New year, new you
Marketing health tips for 2024
New Year’s resolutions are rarely kept, but these ten points will help to ensure your marketing health is as robust as possible as you sprint through 2024.
1. How sustainable is your marketing?
Start thinking about marketing in the context of sustainability. This reflective exercise should not just be about minimising waste or reducing packaging. It should embrace all areas of the business as well as marketing practice – reviewing your company’s purpose, identifying new growth opportunities and markets, revisiting brand values, innovating products or services, choosing partners and routes to market, and your message and communication channels.
All marketing parameters need to be viewed through the lens of sustainability to ensure your company’s impact on employees, customers, supply chains, society and the planet is a positive one. Does this sound daunting? Look at your core capabilities as a business - this might determine where you can make the biggest difference.
2. Give customers what they want
Think of new ways to strengthen your relationship with customers, adding value to forge those win-win partnerships.Avoid the crowd – don’t try to compete in shark-infested seas! Devise ways to open up clear blue water for your offering.
Know your audience. Published market data and online tools aid understanding about your customers’ needs, habits and media preferences to inform your positioning, messaging and choice of communication platform. Is your market niche? Survey a small handful of customers – active, dormant and potential.
3. Make feedback work harder
It’s the perfect time to solicit feedback from clients.But this doesn’t need to begin and end with Google five-star reviews.Adopt a structured approach to gathering testimonials and producing case studies. These ‘user-generated’ assets are gold; they can be repackaged and reused repeatedly across your marketing materials, both online and in print.
4. The gift that keeps on giving
Take a fresh look at your e-newsletters. Create value by better targeting and personalisation to drive email engagement. Use novel subject lines, compelling teaser text and persuasive calls to action to make your message stand out in a digitally saturated environment. Kick off 2024 with a health check of your subscriber list.
5. Harness blogging potential
Your news updates should rarely be all about you.Create genuinely shareable content by directly answering the problems faced daily by your customers and prospects. Build a reputation for your subject matter experts across the business – people do business with people.
6. A full social calendar?
Your social media programme should align with your company’s commercial and strategic goals.If you haven’t already done so, draw up a social media content calendar to help keep on track and on message. Recruit a cross-functional team of employees to be your eyes and ears. Check your copywriting style and narrative arc; storytelling wins hearts and minds, unites people and encourages an emotional response – even in a business-to-business context.
7. Improve website hygiene
Take a look at your website and imagine you’re a first-time visitor.Content, design, navigation and performance are all drivers of improved user experience. Technical and non-technical audits will highlight the issues to prioritise. Small changes can result in significant improvements for human visitors and search engines alike.
8. Sharpen marketing measurement
Do you know where the most profitable enquiries are coming from, or how leads convert to a sale, order or instruction?It is never too late to begin implementing monitoring and measurement systems that help you to understand marketing’s impact. Draw up actionable SMART metrics that are meaningful to your business’ objectives. Avoid reporting vanity metrics.
9. Protect your data
January is an excellent time to check your data protection policies and practices to ensure compliance with the latest regulations and guidance. If you don’t know where to begin, focus on the likelihood of risk and severity of impact. Every new system, application or procedure should be risk-assessed.
10. And finally…the future is bright; the future is AI
From content creation, copywriting and design, to analytics and campaign management, the potential offered by artificial intelligence is unlimited. AI delivers time-saving benefits for routine tasks, enriches knowledge and improves customer insights, helping to free up valuable marketing resources to focus on matters of leadership, strategy, judgement and relationship development. Hone your critical skills for responsible stewardship of new technology and be sensitive to the ethical considerations.
If you need help with any of the issues raised, call us on 01672 811778.