Marketing Checklist to Strengthen Your Business Before the New Year
Whether we want to believe it or not, it’s almost 2023! That means it’s the perfect time to step back and evaluate, tweak and change your marketing checklist for the new year.
Before diving into the nitty gritty, let’s go over what a marketing plan is.
First and foremost, a marketing plan is specific to your brand. It is created in order to help you plan out, systematize, implement and continue to keep tabs on certain goals and objectives over a given period of time.
Your marketing plan should include the following elements in order for it to serve your business.
- Market Research
- Target Consumer Research
- Competitive Analysis
- Goals and Objectives
- Marketing Budget
- Content Marketing Plan or Marketing Strategies
- Results Monitoring and KPIs
It is important to revisit these components regularly.
With the new year approaching quickly, now is a great time to review your current marketing plan.
Follow along with us as we guide you through an end-of-the-year marketing checklist that will help you adapt and plan for a successful 2023 marketing strategy.
Competition
You may already have a completed competitor analysis in the books, but it’s important to revisit that periodically.
What better time to do so than before the new year?
Here are some questions you can ask yourself in order to stay in the game.
- Who are your top competitors?
- What are their current marketing messages?
- How are they positioning their products or services?
- Who is their target market?
- What is resonating with their audience?
- What isn’t working for them?
With the rapid evolution of technology today, business tactics and strategies can change on the fly. Reevaluate what is and isn’t working in your market to ensure that you’re the top competitor.
Redefine your Yearly Objectives
Goals and objectives are the keys to helping you stay on track throughout the week, month and year.
Without any, you have no reliable way of measuring your success, no way of keeping you or your team accountable and no way of recognizing how to improve.
Follow these four easy steps to create your new objectives and stay on top of your goals.
- Determine exactly what you want to achieve this year.
- Set specific goals that are customized to these achievements.
- Based on your goals, create smaller objectives that will help you reach each goal.
- Review your progress regularly and adjust as needed.
No matter how big or small, reviewing and improving upon your objectives will help you reach your 2023 business goals!
Reevaluate Your Marketing Budget
While it may seem overwhelming, evaluating your 2022 budget and addressing your 2023 marketing budget should be a top priority.
A marketing budget is a plan that maps out and allocates funds to different marketing strategies.
These strategies may include a combination of the following:
- Spending Time Researching or Hiring a Team of Researchers
- Purchasing Tools and Software
- Running Paid Advertisements
- Hosting Events
- Outsourcing Marketing Tasks
Before you start allocating funds or setting any new goals, make sure to carve out some time to review your previous year’s marketing wins and losses.
Did you launch a new email marketing campaign that didn’t perform as you imagined?
Are your social media ads not generating any leads?
Take note of these flopped campaigns and figure out why they didn’t perform.
Reviewing what worked and didn’t work can help you tweak and realign your new marketing goals and objectives before planning for your updated strategy.
Need help? Reach out to us to see how we can assist in creating a goal-driven marketing checklist for 2023!
Social Media
Similar to reviewing your marketing budget, you will also want to review your 2022 social media analytics.
Gather the following metrics from all social sites you used this past year.
Awareness Metrics:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Audience Growth Rate
Engagement Metrics:
- Likes
- Shares
- Saves
- Interactions
- Engagement Rate
Conversion Metrics:
- Profile Visits
- Link Clicks
- Website Taps
Viewer Sentiment Metrics:
- Social Share of Voice
- Social Sentiment
Again, it is important to note what performed well and what didn’t.
If you find a type of content that has consistently low engagement, make sure to take that out of your new strategy. If you see a pattern of posts that get a large number of reactions, make sure to keep that type of content in your monthly rotation.
Evaluating these metrics can help you create a robust and engaging social media marketing plan. Doing so will prove to be extremely valuable in building brand awareness, generating leads, increasing reach, engagement and yes… follower count!
Keep Up to Date on Trends
Over time it may become easy to dig your head in the sand and stick to the same old plan, but doing so might prevent you or your company from growing.
With the preparation of a new and improved marketing plan, now is a great time to review your industry’s trends. Whether that be a shift in pricing, marketing tactics, technology, social media, finance or human resources, staying on top of these updates is imperative.
Here are some ways you can easily stay on top of these changes:
- Read industry blogs
- Sign up for industry newsletters
- Read trade journals
- Subscribe to Google Alerts
- Attend networking events
- Observe your competition
- Tune into social media
While it may seem irrelevant compared to the day-to-day management of your business, following up with your industry can help you create messaging that mirrors the ever-changing business landscape.
Review and Rework Your Content
While you are updating and improving your marketing strategy, now is a great time to review your content marketing plan.
Content marketing aims to attract and engage your target audience through audio, video or written content. By doing this, you are using this strategy to achieve your set specific goals.
What can content marketing do for your business goals?
- Increase website traffic
- Increase audience engagement and relationships
- Establish credibility and trust
- Increase brand awareness
- Improve conversion rates
- Find your brand’s advocates
If you are interested in developing a customized content marketing plan for your business, message us today!
Refocus Your Brand
Throughout the year it becomes increasingly challenging to evaluate and refocus your brand. From getting new professional photos taken to updating your website, logos and brand strategy, these marketing checklist tasks can create quite a burden.
Take this time at the end of the year to review and refocus on these important aspects of your brand.
Moving into 2023, you’ll want to have a fresh look and updated brand assets to tackle new clients, trends and other exciting business ventures!
Complete Your Marketing Checklist Today
Reevaluating and updating your entire marketing plan can feel like quite a formidable task, but if you follow these easy steps throughout the course of a couple of weeks your business will be more than ready to crush the new year!
If you’re finding it hard to juggle the marketing checklist right now, don’t hesitate to reach out by filling out a free proposal request right here:
Find out how we can help take the burden off your shoulders and get you on the right track for a new successful and prosperous year!
