Your marketing strategy should function as a blueprint for your decisions in the coming year. The first step to building an effective strategy is to evaluate your 2021 marketing and decide what worked well and what was somewhat less effective. Did any of your advertising help you meet your goals for the year? Did your creative campaigns deliver the ROI you hoped for? Spend a day outlining this information so you have a guideline for building your new strategy.

From there, it’s always a good idea to start with a SWOT analysis method and write down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to marketing. Pair that information with the results from last year’s campaigns to start building your plan.

Now you can start outlining some measurable goals for the new year. Decide what you want to achieve and then work backwards to figure out the steps you need to get there. Here’s a good example of a measurable marketing goal:

Marketing Goal: I want to hit 5,000 followers on my business’ Facebook page by the last month of 2022. Here are the steps I will take to achieve that goal:

1. I will post on my business Facebook page at least twice a week.
2. I will engage with a comment or a post from another user every day.
3. I will create two educational content pieces every business quarter and share them on my social pages.

While setting your goals, you want to consider market segmentation. To do this, think about your target audiences. Who are your customers and what are their business needs? What are their biggest challenges and how can your products and services help solve them? Be sure to pay close attention to each audience’s customer journey and where they’re finding you. If it’s on social media, focus your efforts there. If they’re discovering you via Google search, you may want to invest more time and money in your search engine optimization.

Once you have your goals outlined, it’s time to create a budget and allocate money to each individual marketing channel. It’s good to diversify across multiple marketing channels, but, as mentioned above, be sure to allocate more of your budget to the channels that you know your customers use most frequently to find you.

Need some help? Check out this free marketing plan and follow the roadmap to business growth.

 

What are some strategies you have found to be successful for your business? Share them with us on our Facebook page!