Is It Time to Reset your Marketing for 2020?
Search “marketing strategies” on Google.
Soon you’ll be swimming in a flood of inquiries and Q&A pages on how to buff up your marketing plan for the next calendar year. However, when building their marketing plan, companies often exercise the wrong muscles. So how can you reset your goals and make sure your marketing is in tip-top shape for 2020?
Companies forget to exercise the muscle of planning! Your art director can overload your pipeline with content and your writers can stream with silver-tongue precision, yet, if you lack planning your success will fall to the wayside.
Strategy Comes First
In the Harvard Business Review Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway, said, “The memory of the frustration of planning is burned into my brain, but so is the memory of the huge accomplishment that came out of that planning.” Content without planning is no content at all. You can create glamorous photos for Instagram and write home-run captions, but without a social media content calendar and careful planning, you’re likely to fall off track.
Determining your marketing strategy begins when discovering what your key performance indicators (KPIs) to which your business should pay attention. What are you trying to measure–be precise in those measurements. Don’t simply state that you’d like to increase your ROI. Set a defined percent (ex. 10%) and then you’ll be able to focus on details within key metrics that help you achieve that goal. For example, to see a 10% increase in ROI you might need to make your goal increasing your product page conversions by 5%. Be specific in what you desire to achieve and it will make your goals more concrete and obtainable.
“The memory of the frustration of planning is burned into my brain, but so is the memory of the huge accomplishment that came out of that planning.”
After you determine your KPIs, you can decide specific platforms to reach your target audience through–be it blogs, Instagram, LinkedIn Sales Navigator–and fully develop those fields to ensure you are ready to begin posting content. In the ever-changing landscape of content, it’s best to develop content in advance. We recommend having each month’s social media calendar planned before the next month even begins. For example–3 Instagram and 2 blog posts for every week of November. Just like in the case of Camille Fournier, this process will seem initially grueling, but will pay dividends in the success that results from your planning.
Omnichannel Approach: Where’s your focus?
You may have heard buzzwords and catchphrases like “omnichannel approach” or “omnichannel marketing”. They exist for a reason. Do you only have one channel? Then you are behind.
Within your strategy, it is imperative to your company’s success that you are planning for multiple platforms. Taking an omnichannel approach means specializing not in one, but across multiple platforms. When hiring content writers, creative directors, marketing agencies or contracted staff members, you must ensure that they are focusing on multiple platforms at once. An omnichannel approach doesn’t require you to use every platform, but you should pick ideally 3-4 platforms in which you’d like to specialize. Doing this will expand brand awareness and give your organization a larger reach with relevant target audiences.
Do you only have one channel? Then you are behind.
Infuse Creativity with Strategy
While you’re in the process of expanding to multiple platforms, make sure not to sacrifice the quality of your content. Increasing the number of platforms you use doesn’t mean that you need to increase the number of your posts. Focus on quality over quantity. With content, often less is more. The beauty of planning is that it affords us more room for creativity. We recommend posting on Instagram, Facebook and company blogs 3 times a week as an initial standard.
Planning, as painful a discipline as it might be, affords us more room for creativity.
If you have the manpower to blog every day, that’s fantastic, but set benchmarks to make sure that you’re not sacrificing quality just to add volume to your feed. Once you’ve established set dates for content to go live and have a pipeline of content stored, you’ll have more creative freedom in how you can format, structure and create content. Planning, as painful a discipline as it might be, affords us more room for creativity. It allows us to build our brand in new, creative ways.
Reset 2020
If you truly want to reset your marketing capabilities for 2020, you should explore opportunities with Robotic Marketer. We are setting the standard for the future of marketing. We’ve created an AI-based, robotic assistant that will compute a marketing plan for your team in a matter of hours. You just need to attend a workshop with one of our marketing managers and our machine-learning technology will take care of the other 80% of the process. Strategy will continue to be the cornerstone of marketing for your business. The question is–how will you approach planning for 2020? Take our advice and run with it.
