We’re now officially three days into the New Year and whilst you’ve probably already thought about setting resolutions in your personal life, have you considered setting marketing-related resolutions for your business? Setting goals for 2019 is a good way to reflect on the past year and give yourself a clear vision to work towards in upcoming months.
Psychology dictates that people are more likely to stick to resolutions made at the start of the calendar year because it is perceived as a ‘fresh start’. What’s more, writing down your aspirations drastically increases your chance of sticking to them.
So, without further ado here’s 3 marketing resolutions you should be working towards in 2019.
1. Start Making Videos
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know that video content is at an all-time-high. From YouTube to Twitter to LinkedIn, video content is everywhere. According to Wyzowl, 72% of businesses say that video content has improved their conversion rate. However, this doesn’t mean that videos have to be expensive and overly technical, make the most of the equipment your team already has. In most cases a candid video filmed on a smartphone of something fun happening in the office will be enough to humanise your brand and encourage conversations with potential prospects. We believe that successful video content is as simple as the three E’s – engaging, easy to digest and entertaining. As long as you have all three, you’re onto a winner!
2. Don’t Over-Automise
The last couple of years have well and truly seen marketing automation go from strength-to-strength. Don’t get us wrong, we’re a sucker for a bit of automation too. We use Buffer to automatically publish social posts and our ChatBot Kev will automatically start a conversation with website visitors. What we have learnt, however, is that there is a fine line between sharing and oversharing. Content for the sake of content is quite frankly a waste of resources. Are your audience interested and actively engaging with your content?
Research shows that 5% of a companies content accounts for 90% of their engagement. What this means is quality is much more important than quantity. If your content is overly spammy and has poor shareability, it is ultimately not creating value. It’s important to think about what your audience actually want to read in terms of their interests, concerns and pain points. These can be established by creating comprehensive buyer personas. By all means continue using automation and scheduling platforms, but not at the expense of real-time engagement and conversations.
3. Streamline Your Marketing
An integral part of business development is profit generation. With the commencement of the new year it might be time to take a look at your current marketing tactics and analyse what is working and what isn’t. A lot of people commonly believe that when it comes to marketing you should have a presence across all platforms, but this is often ineffective. You can’t be everything to everyone. Invest more into the platforms that yield the best results and fade out of those that perform poorly. Like we’ve already mentioned, it’s all about quality over quantity. There is no point being on all platforms just for the sake of it. Are your target audience using that platform? If not, what’s the point? Time is money, it’s better to put your money where your mouth is.
Remember that it only takes 21 days to make a habit, which means that in less than a month you can vastly improve your marketing tactics.
Have you set any marketing resolutions this year? What are they?
