January is a good time for reflection. A time to look back at the previous year, evaluate what you did and how you can build on that in the coming new year.
Specifically, it’s a good time to take a look at your marketing efforts. Here, we’ve provided a handy list of questions to help you reflect in an efficient way that will help you to build your marketing plan going forward.
How did you market your business last year?
There are many ways business owners evaluate their efforts over the past 12 months, here’s a handy check list to help you review your overall marketing efforts.
Not sure what to look for? Check out our SEO Self assessments and find out where to start.
Social Media: Did you know: 95% of 18-34 year olds, 92% of 35-44 year olds and 85% of 45-54 year olds follow their favourite brand through social media? Social media is the most cost effective way to be where your audience is, are you using it effectively to grow your business?
A new website: Did you revamp your website this year? If so, have you taken an analytical look at how it has improved your Click Through Rate (CTR), the amount of time a viewer spends on your site (Bounce Rate), or how they got to your site, to help evaluate if your page needs improvements?
Optimizing your current site: Did you optimize your site this year? If so, take a look at your target keywords/keyphrases and how they worked for you. How are you showing up in keyword results organically? Do you need to make some tweaks?
Blogs: Are you writing regular blogs throughout the year, or did you mean to and just never got around to it? Do you effectively use specific keywords that you know resonate with the audience you’re trying to reach? Are you collaborating with other brands or social media influencers through your blog to increase your reach?
Print materials? Did you try print media such as mail-outs, brochures or flyers? What worked? What didn’t? How can you improve your messaging and better target your distribution next year?
Word of mouth? How did your business perform? Consider offline and online referrals, how can you get more referrals from your current client base?
Paid Online advertising? How much did you invest in your paid online marketing campaign? Compare your results with other marketing efforts, and touch base with your SEM team on how they plan to improve their strategy next year.
How did your marketing plan perform?
- Did you have a plan?
- How did it work for you?
- Did you see a return on your investments?
- How could you have better invested in your marketing strategy?
- Based on your efforts this year, what are your marketing goals for next year?
- Did you increase brand recognition?
- How did your relationship building activities go?
- Did you experience increased sales?
- Did you acquire new customers?
- Did you experience continued growth with current customers?
These are important questions to ask to evaluate how your marketing efforts helped grow your business, because let’s face it, if your marketing isn’t helping your business, then why put in the time, effort and money to continue it?
As a small business owner, you probably have your hands full. You are trying to wear all the hats at the same time, and often marketing is the aspect that falls to the wayside. While we may be a little biased, without marketing, how does anyone know about your business? How can your business grow and become increasingly successful, allowing you to retire on that private island you’ve been dreaming about?
Sometimes you need to turn to someone else to take a hat or two off your head. Someone whose primary focus is to not only create a marketing plan to be followed, but to carry it out and to evaluate the efforts as the year goes on to see what is working and what needs to be changed.
If you’re considering improving your online marketing efforts this year, whether your are simply looking for someone to create a plan for you to follow or you want a team to optimize your website and SEO efforts, write blogs to keep your site fresh and always reaching new potential clients, or post regularly to your social media accounts, MKT Communications covers it all. We offer a one-stop marketing approach that can cover as much or as little as you need. We will create a custom approach that will best suit your business and your budget.
Start by checking out our Self Assessments and learn where you may need more support, or contact us today to discuss how we can help analyze and optimize your marketing efforts for a larger return on your investment this year.