5 Ways You Can Fall Back In Love With Your Marketing This Year
5 Ways You Can Fall Back In Love With Your Marketing This Year
With Valentine’s Day coming up next month, there’s no better time than now to renew your vows…to your business. Marketing is a key element to every business’s success. Hopefully, there’s always been love and passion behind what you do from the very start as it pertains to your business. But have you put that same love and passion into your marketing? Here are the 5 ways you can fall back in love with your marketing this year.
-
Have A Plan
Love may be in the air… but your marketing shouldn’t be. Spontaneity may be fun when you’re planning a fun outing with a loved one, but not when it comes to your marketing. According to HubSpot, only 32% of marketers say they have a documented content marketing strategy. Having a plan is critical to your success. Here’s why!
- Provides focus: Having a marketing plan can help you create measurable business goals – and help you stick to them. With a marketing plan, you can focus on tangible targets, improving sales, and meeting goals throughout the year.
- Helps with consistency: The key to success in marketing is consistency. A marketing plan can help ensure you and your team are on the same page and know exactly what to focus on.
- Holds you accountable: Once you have a set of goals, and a plan, you’re likely to be motivated to achieve them. It holds you accountable.
- Gives you room to grow: Having a marketing plan set in place at the beginning of the year gives you room to grow through the year. This is because you’re able to look back and analyze what has worked well and what hasn’t.
-
Honesty and Trust
When asked what the most important part of a relationship is, usually people throw out words such as trust and honesty. Honesty and trust should be at the forefront of every relationship you have, including within your business. Whether with your employees or your customers, you should always focus on total transparency. Through your marketing is a great way to show people they can trust you.
There are many reasons why honesty and trust is important in your marketing efforts, including:
- Makes your marketing seem less “sell” focused: While your main goal is to sell a product or service, you shouldn’t try to oversell anything. You should focus on engaging an audience first. Consider what a customer may want from your business before trying to push a sale on them.
- Builds a relationship with your customer: Marketing is effective in terms of bring business to your company and building long-lasting relationships, but only if you are honest and trustworthy. If customers trust you, they’ll be confident you can offer a solution to their problems and meet their needs.
- Attracts the right people to your business: Contrary to popular belief, not every customer is your customer. There are some customers that aren’t ideal for your business, and that’s okay. Being honest will save you from potentially having unsatisfied customers walk through your door. If you’re transparent about your strengths and your shortcomings, those that want to do business with you, will – and those that do not, won’t.
-
Keep Things New and Fresh
One reason that many people fall out of love with their marketing is because they’re not seeing the results they want to see anymore. The ‘relationship’ they have with their marketing becomes stagnant if you will. Every successful marketing campaign stays relevant to its audience. That’s why it’s always important to keep things new and fresh as the times change. There are a few ways you can do that this year, including:
- Stay up-to-date on trends: While you want to avoid adopting every marketing fad into your brand, you want to make sure you’re staying current on marketing trends. The trends that age well and make sense for your business are the ones you should jump on.
- Be a student and a teacher: Responding to customers who engage with your brand is one way you can learn what people like or don’t like about your marketing campaigns. While you’re teaching them about a product or service you provide, don’t forget to also be willing to learn if you want your business to grow.
- Provide content that provides: Don’t just write content for the sake of writing it. Provide content and information that’s relevant. Too much content, especially if it’s irrelevant, can turn your customers away.
- Adapt to the times: Successful marketing keeps its true identity while also adapting to the changes this industry faces every year. Embracing change and all the new exciting trends is a great way to keep things new and fresh this year.
-
Get Engaged
If you like it, then you should have put a… comment on it! Most people fall back in love with their marketing when they see it’s working. As a business, you rely on your customers to see the results you want to see. Sweep your customers off their feet and get engaged with them so you can start to see these results.
Here are some ways to improve engagement with your customers using your marketing efforts:
- Giveaways
- Polls and Quizzes
- Live Videos and Instagram Stories
- Relevant and Entertaining Content
- Responding to Comments/Likes
- Email Marketing
- Asking Questions
- Surveys
- Exclusive Deals
- Online Communities
-
Have Fun!
A big part of having fun is to have passion. Remember why you wake up and do what you do day in and day out – and have fun doing it. Mark Twain once said, “find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” One sure way you can fall back in love with your marketing this year is to simply have fun with it. If you’re primarily business-focused and don’t spend a lot of time with your marketing, you’re not alone. For people that aren’t well-versed in the industry, they often look at it as a chore and something they have to do – dragging their feet through every meeting and campaign.
It’s important to remember that marketing doesn’t have to be laugh-out-loud funny, always themed, or extremely creative to be effective. All it takes is for you to be human and relatable. This year, balance business and fun into your marketing strategy just by being you.