You don’t need 20/20 vision to see that the new year is right around the corner. With the new year comes new goals for yourself and your business. You have some important questions to ask yourself, such as: what sort of hurdles do you want to overcome? What new levels do you want to reach and rise above? Where does digital marketing fit into your business plan in 2020?
A new year means a new start for your business and a time to reflect and make changes for the upcoming year. HighClick is here to help with those changes with a helpful guide on how to develop a digital marketing plan in 2020.
Analyze your Marketing Strategy
Growing up my mama always told me “Prior Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” The best way to plan is to reflect on what you did the past year and what were the outcomes.
What sort of marketing did you do during 2019?
What marketing trends did I follow?
How successful were those campaigns?
Did you do any digital marketing?
If you didn’t track your analytics in 2019, yesterday was now is the time to start.
When you track your analytics, it helps you understand how your campaigns are running in real time. You’ll be able to see what your customers respond best to and modify future campaigns to reflect this outcome. Analytics allow you to understand how your money is being spent and where to allocate funds in the future.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter give business accounts access to basic analytics free of charge for easy tracking.
Now that you’ve analyzed your previous year it’s time to set some…
Marketing Goals for 2020
Analysis of your previous year gives you insight on how effective your strategies were and how responsive your audiences were to those strategies.
Do you want to focus on a new ? If your website hasn’t been updated since 2017, the answer should be yes. When you spend marketing dollars on a professional website design, you are not getting a disposable product in return. An updated web design is a gift that keeps on giving.
Will you spend more or less time on campaigns this year? Social media marketing is one of the backbones of a successful digital marketing campaign with how it aids brand awareness, but you don’t have to spend every working hour cultivating it. With the help of your analytics, figure out which platforms best help your business grow, engage with your community, and bring people to your website or storefront. Then decide on how exactly you want your channels to look this year. Will you keep the same post style, or change it up?
Our advice: let your business’ story tell itself. Be authentic in your posts, and your customers and community will help with the rest!
If you’re going to give a business a new website, you’ll need to give it updated search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is an algorithm that helps you pop up in search engines. Search engines crawl your site to find keywords and phrases to help them identify you, and bring you up on the search results page. If your website is not optimized, there’s a chance you won’t show up at all.
Will you give yourself an edge on the competition and invest in pay-per-click (PPC). PPC is an online marketing tool where you pay a search engine a sum of the fee each time your gets clicked. If they read your ad but don’t click, you don’t pay! PPC is a fantastic option for businesses who want new leads fast.
Everything is helped by. As the adage goes “content is king!” Content marketing helps with social media posts, website updates, and SEO. It’s the type of marketing that happens all year round, regardless of a sale or not. Content creation can range from the blog post you typed up, or that new video you’ve worked hard on to showcase your business – it’s the chameleon of the digital marketing world. Content marketing shouldn’t explicitly promote a brand or product, but instead, spark interest in the brand or product.
(Psst. Find more content marketing for beginners here!)
Everything interacts with one another. A website gives your business a hub for new and existing customers to find you. Your social media channels give your customers a way to interact with the business on a new level and learn about your website while boosting brand awareness and promoting your content. Content marketing helps boost your SEO, at the same time providing content for your social media channels. Without proper SEO, finding your business will be a struggle for you but a boon for your competition, and with a calculated PPC campaign, you can be sure to come out on top.
The challenge here will be how you allocate your time and funds to these various digital marketing types. It’s finally time to…
Create a 2020 Marketing Strategy
How do you want to do this? While running around like a chicken with its head cut off is an option some people like to go with, to run a successful business and not stress yourself out is a sounder marketing strategy. When we previously talked to you about Social Media Optimization, we told you to be S.M.A.R.T. – an acronym to help you strategize your marketing goals.
Be Specific. Now is the time to make a list of marketing goals that align with your business goals, but what exactly are your goals? “I want to post on these holidays.” “I want to run sales around this time.” “I want our brand imagery to look like this now.” “I want our voice to sound like this now.” These are building blocks to writing out your marketing goals, but be more specific.
When you are specific, you give yourself a road map that is easy to follow and won’t get you lost. It’s the first step, arguably the most essential step in your S.M.A.R.T. planning.
Examples:
“These products and services will be at the forefront of my marketing.”
“I will be at 5000 followers in 5 months.”
“I will celebrate every major holiday with a sale.”
“I will work for more reviews left on my Facebook and Google pages.”
“I will create this type of content every other week.”
Be Measurable. How exactly will you know if you’re reaching your campaign goals? Is it with clicks or impressions, increased traffic or sales? This helps “future you” with revisiting old campaigns to see what worked and what didn’t. Planning ahead helps for years to come!
Be Achievable. What is in your power to accomplish? We all want to be the next Amazon, and there is no reason why we can’t, but each journey towards success starts with one foot in front of the other. With each achievable goal, you surpass in the new year, reflect on how it exceeded your expectations and how you’ll take those lessons into the next goal and campaign. With each campaign, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s achievable and what isn’t.
Be Realistic. Can you realistically achieve it? Again, we all want to be the next Amazon, but realistically speaking there will never be another Amazon. Are your goals within your marketing budget? Are they one brand for your company? Do you have the time or manpower to achieve them? Do you know a friendly local marketing company that is here to help?
Be Timely. When exactly do you want to accomplish it? We’ve talked on and on about goals and what happens before and after you accomplish them, but not so much on when you’ll do it. Giving yourself a time table of your marketing strategy is imperative! Content calendars are superb tools to help you plan out when and where your marketing will be. This will aid you in being timely with your posts, and help you visualize your plans for each month or quarter.
Need a little help? Twitter released it’s 2020 content calendar to help marketers and business owners alike.
In conclusion
PLAN! If you fly by the seat of your pants, you’ll business will reflect that. Don’t let your marketing efforts go to waste! Every successful business owner had a strategy on how they marketed themselves. You owe it to yourself and your company to have a marketing plan (a digital marketing plan at that) in place for 2020 that will help you elevate your brand.
One of those plans should be to contact HighClick Media, your local digital marketing agency. Elevating brands is what we do. We’ll work with you to create an on brand, highly focused, digital marketing strategy and campaign to fit your budget and vision. Reach out to us today, and be ready for the new decade.
