The turn of the new year is always a good time to reflect on business goals. Inc. Magazine offered 9 essential steps to creating your business goals for 2020, including reviewing your vision, setting your annual growth goal, brainstorming strategies, prioritizing initiatives and more.
To assist you in meeting your business goals, we also hope that you take the time to set some marketing goals for the coming year. To help you with this, here are three steps that we recommend:
STEP 1. Where Are You Now?
What are you doing now to market your company? How is it working? Looking at your current marketing efforts can provide insights on ways you can improve or enhance your marketing. It can also provide a baseline for growth in the future.
To establish where you are now, we recommend the following:
Print Marketing
Spread out on a table printed advertisements, flyers, brochures, business cards, postcards, door knockers and other collateral you are using to market your company. Look at the photographs. Are they reflective of your company’s brand and your mission/vision? Look at the words used in the headlines and within the copy. Does it say what you want to convey?
Digital Marketing
Take note your social media following. How many Facebook followers do you have? How many LinkedIn followers? Take a minute to scroll through the posts made in the last year. Which ones got the most engagement?
Did you run any SEM (or pay per click) campaigns or Facebook ads? What language did you use in the advertisements? What keywords did you select? Did you get results? Are those keywords used in your print materials and, more importantly, how often do these keywords appear on your website?
STEP 2: What Are Your Competitors Doing?
What are your competitors doing? What messages are they saying? You may be pleasantly surprised that you are doing it better. You may also find some inspiration or ideas on different strategies that you can put in place.
To look at this, we recommend the following:
- Look at their websites. Read the content that they have provided. Look at their About Us page. Look at the products they are offering. What are they saying? What images are they using?
- Look at their social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) accounts. How many followers do they have? What are they posting? What content is getting the most engagement? Are they on a channel that you are not on and, if so, are they getting a lot of engagement?
- Look at their online reviews. What are people saying about them? How are they responding to reviews?
STEP 3. How is Your Website Performing?
A lot can happen in a year. Perhaps you started offering a new service and need to add information to your site. Perhaps you have seen a change in the type of customer that you are working with. We recommend that you look at the content on your website at least once a year. Take a minute to review each page to make sure that your message resonates and says what you want to convey to your target audience.
We also recommend that you conduct a Google Search to find your website. Did your site appear on page one? Also, is your Google business listing accurate? Take a moment to review your site’s analytics.
Set Your Marketing Goals
Following these three steps can help you establish your marketing goals, objectives and strategies for the coming year. They’ll give you deeper insight as to what you are currently doing, what your competitors are doing and how your website is performing. You also will come away with a task list of changes that you want to make.
Want to speak to a marketing professional? One of the value-added benefits of working with Accent Distributing is that they will put you in touch with a full-service marketing firm so that you can ask questions – at no cost to you. Contact Inside Sales for details at (941) 922-5268 or at [email protected].
