Happy New Year from us here at Emerald Frog Marketing!
With a new year comes a new start. Now is the time to take a look at your marketing and make the most of the fresh opportunities that next year will bring. Time to shed some of that fat your business is carrying about and do some marketing star jumps!
Here are our top 6 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions for businesses:
1. Review what worked this year and what didn’t
Take the time to review all your marketing activity this year. How much did it cost you? How many new customers did you acquire? How many existing customers bought again off you in 2016? What was your return on investment? Which tactics worked well for you and which didn’t? If they didn’t work well, then why? Was it your offer? Was it your data? Good marketing is based on testing and measuring and now is the time to review all this if you are planning out your following year's marketing activity.
2. Communicate with your customers
An important New Year’s Resolution is to pledge to communicate with your customers. Many businesses are so obsessed with finding new customers, they forget about their existing ones. New customers are expensive to find, so make sure that you look after them once you have built a relationship – or they may be tempted to go elsewhere. Make sure you communicate with them regularly this year, either through marketing tactics such as e-newsletters or direct mail, or (as often works well with high value purchase customers) by giving them a call to say hello.
3. Do a little marketing every day
An important resolution this. Marketing is built on consistency and building your brand. If you go quiet, people may assume you are not in business any longer. Marketing, to some businesses, may be one of those jobs like housework. A bit every day is much easier to deal with than leaving it all to pile up. If you are a small business, pledge to spend some time each day on your marketing. If you saw Great Expectations over Christmas, then don’t end up with the marketing equivalent of Miss Haversham’s cobwebs.
4. Change your Facebook profile to a business page.
This is actually one of our personal bugbears. Those small businesses that set themselves up on Facebook as a person and send you friend requests. Gah! It’s irritating and unprofessional and quite frankly I don’t really want businesses looking at my family photos. So, make sure that you create a Business Page. This will put no limit on the number of “likers” you can have and also is far more Google friendly. You will also have access to Facebook’s “Insights” data which will give you valuable data as to how people are interacting with your page.
5. Refresh your website content
Google loves websites that are regularly updated, which means you will appear higher up in the rankings than a “dormant” site. Blogs are a great way of doing this. But, if you don’t have the time for a blog, then take the time to review all that is written on your website. Is it still sounding fresh and accurate? Are there offers or new products that need to go on there? By keeping your website fresh, people will keep coming back. A website is your “shopwindow” so take the time to make sure it is looking its best.
6. Spring clean your database
Now is the time to have a good look at the data you hold on your customers. Is it up to date? It is estimated that databases “decay” at a rate of 25% a year. That means that by the end of the year, 1 in 4 of your customers may have changed their name, moved, left the company or died. It can cost you time and money and even offend your customers if you get it wrong.
It’s also worth spending a bit of time “segmenting” your data. This means sorting your customers into groups. You can segment by industry, customer or prospect, demographics and so on. It may be a dull job, but it will help you target customers more cost effectively and aim the right product or service at the right person.
So there you go. Our top 6 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions. Of course, if you need a hand with any of that stuff, then give us a shout.
😉
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