At the end of every year I like to reflect on my decisions: Mistakes made, victories won and needed changes in the new year. These mistakes go beyond extra helpings of cookie dough ice cream or my failure to burn off that small tire around my belly.
As a business owner, I think back on strategic decisions I made during the year that kept me from winning business or missing business leads. I have made my list and checking it twice on what I need to do in order to have my team go further faster in 2015.
With that said, I thought I would share an end of year “to-do list” to help you get off on the right foot in 2015 in reaching your marketing goals. It will help you define IF and HOW people are going to remember you and your products. Don’t be a Ned Ryerson!
GOALS: What goals do you have beyond “we want new clients”? Define income goals, budget goals, networking goals, ROI goals on time spent on projects. Where do you want to go and how you are going to get there?
What are your marketing goals? How many people do you want to reach? What kind of conversion rate do you want your website to have? Do you know the trends for your industry?
Analytics & Metrics: What tools do you need to measure and understand results of your efforts (besides increased sales)? Using tools help to understand what efforts are working and what are not; finding the holes in the income budget is key to growing your bottom line. Maybe this means your conversion rate on your website is lower than 1% or your web traffic is too low to reach the goals? Google analytics is a great step in the right direction to understanding if your website is working for you to help you reach your goals.
Market place identification: Where are your prospects hanging out online? STOP and THINK HARD before answer that question. Are you currently reaching new buyers? What social platforms are they finding out about your competitors on? Own catering business and not on pinterest? Well, you might as well be serving up your prospects on a silver platter to your competition. Talking about the Green Bay Packers on twitter while living in Georgia Bulldog country then you get an F at connecting with your demographic. Talk football, but talk to UGA fans about Dawg ball, tailgating and BBQ recipes. Not sure where to find your prospects online? Ask them what platforms they go to in order to find inspiration and find out what they are looking for from vendors.
Planning: Do you write out a daily “to-do list’? Manage your marketing strategy the same. Put together a social media schedule of when to find your prospects online and develop a content calendar around what interests them. Have a plan and execute it!
Your greatest asset (Your website): In a prior blog I posed the question “Are you working for your website or is it working for you”? Your website works for you in 3 ways.
- Conversion Rate Optimization: A standard ecommerce website should convert somewhere between 3-4%. Are 3-4% of the visitors of your website buying or contacting you about services? If not, time to do some work on your website!
- Marketing Automation: How are you capturing email addresses to market to your target audience? Companies that use marketing automation see on average a 451% increase in qualified in leads and 61% off B2B companies send leads directly to sales. Want more stats on marketing automation then check out this article.
- Email marketing: Email marketing educates customers on current and future products. Recently we spoke with a food company prospect who had product in 5 stores due to the store’s customer’s requests. Four of the stores purchased no more than one product because they were unaware of additional products available. The prospect consistently missed an up-sale opportunity due to lack of education! Email marketing automation potentially increases productivity by 15% without picking up the phone.
As my informative blog comes to an end, I hope that you find some nuggets on how to reach your sales goals in 2015. I know that these tools help us and our clients to reach goals.
As I leave, I would appreciate any suggestions you might have on how to hatch my plan to get Brad to address me as “Dark Lord of All That is Genius” in every conversation in 2015.
I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season!
