How to overhaul your marketing strategy for 2017

Is your current marketing strategy just not cutting it anymore? Maybe you aren’t happy with the returns you’re getting on your investment of time and money? Well, the start of a new year is always a good time to reflect on your current strategy and potentially hit reset.

We often fall into a rut when it comes to marketing. Like clockwork we post content daily on our selected channels. While it was novel and fun in the beginning because it was fresh and exciting, the daily time allotted to engagement slowly gets cut shorter and shorter until sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. That initial excitement has dulled and, even though we may not realize it, the original strategy has become robotic and boring – hardly something to excite your customers!

Take a step back and look at ways you can assess your current strategy and light a fire under your marketing once again.

Check the data

When many people hear the word “data” they often cringe at how buzzy it has become. FEAR THE BIG DATA!!! It’s like data has become the wizard behind the curtain. You don’t need to be a data wizard to utilize numbers to check your marketing strategy success. Using simple metrics you can track your progress. Before you take on a marketing strategy overhaul, be sure to look at how you have done in the past year, looking at your selected metrics. Reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, and what your best marketing moments were for the year. That will shape how you move forward in this process.

Check your overall business objectives

Brush the dust off your business plan that you created in the beginning. Those things aren’t meant to just take up space, they are meant to guide your overall business growth. Have a peek at your business objectives that you set out to achieve and see how your marketing strategy has supported those objectives (or not). Sometimes you may find that your business took an interesting turn in a different direction, so you need to adjust your business objectives. Whatever the objectives, your marketing strategy should support them.

Change your mindset

You’re not going to see better results if you aren’t willing to take on a different perspective. See your marketing strategy as more than just selling a product or service – you are selling your brand. Once you see yourself as more than just a product, you will be able to get more excited about your marketing strategy.

The other thing you can do to help change your mindset is to learn about marketing, even if you are just educating yourself so you can work more efficiently with your third party marketing consultant/agency. It helps if you understand the tools and metrics they will use to help overhaul your marketing strategy.

Set measurable goals

Whether you continue to use the same metrics as 2016 or you have changed your strategy slightly, you need to work towards a goal, and it needs to be measurable. Depending on your selected channels you could set goals to measure an increase in followers, an increase in engagement, increased conversions on each channel, increased website traffic, etc. Your goal can’t simply be to increase the numbers, give yourself a specific target that you can refer to throughout the year. Set milestones for yourself and challenge yourself to do everything you can to reach those milestones to stay on track.

Don’t set goals for 2017 before you look back on the data from 2016. You need to see where you are going, but you also need to see where you have come from so you can set realistic goals.

Step outside of your comfort zone

One of the reasons your marketing strategy may not have worked in the past is that you were too afraid to step outside of your comfort zone to make it better. Sometimes that means learning about something new or really getting to know what your audience likes. Challenge yourself to try something new with your marketing strategy in 2017.We’d love to hear about your newfound marketing enthusiasm! And if you need a bit of a push, we can help you rebuild your marketing strategy to get you to where you need to be.