhancing the overall wellness of the company's culture.
Loyal employees can do phenomenal things to bolster your brand-boosting power, which means it behooves you to figure out what makes them tick and where bottlenecks lie so you can engineer plans to put out unnecessary fires.
If your marketing team is tiny, you may be asking too much of too few people. Inbound efforts and SEO strategies are full-time jobs in and of themselves, not to mention the phenomenal amount of time and effort needed to keep up with social media, reputation management, and Google's ever-changing elements that will allow you to be in the search engine's good graces. If you're deploying these tasks onto existing staffers, they're likely stressed out and causing funnel bottlenecks you may not even be aware of.
To solve this stressful situation, employ the efforts of an inbound marketing firm whose sole focus is to get leads into your sales funnel.
Get to Know Your Numbers on an Intimate Level
If you're allergic to analytics and find yourself fleeing from anything that has to do with facts and figures, it's going to be a tough year!
Big data is a really big deal, and it's not going anywhere. Now is the perfect time to take a look at the past years' metrics and explore your opportunities. What's working well? Which strategies are not so hot? Do you know what you don't know?
In the marketing world, words and pictures only tell a portion of the tale; numbers finish the story. By learning everything you can about the ways customers engage with your company, your team will be able to produce more personalized and effective content in the coming year.
