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Phew! Another (hopefully) successful year awaits. But don’t get too comfortable, because now is the best time to set yourself up for success in 2024. The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on last year’s wins and losses and use them to update your strategy for the first quarter.
Read on as we’ll show you how to create a coherent plan that focuses on your audience, goals, and budget.
1. Create a marketing plan for the first quarter
Each new year brings new opportunities for brands to increase profits and keep customers smiling. Now is the perfect time for an annual marketing review and a deep dive into how your strategies have worked.
The busiest season of the year is over. It’s time to start planning for an even better year next year. That being said, here’s how to create a consistent plan that focuses on your audience, goals, and budget.
Related: How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan: 5 Steps
2. Looking back on the previous year
This is not the time for business as usual. The goals you set for this quarter will set your overall pace for the year, so it’s a great time to reevaluate what you know about your brand and audience. If you want to see success this year, it’s time to question everything.
It means taking inventory of your past accomplishments and failures (there’s the keyword there). Analyze his KPIs and indicators for the previous year. How did last year compare to the year before that? The answers to these questions hold the secret to success and should be the light that guides you through the new year.
Start by gathering important information such as your website’s annual traffic, engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. Examine social media engagement flows, website behavior, and sales data to identify consumer behavior patterns and use them for your next creative idea.
3. Audit and optimize your online presence
Every business strives for a strong online presence, and while some of you may have seen it come to fruition, others may not. No matter how you performed last year, it’s time to get a complete brand audit online. Collect all metrics from all the communities you’re a part of and determine if key elements like your brand message, social content, ad campaigns, website visits, etc. are working or need to be adjusted. .
Remember, you should always approach an audit with a plan in mind. Here’s a magical way to do that.
First, check the design and content of your website. Do you want to explore what’s on the page or quickly click away? Is it user-friendly and easy for customers to get where they need to go? Is your website easily viewable on mobile? ? If not, an update is required.
Additionally, take a quick look at their social media profiles. Update your profile, banner, and profile photo to reflect your current brand and target audience. Keep your profile consistent with one visual aesthetic and optimize with keywords in all content posted.
These small steps can make the biggest difference in the world when it comes to attracting new viewers and retaining your current ones.
Related: How to grow your brand’s digital presence from 0 to 100,000 followers in just 6 months
4. Clean up your community
If you want to stay in the good graces of your audience, you need a solid plan to tell them about your product and provide them with something of value that will keep them coming back. This includes everything you post online, such as blogs, social media, email, and networking groups.
What is the answer to this? It’s easy. Every quarter, your brand should go through and clean up all the communities it has joined in the past year. Identify your messaging, content types, and aesthetics across all platforms to ensure your brand is consistently and cleanly represented.
Online communities are essential for any brand, but too many can be a recipe for failure.
Most importantly, remember your email community. Please check your subscriber list, as it may have changed significantly in the last year. Re-evaluate your content and make sure it’s written to speak to your current audience, not your audience from a year ago. Remember, it’s not about you.
5. Adjust your paid advertising plan
Advertising is truly an art form, and each campaign gives you new insights on how to continue to improve. The beginning of the year is a great time to get a yearly overview of how your ads are performing each month or quarter. So, in order to improve your advertising, here are the main things to look out for when analyzing the previous year’s results:
First, we take a closer look at the performance of ad campaigns individually over the year. Check the numbers and analyze the details for each campaign. By looking at details such as ad spend, engagement, and ROI, you can understand which campaigns worked and which didn’t, and determine why, so you can save time and resources on what doesn’t work in the future. No more wasted.
Next, make some changes to how you fund your ads. This means shifting funds to campaigns that are most effective, or tweaking the amount you pay to specific demographics or regions.
Finally, something we marketers are no strangers to is adjusting campaigns based on changing trends. There are always new places to display your ads and new ways to create them. So be on the lookout for new opportunities, like trying video ads instead of carousels.
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