With the Holiday season here and New Years just around the corner, It’s a great time to look back at your marketing efforts and plan for success in a new year. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Is your website still doing its job?
Take a look through your website and click through the pages; Try to view the pages from the eyes of a potential customer. Is the text clear and accurate? Has anything changed about your business this year in terms of products or services that are not reflected on your website? Take some time to update and refresh your website going into the New Year.
Did you meet your sales goals for the year?
Meeting your goals assumes that you’ve set them. Did you? And how are you measuring your success? In order to know how well you did or didn’t do, you first need a baseline measurement to compare to, whether that’s a monthly spreadsheet or a tally of how many widgets you sold each quarter. Knowing where you are and where you want to be is critical to planning your marketing strategy.
Do you have a marketing plan for the upcoming year?
The options for how to allocate your marketing dollars are many…commercial production and television advertising, email blasts, radio, pay-per-click advertising, print ads, social media, and the list goes on. Before you decide what to do for 2017, take a look at last year’s efforts. What worked and what didn’t? If you don’t know, then that is something to rectify this year because don’t you want to know whether you got a return on your investment? If you spent X dollars on a radio spot, do you know how many people bought your product or service as a result? How did you measure that? Are you tracking where leads come from? If you were running Facebook ads for a product campaign, did you check your analytics to see how many people clicked through to your website? Did you see a jump in sales? How many people converted to customers after you sent that email blast?
The answers to these questions should guide your decisions on how to allocate your marketing budget for the coming year. Some offerings, particularly the digital options, start booking well in advance for the year and inventory does run out, so planning ahead is recommended or you could miss out on a great way to market your business to a wider audience.
Have you thanked your customer base for their business?
If you haven’t already, wish your current customers a Happy New Year and thank them for their continued support of your business. You could also mention any exciting news and offer a coupon that encourages customers to visit in the first quarter of the New Year.
Happy New Year and Best Wishes for Marketing Success in 2017!