New Year's Resolutions for Your Marketing

Lindsey Walters

With the year winding down, we often reflect on the past & make plans for the future. To many, the New Year signifies a sort of new beginning or fresh start.  Before you stop reading because you think I am going to tell you to lose weight, stay with me. Resolutions are made by decisions you think need to happen in order to correct a problem area. If you think you need to lose weight, you exercise and eat healthy. If you need to stop smoking, you get patches or gum. But what about your marketing focus – what would you want to improve?

Smaller companies might not have the resources for a dedicated marketing professional, and fold marketing responsibilities in with another position. Larger companies can sometimes get lost between their many marketing professionals. Some companies do not even know what marketing means.  Marketing can be pretty complex, and can mean different things to different people and companies. No matter what you want to improve, here are some resolutions for you to get the ball rolling on a better New Year:

Get involved with your marketing initiatives more – Your marketing is not something you should just plan out, implement, and be done with. This is something you should consistently check on, track and change up.

• Messaging and imaging can go stale within a short period of time, so updating your ads or messaging is a great way to re-engage or peak new interest.
• Tracking your different marketing components allows you to see what is working and what isn’t. Things like utilizing Google analytics, tracking links, or a CRM of some sort allows you to put processes or tracking in place with a low amount of effort on your end.
• Year-to-date statistics and analytics of any campaigns you have implemented are great, but looking into month-to-month statistics over time might allow you to see things or patterns you might miss with the larger picture.
• General curiosity can help you discover things you otherwise miss. Asking questions to anyone and everyone that is involved with your marketing efforts allows you to gain a better understanding of why you do the things and can lead to improvement in the future. Why do we structure our eBlasts this way? What is our typical conversion rate on this ad? Is the list we are sending messages to cleaned? Are we running any A/B tests? Who is reading our content? Is there anything we are not utilizing with our current marketing service providers?

Avoid things that make you cringe- We have an internal “test” at insideARM that pretty much goes by the theory that if anything makes you cringe, just don’t do it. For example, if someone were to order loud smelling food for lunch, don’t do it. Apply this to your marketing. Want to push the boundaries a little or spice things up with your marketing efforts? Don’t ever lose sight of that imaginary line of what is appropriate or not appropriate. Making false claims (or maybe not entirely true claims), using statements or imaging that might imply something explicit, or even recreating others’ work all might be examples of things that might not pass the cringe test. Always ask yourself if your marketing efforts would make you proud and go from there.

Keep In Touch More – Reach out to say hello every once in a while to check on your clients or peers. Find out things about them, what is working and what isn’t working for them, what they struggle with and what excites them. Find out if there is anything you can do to help or change that might work better. Relationships are key to learning new things, assisting others, and making your job more worthwhile. It seems like a simple thing to do, but it is easy to get caught up in your day-to-day functions and can easily be sacrificed for something that, at the time, seems more important. Be sure to set some time aside to do this, or you might miss out on the opportunity all-together.

Plan Ahead of Time – Remember when you didn’t have your 2014 planned out until February of this year? That was difficult to not only throw together last minute, but also lessened the time you could have used to achieve your goals. I know we are all busy, and it can’t always be done right on schedule, but making time to plan for your future now will help you down the road. Having clear-cut goals at the start of the year & knowing what marketing offerings you want to pursue can help you decide what to focus on, what is truly important for your organization and team, and can allow for next steps to fall in place.

The main resolution, arguably the most important, is to stick to your resolutions. Remember that these resolutions were put in place because you wanted to fix a problem, not let it keep happening. Don’t fall off the bandwagon by the end of January, and keep up with your resolutions, because when you think about it, your business is depending on you.