Marketing is an ever-changing field, and you can quickly fall behind your industry competitors if you’re not looking for ways to level up your game. The start of a new year is an excellent opportunity to consider what you can do better to attract and engage consumers.
Here are five steps to level up your marketing strategy in 2022.
1. Set your goals for the current year
The first thing you need to do in order to change your marketing strategy for good is to rethink your goals in 2022. Setting marketing goals is a critical step in achieving everything you want for your business, whether that means more awareness, more sales, or more dedicated customers.
As a new year is just starting, it is time to visualize what you’re planning to achieve through marketing. You can think of new goals or reevaluate the ones you still hadn’t completed at the end of 2021.
However, when choosing your marketing goals for 2022 or any new year that has just started, make sure that they are realistic and punctual. For example, instead of setting a general goal like “I want to sell more”, think of a more punctual objective such as “I want to increase my profit by X%”.
Failure to set up clear and achievable goals can make you lose your focus in your marketing efforts. Without goals, you will also fail to choose the right strategies to promote your business and products/ services.
2. Reevaluate what you know about your market and customers
The next step to level up your marketing game in 2022 is to reevaluate what you think you know about your market and audience because things may have changed since you’ve last done some market research.
Over the past couple of years, marketers had to adapt to a fast-changing world where they needed to reinvent everything they knew about meeting customers, attracting them, and selling. The pandemic and its effects have redefined everything about the purchase behaviors we knew and the means used for that.
Now, although the field has become a bit more stable, consumer preferences and market trends are still prone to changing overnight as major events happen at all times around the world. So, it is always a good idea to reevaluate what you know about the market you’re in and the audience you have.
As the experts from Savanta Research explain, “Taking time to evaluate who is buying your products or services helps in understanding what marketing tactics to implement next and meet your business goals.”
So, make sure that you reevaluate the market trends and waves that you can use to your advantage at the start of a new year. Additionally, research your audience to see if there’s something that changed and how you can modify your marketing and sales tactics to cater to what works for your audience at the moment.
3. Analyze the successes and failures of your previous marketing activities
Every start of a new year is a great opportunity to look back and see what you can learn from what happened in the past year. Both your successes and failures are essential lessons that can help you improve.
So, what worked for your marketing in 2021? What didn’t work? Make a list of all the marketing tactics you had implemented in 2021, and take a look at the statistics to see what brought you the results you were hoping for and what didn’t. Additionally, make sure to reevaluate the strategies you’ve used but didn’t work as you planned and try to find out why that is. Maybe there is a small adjustment you can bring to a specific tactic to make it more efficient.
As you learn what you did right and what didn’t turn out so well, you can adapt or change your marketing strategies to help you achieve your business goals. For example, if influencer marketing worked for your brand in 2021, it’s a good idea to continue using this tactic in 2022 as well. However, if your content marketing didn’t bring the ROI you expected, maybe you can adjust and improve your content to better attract and engage your audience.
4. Think about how to get your audience’s attention today
Consumer preferences constantly change, and what worked in 2021 may not be as effective in 2022.
Think about it: a decade ago, when Facebook was the most successful social media platform, everybody was on it. So, it made perfect sense to run a social media campaign there. However, these days, other social media platforms are more attractive for younger consumers, such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, or TikTok. So, it makes perfect sense to make sure that you check what attracts your audience today before choosing where to direct your marketing efforts and resources.
If you find, for example, that your audience better likes to engage with brands on Instagram, it makes sense to focus most of your promotion efforts there. However, suppose you find that they prefer video content on YouTube. In that case, you can focus on leveling up your video marketing, like starting a vlog or creating product videos, explanatory videos, and so on.
The bottom line: think about what grabs your audience’s attention today and focus on finding ways to leverage that.
5. Always keep track of your progress
Once you’ve created your marketing strategy considering all the things discussed above, it is time to let it roll out. Allow your marketing strategy to reach out to your audience and watch it find success or fail.
More precisely, once your marketing tactics find their way to your prospects, you need to sit back and see what happens. Luckily, these days you have a number of tools you can use to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Gather all the data you have access to and use it to monitor how well your efforts are doing. Depending on the information you gather, modify, improve, or maintain your marketing tactics.
