Your marketing to do list for 2020

As the new year stretches out ahead of you, your business planning may include thoughts about your 2020 marketing strategy; do you have one in place, does it need refreshing, is it working?

If you’re finding yourself in this position, I’ve pulled together some top tips for what should be included in your marketing to do list for 2020.

1. Know your purpose and live your values

You need to be clear on what you’re doing, and why you are doing it. In the words of Simon Sinek, and a question we often ask our clients, what is your ‘why’?

Once you’re clear on your why, you’ll be able to communicate with your customers in a much more authentic, powerful way. Similarly, your team will be more committed too – something which Rachel has talked about recently.

Customers are now much more switched on and interested in the values of the companies they’re buying from, and it can play an important part in their decision-making process. So now is the time to champion the causes that your business is passionate about, whether that be your local community, local suppliers or sustainability, for example. Chances are, if you care about it, your customers will care too.

Talking about the charitable and community activities you are involved in, whether that be on a global or local scale, is a great way of building a connection with potential customers and giving your business a valuable point of difference as well as providing great content for news stories and social media posts. In addition, you are bound to attract employees, suppliers and customers that believe what you believe, and therefore a build loyal team and band of supporters for the future.

2. Make a plan

The need for a marketing plan is nothing new for 2020, however we still want to reiterate its importance. So many businesses still fire away with their marketing tactics without a solid, well thought through plan behind them. Take the time to define your marketing objectives, your audiences and your key messages, then you can think about the best tactics to deliver the results you want.

Once you have a plan, don’t file it away and never look at it again until January 2021! Keep going back to it to make sure you’re on track and you’re not getting distracted by something that’s not going to help you in getting closer to your goals. Be honest with yourself, is the plan working? Does it need reviewing? The plan doesn’t have to be etched in stone, simply a guide to keep you and your team on track.

3. Connect and engage with your customers

In an increasingly digital world, people are craving connections and personalisation is a key trend for 2020.  There are so many opportunities for personalisation, particularly online so we would encourage you to analyse your customer data and think about ways in which you could personalise your marketing to specific customer needs. Could you create product suggestions based on a customer’s previous purchases? Could you share a piece of content that’s specific to a particular demographic?

4. Be consistent

In order for your customers to build a connection with you, and for your marketing to be really effective, you need to be consistent. You need to be clear on the messages you are sharing, and make sure they’re consistent across all of your marketing platforms. For example, is your website content aligned with your social media posts? It needs to be!

You also need to be consistent with the type of marketing activities you undertake, and how often. It’s no good posting three times a day on social media one week and then nothing for a month! You need to be realistic with what level of activity is going to be sustainable and stick with it, quality is often better than quantity.

5. Measure the right things

With so much data now at our fingertips, it can often feel overwhelming and you might be feeling the pressure to measure absolutely everything and to produce report after report.

Stop. Think about the marketing objectives set out in your plan and work out what data is going to help you to measure how you are progressing towards these. It’s easy to get stuck in a rabbit hole when looking at your website analytics for example, so pick a few key metrics that you want to measure month on month and go from there. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign, are you tracking how much traffic it’s driving to the website and how many enquiries it’s generating? If you’re publishing a monthly blog, is anyone reading it?

If you’re struggling with planning your marketing for the year ahead or are wondering how you’re going to make your goals a reality, why not get in touch to see how we could help.