There are nine key elements you should include to ensure your plan accomplishes your goals.
Carve Out Funds For Your Marketing Strategy If you’re serious about promoting your business, you need to put your money where your mouth is and invest in your marketing strategy.
Not sure how much to set aside? A good rule of thumb is to dedicate about 10 percent of your gross annual revenue to your company’s marketing and public relations efforts.
Define Your Marketing Strategy’s Goals – Be SMART About It! If you don’t set goals, how will you know if your marketing strategy was effective? Make sure the goals you set are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. The goals you define will determine how you guide your marketing and PR activities for the year; take the time to set objectives that will achieve the results you want.
Clarify Your Branding Guidelines The best way to do this is by setting clear brand guidelines for your content creation team. This goes far beyond creating a logo! It includes: • Exactly which shades of various colors you’ll use in
graphics
• The overall look and feel of visuals you’ll use, from
stock photos to in-house imagery
• Which fonts you’ll use throughout your website,
graphics, brochures and any other branded content • Types of vocabulary you’ll use throughout your
content
• Messaging you’ll use across all your platforms –
this can include specific phrases and/or general tone of the text
Refresh Your Website When was the last time you evaluated your website? If it’s been a while, it may be time to focus some of your marketing strategy on a refresh. Your website is visually engaging and compelling to visitors, in addition to strategically following search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. Making your site appealing to search engines like Google helps users discover your website (more than 50 percent of traffic comes from search engines!), and designing effective content for the visitor ensures they stick around to learn about your business.
Is it mobile friendly? It needs to be! According to Blue Corona, up to 70
percent of web traffic happens on a mobile device and 69 percent of smartphone users say they are more likely to buy from companies with mobile sites that easily address their questions or concerns.
How quickly does it load? Blue Corona reveals that nearly half (47 percent) of web users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 39 percent of users will stop engaging with a website if the images won’t load or take too long to load.
Is it visually attractive? Studies from Blue Corona show that a business has 10 seconds to leave an impression on a website visitor. Nearly half (48 percent) of visitors will determine how credible a company is based on the website’s designs and more than a third (38 percent) will stop
engaging with a website if it’s unattractive.
Is the copy compelling? As visitors browse your website, do your words grab their attention and keep them wanting more? According to Conversion XL, users spend about 5.59 seconds reading your website’s written content. In addition to making it easy to digest, if you capture their attention effectively, they’ll stay for longer than six seconds, too.
Is it optimized for search engines? You want to design your website for your target audience, but if users can’t find it, they can’t be wowed by it. By folding in SEO best practices, like frontend and backend SEO, meta descriptions and more, you’ll
make it that much easier for potential customers to find your website.
Should you invest in a chatbot? This can be a helpful way to connect with your website’s visitors. As Three Girls Marketing & PR Specialist Anna Izenman explains in this post about how chatbots boost customer engagement. These digital tools improve customer service, streamline the shopping process, personalize communication, improve response rate and automate repetitive tasks.
Dedicate Resources To Consistent Blogging If one of your marketing strategy’s goals is to increase website traffic, blogging needs to be a
priority in your 2020 plan. According to recent research: Having a blog as part of your company’s website increases your chances of ranking higher in search engine results by 434 percent! There’s a direct correlation between the number of blog posts on a website and its traffic; companies that published 21-54 articles saw an increase in traffic of 30 percent.
Infiltrate Inboxes Regularly With Email Newsletters Not sure if email marketing is worth the investment for
2020’s marketing strategy? Email marketing has an average return on investment of 3,800 percent 81 percent of online shoppers who receive emails based on past shopping habits consider another purchase 72 percent of
consumers prefer to receive promotional content through email than social media If you integrate email newsletters into your marketing strategy carefully, it can be an incredibly cost-effective way to reach consumers while making the most of other content you’ve already
created. These types of messages are a fantastic place to share your blog posts as well as any videos, graphics or other designs you craft for your brand.
Create An Engaging Social Media Presence With literally billions of users spending time on social media platforms around the world, it’s well worth the investment to foster an engaging presence on Facebook,
Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Pinterest. You don’t need to invest in every platform – in fact, I recommend against it. Research your audience to determine which social media networks they use, and then wrap those channels into your marketing strategy.
Invest In Targeted Advertising Thanks to social media algorithms making it harder for organic content to stand out, it’s more important than ever to include advertising in your marketing strategy. Plan on at least a modest ad campaign to increase your visibility on your top platforms.
Review Analytics And Refine
Your Marketing Strategy Specifically look at how your readers and followers are responding to your content. While you want to give your marketing strategy time before you drop a tactic or reallocate your funds, reviewing these insights can help you fine-tune your approach. By looking at the analytics, you can listen to what they’re saying through their reactions, comments, shares, clicks, amount of time spent on a page, etc.