By Valerie Jimenez
New Year, new business plan!
As you’re getting ready to create your marketing strategy for 2013, remember there’s a few things to consider for your marketing campaign, especially how you’re going to approach it.
It’s important to take a “holistic” approach for your marketing campaign, rather than in individual pieces. For example, don’t just determine you need a website. A website by itself won’t do very much if you don’t bring traffic to it. Start by thinking of different ways in which you can attract viewers. Then make sure to define your website’s purpose. Do you want people to contact you? Do you want people to learn more about your services to simplify your sales process? Maybe both?
With that being said, don’t allow traffic to be your only focus. Often times, the websites with the most traffic produce the least amount of leads. This can occur when a website is not visually appealing, can’t be seen through a smartphone or a tablet, or includes confusing and unnecessary information.
The same idea should be applied to the use of social media. Think of what you’re achieving by spending all that time on Facebook and Twitter. Are you sending the right message? Do you have appropriate tools so that people can find information if they want to research more about you?
They key is look at your marketing campaign in a holistic manner, meaning to think of it as a whole. Here is a step-by-step process that you can use to help you plan and execute a holistic marketing campaign:
- Set your marketing goals. Some marketing goals could look like this:
- Increase brand recognition
- Increase sales by 20%
- Enhance credibility
- Determine your budget. Whether you’re going to implement the strategy or hire a marketing agency for that, the budget will still need to be set.
- Draft your strategy. Examine each goal individually and come up with possible ways to achieve each one. The most feasible solutions should become your strategy.
- Identify key players. Identify who will be in charge of executing your strategy so that there is accountability.
- Reality check. Once you know what your budget is and you’ve identified possible ways to achieve your goals, ask yourself if it’s realistic.
- Execute the strategy and track results. As you are executing, you must be able to measure numbers of visits, traffic increase, traffic sources, etc.
- Search for trends. Do you get more traffic on your blog when you post on Wednesdays vs. when you post on Mondays?
- Record results and start over. After 90 days, analyze your results and plan for the next 90 days based on your recordings.
Valerie Jimenez is an innovative business leader and Chief Executive Officer and Creative Director for My Website Pronto. For more information, please visit www.mywebsitepronto.com.
