Your marketing team probably isn’t hanging around the water cooler much these days, nor are they exchanging YouTube videos in the breakroom. For savvy marketers, that last quarter of the year is a busy time spent deep in analytics and budgets to create the marketing strategy for the following year.
If you just got that oops, forgot about that term paper due today feeling, don’t panic. There’s still time to do some serious planning in the remaining months to deliver a marketing strategy for 2020.
Here are key steps to include as you plan for a new year:
Examine Your Budget. You need to know not only what you spent in the past year, but also how much return it delivered. Did your big push to focus on live video deliver the growth you had anticipated, or is it time to regroup and change how you’re using those resources?
Review Your Content. Look at everything you published in 2019, from blog posts and white papers to email newsletters. Make a list of your top performers and make note of a variety of features, including the targeted audience, headline, word count, subject matter. Use the information to determine what was working in your favor with these pieces so that you can replicate the success in the future. You can also tag the pieces that might be good candidates for repurposing into another format for this year’s marketing strategy.
Analyze Social Media. Don’t miss out on the wealth of information available through social media analytics. Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms offer insights into your audiences, engagement and the performance of certain types of posts. Take a look at what your competitors and influencers are doing on social media to determine if there are certain trends you should consider for your marketing strategy.
Get Buy-In. After you’ve spent weeks preparing your marketing strategy, you may want to set it aside and get back to your daily assignments, but the job isn’t finished. Share your plans with others across the organization, from executives to sales reps, to get a collective excitement around your plans to deliver leads and growth to your company.
Getting started is the hardest part of any marketing strategy, but with SJC all you need to do is pick up the phone. Whether you need a comprehensive, start-from-scratch plan or you simply need someone to take over the headache of a social media strategy, our team is here to help.