There’s a lot of media noise out there and the more players that get in the marketing game, the louder the din you need to break through to get noticed as a unique and genuine presence in the market. With changes on the horizon from platforms like Facebook making it harder for the voices of small businesses to rise above the masses, it’s a good time to start focusing on quality over quantity.
Kon Mari that Marketing Plan
Shake the dust off that Marketing Plan! Figuratively dump out its contents to see what you’re working with and keep what is achieving clear and effective results and finetune what isn’t working or pitch it. Efficient, Effective, Results Driven. That’s what you’re shooting for in your Marketing Plan.
Assess What’s Working
Take an inventory of what you have in the mix – blogs, newsletters, social media postings, in-store promotions, events, customer loyalty programs – and gauge what is working and what isn’t. It seems almost too simple but only spend time on what works. Are you putting in a lot of hours plugging away at a weekly newsletter that isn’t getting any traction? Facebook posts that see no engagement? Well, now’s the time to clean up your presence and spend that time working on email headers that increase your open rates and content unique to your brand and geared toward your customers, Facebook posts that have an increased audience reach by using video or creating a conversation between Friends. Take what you are doing and make it better. There’s always room to improve your game.
Know Your Target Audience
When you know who you want to talk to, it helps you decide what your message is. Decide who your target audience is – age range, shopping preferences, what need they are trying to meet, what media channels work best to reach them and at what time. Targeting your audience makes it easier to get the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Recycling Isn’t Just for Plastic
Small businesses need to be smart and effective with fewer resources than the competition to survive. Reusing content you create across all of your media platforms versus creating new content for different channels allows you to maximize the reach you have for the content you create. Promoting an upcoming event specific to a new product or service you’re featuring? Create event graphics and copy and use it to create a blog, a Facebook event, and Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook posts. Include information on the product or service and the event in your next newsletter, upcoming ads, and posts on Google My Business and Google+. Creating one solid piece of multi-faceted high-quality content gets you more play.
Taking stock of your marketing efforts in their entirety and shaking things up a bit is a great habit to get into as an annual goal. Measuring and keeping track of your analytics throughout a year period can show you trends and successes to learn from and carry forward to the new year.
