13 Ways to Refresh Your Marketing Strategy This January

🎯  Can you believe we’re nearly half way into January already!? How’s your January marketing activity going? 

I know for many clients it’s an unnerving time (especially if your financial year runs from Jan-December) seeing if the marketing strategy and plan you put together months ago is working in terms of hitting targets in the first month of the year.

If you:

• Don’t actually have a marketing strategy or plan

• Have a plan but you’re worried it won’t cut it this year 

• Have a plan but it’s just rolled over year after year after year after year…

Here are 13 ideas on how you could inject some fresh thinking into your marketing strategy - which could translate into real growth, or efficiencies:

1. 🤝 When’s the last time you spoke to a customer? Nothing beats speaking to customers, it should be a starting point for any marketing plan and something you should do regularly. Pick up the phone (or video call!), find out why they chose you, what their journey was and what you could do better - this can inspire new product development (or improvement), new campaign/ messaging/ channel ideas. The world is a bit of a scary place right now - how are they feeling? what are their fears, can your business help at all?

2. 🧐 Have you reviewed your customer segments lately? Sticking with customers, review your customer data. Maybe there are new segments you can go after, maybe there are segments you should consider excluding from your targeting.

3. 🎯 Are your audience personas still relevant? When reviewing customer segments, are their behaviours still the same? They may have changed due to factors like the ‘cost of living crisis’. Where are they spending their time? E.g. If your marketing plan still has Twitter (X) as a core channel - are your target customers actually there any more? (many users have left)

4. 🔍 Are you keeping an eye on competitors? Have they refreshed their messaging or creative? Are they growing or in decline? Free tools like Google Trends can be handy to see trends in your market

5. 💰 When’s the last time you audited your PPC activity? Google Ads has changed a lot over the last few years, and Google have sneaked in things like making changes on your behalf which you might have signed up for without knowing. Are you ads appearing on relevant searches? Are you targeting conversions? What’s your impression share (in terms of room for growth?) Here's my guide to setting up and checking some of the basics in PPC

6. 🚧 Likewise, SEO - has anyone taken a fresh look at this recently? Is your site loading fast enough? Any broken links? Have you ever done a content audit? Are you using language (keywords) that your potential customers actually use? Many clients are sitting on bloated websites with duplicate and/or light content that’s holding them back from growing on SEO. My SEO training for teams continues to be very popular - I try to cut through all the jargon and focus on basic principles you can build into your day-to-day web and SEO optimisation. These days it's even more important to get your basics in place so your brand and website can also get picked up by AI bots like Chatgpt.

7. 💌 Are you using Email marketing? It surprises me when I speak to clients that email is often a low priority. Done right it can be a highly cost-effective channel - and help guide customers through your buying funnel by lining up triggered emails which can be set to be sent while you're busy doing something else.

8. 🪂 Is this the year to consider Radio or Outdoor advertising? If you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling on digital channels, you might want to consider a small test on the more traditional channels - even local TV can be affordable. Be guided by where your customers hang out, and make sure you can measure the impact even if it’s just website traffic/interactions and/or brand searches 

9. 🧐 Have you reviewed your agencies lately? If you’re using agencies for any of the above, are they still delivering value, over and above what could be done in-house? How do you know they're doing a good job? When’s the last time you reviewed them vs others? A few clients have used me to review exactly this.

10. 🛍️ Is your customer journey seamless? Walk through the buying process yourself to identify friction points and opportunities for improvement - maximise every penny of your marketing budget by plugging holes in your ‘leaky bucket’ (funnel!). There's no point investing in advertising if your customer journey is cumbersome, better to fix that first!

11. 🌍 Is your team ready? Talking about in-house - if you have a team, are they set up for success? Do they have clear objectives? Do they need any marketing training? If you haven't already, set up a team planning session to align goals and energise your team for what’s ahead.

12. 🚀 Are you experimenting? Are you making the most out of AI tools to streamline your work and processes (many of which are free!)? Many marketers hold say 5-10% of budget for trying something totally new, but if you can’t do that - you can still try to build ‘test and learn’ into your activity - if you only use images on social media, try video? Try different messaging on digital channels? Try sending emails at different times?

13. 📊 Is your data and reporting up to scratch? If you seem to spend most of your time updating reports for stakeholders, how can this be streamlined and automated? Are you reporting on the right KPIs?  

This isn’t a comprehensive list. I originally wrote it for my LinkedIn page a year ago, although it feels like everything changes fast, marketing principles stay the same.

And you might not be able to get through the whole list - but that’s what consultants like me are for! Send me a message if you want to chat through any of the above, I can be a fresh pair of eyes, I can be someone to bounce ideas or concerns with.