Streamline your marketing for 2023
The beginning of a year is a good time for reevaluation. Some people make definitely resolutions, others of us simply use the time to step back and take a look at how the last 12 months went and what we can improve for the next. In this article, I’m going to show you how you can do that with your marketing with four top tips:
Have a target audience in mind
This is the first tip, since all of the others depend on getting this one right. You may feel that in listing our target audience to one or two specific types of customers will also limit your appeal. In fact, the opposite is true. Trying to appeal to everyone in fact makes a business’s messaging so general and wishy-washy that it’s more likely to appeal to no one.
So, this January, sit down and think about your product or service—think about what problem it is solving for what type of person, think about who is most likely to both see the value in what you’re offering and be able to purchase it, and then think about the question covered in our next tip—how and where you can reach that person.
Choose the right social media platforms
Once you have your target audience in mind, you can use this to inform where you concentrate your marketing efforts. The good news is that you are unlikely to need to have and/or spend the same amounts of time on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Mastodon, LinkedIn and who knows what else that pops up in future. When you know your target audience you can educate yourself on which platforms they are likely to use and focus on those.
Set a realistic customer journey
Your customer journey is the steps your potential clients take from first hearing about you to making a purchase. Knowing what this is will mean you have an end goal in sight for everyone who interacts with you on social media or visits your website. This goal can vary for every business and will often depend on what precisely you’re selling and to whom. For example, if you sell greeting cards (or something else that can be considered an impulse purchase) your customer journey will look different than if you sell self-catering holidays.
If you consider your product or service to fall into the impulse purchase category, then you’ll need to sell in larger qualities, so your customer journey can focus on making it as easy as possible for your customer to actually make that purchase, and you’ll also want to make sure you can retarget them in the future for repeat purchases.
If your product or service falls into a more considered purchase category then your customer journey will be more of a gradual one, showing them why your product or service is the right one for them and helping them make up their minds to buy.
The key point here is knowing where you want your audience to go from each point of contact will make it much easier for you to point them in the right direction.
Outsource what you can
The majority of business activities we undertake will cost us either time or money. And as we know, time is money! In other words, it’s important to understand that all the marketing you do has a cost one way or another, and to work knowledge into your strategy. It may actually cost less to pay for an advert on Facebook or in a local magazine than for you to spend the time it would take to reach the same amount of people yourself—especially if you could be using that time much more productively elsewhere.
Likewise, getting a virtual assistant or social media manager in to help you with things that take you a long time could save more that you spend. That’s something for every business to work out for themselves, but it’s good to be aware of the possibility that spending money to save time can actually be a cost-effective option. It’s certainly something to think about anyway, particularly if you’ve done the above suggestions and are still struggling to find the time for everything.
I hope you find these top tips helpful in streamlining your marketing this year. If you’d like to book a free discovery call to discuss how we can help with anything in this article, do get in touch.