Revamping Your Marketing Strategy For 2018

It doesn’t matter how successful a year your business had, everything starts over in 2018 and that includes your marketing strategy. Whether you are heavy into Google with SEO & PPC, spending time on social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, or you believe more in running ads across the web, it’s time to take a serious look at what worked, what didn’t and what needs to be changed. Here’s how you get started:

• Pull all your data: There’s no point in trying to revamp your marketing strategy unless you have the information necessary to know what worked and what didn’t. Pull all the analytics; SEO, email, social media, PPC and everything else. This is where you are going to get the information that will influence your decision for the New Year.
• Look at your competitors: What are the other companies in your area and industry doing? Where are they seeing their best results? What are they doing differently that you should try? For example, if they are focusing more on SEO to get steadier traffic because PPC costs are too high, then that’s where you should focus too.
• Why didn’t it work: It may not have been a bad idea that caused something not to work this year. The problem may have been that certain elements of the campaign didn’t work. For example, you focused on social media this year but you had a small budget. The problem isn’t that you focused in the wrong area; it’s that you didn’t give the campaign enough resources to work.
• What’s changing next year: Whether it’s Google, Facebook or any other platform you market with, everyone will have different plans for 2018. That means you need to do your research and find out what they are changing so that you have an advantage. For example, Facebook may demand less call to action in your posts while Google wants more content. Those are adjustments you need to be ready to make.
• What can I add: This is an opportunity to upgrade what you are doing. For example, you can create better content including ads, videos, blogs and more to encourage interaction. You can also try to look into new avenues like SEO, press releases and other things you’ve been reluctant to try in the past.

Whether you are pleased or not with how 2017 went, there is much you can take away from your experience. Look at everything you did, see what could have been done differently and formulate a strategy that is going to do better next year.