When it comes to hitting your marketing goals, planning and focus is everything. With a few months left before the end of 2019, the need to regroup and refocus your energies is more pressing than ever. You still have time to meet the marketing targets you set for yourself, but you can’t afford to be wasting time or effort in areas which aren’t helping you meet your goals.
As 2019 has progressed, elements of your original marketing plan may have changed.
Projects might have fallen through. Emails which you felt sure would encourage click through with their carefully crafted content might not have reached the desired or predicted number of people. A spanner might have been thrown in the works during the development phase of your new website production, meaning that rather than launching in March, you had to wait until the end of April before you could start promoting it.
While these changes are common and to be expected, experiencing them can start to put pressure on you as a marketer. The chances of hitting your goals by December, which is drawing ever closer might be feeling less and less likely at this point in the year.
Don’t panic. With just over three months left of the year, there’s still time for you to regroup and refocus. The ‘back to school’ feeling that September brings is a fantastic opportunity for you to make changes and improvements to help you hit your marketing goals for the rest of the year. To help, we’re sharing our top tips when it comes to hitting your marketing goals.
Review Your Business Objectives
Take the time to reflect and review your business objectives as a whole. Knowing how your marketing efforts are working to support and achieve these will help you when it comes to reflecting and reviewing your approach.
Understanding your business goals enables you to analyse any gaps in your overall marketing plan, to ensure it is aligned with the revenue plan. Use this knowledge to help you realign your marketing approach and refocus your efforts during the final months of the year.
Utilise Marketing Reports
Before you start making changes, it’s important to understand how your current marketing activities are performing. Marketing performance reports are a great way of gaining insight into the successes and failures of your marketing approach.
The information provided by marketing reports enables you to see areas which need strengthening and which activities are working effectively. If your social posts aren’t encouraging people to visit your website, research what your competitors are doing and see how their approach differs from yours.
Marketing reporting helps you spot opportunities to make your current approach to marketing do more. For example, if your website landing page is resulting in people completing your desired action, look at why.
Once you have this insight, you can begin to develop your marketing approach for the rest of the year to ensure time, money and effort that you’ve already invested, is paying off – and that money isn’t being wasted in areas which aren’t producing results.
Ensure Your Targets Are SMART
Setting targets at the beginning of the year is one thing. Use the insight you have gained from your recently completed marketing report to reevaluate your goals.
Long term goals can be difficult to communicate, so creating a set of SMART targets (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) can form a link between how your day to day actions are helping you achieve long term success.
If you’re meeting your goals daily, weekly or monthly over a sustained period, you’re more likely to reach your overall goals by the end of the year as a result.
Marketing Budget Review
A well-crafted budget set at the beginning of the year will keep you on track and stop you from making unplanned (poor) buying decisions. But with time running out when it comes to reaching your 2019 marketing goals, it might be time to review where you are spending your money.
Reviewing your marketing budget and getting changes approved by a manager can be time-consuming. Preparation is key to avoiding pain points, so it might be worth downloading a simple checklist which you can use as a guide.
Are there areas of your marketing activity, which given an increase in budget could produce greater results? Slight adjustments to where you’re spending your budget and your time could help you achieve more with minimal changes to your overall marketing approach.
A prime example of this is video production. Well produced video content has the potential to reach and engage vast amounts of people. If your videos are lacking impact consider increasing the production budget to ensure you’re creating content which you’re proud to promote.
Consider Your Content
If your website analytics show that no one is following the journey that you want them to take, or if they are not reading below the fold on your webpage, or perhaps your emails are being opened but have no engagement – it might be time to look at your content.
Your content needs to demonstrate how you can provide value. Differentiate yourself from the competition, establish yourself as an industry leader, work to build a relationship with your audience and communicate your brand purpose.
When it comes to creating or developing your content ensure the messaging is clear and impactful. Take your readers on a journey, where at the end of it they’ll be convinced they want to work with a company like yours.
Experiment with style and messaging until you have a voice which is unique to your brand and sets you apart from the competition. If your audience like what you’re saying and remember it, they’re more likely to come back.
Create a 90-day Plan
Don’t ‘set and forget’ when it comes to your marketing plan. Even if you already have an existing marketing plan, revisit it and look for ways to implement it with a focussed 90-day marketing action plan.
Establish changes which need to be made, divide up the key roles and create achievable deadlines which take into account your available resources. Adjusting your marketing plan helps relieve the pressure which comes with recurrently missing deadlines, but prevents you from losing focus on achieving your overall goals.
You might find that creating a new 90-day marketing plan increases productivity and motivation, making it easier to work towards the new deadline you’ve set yourself.
Project Management
Project management is a key component to successful marketing. Implement a system which enables the whole team to communicate effectively. By preventing bottlenecks occurring due to poor communication, the creation of campaigns should flow more smoothly and productivity should be higher as a result.
Take time to refocus. Assess your current position and consider how your marketing is supporting your business goals. Use this insight to redevelop your marketing plan and focus your attention where your efforts aren’t producing the desired results. Making consistent effort to improve your marketing performance on a daily basis means you’ll be continually working steadily towards achieving your goals.
Unsure how best to put our top tips into action? We can help you hit your marketing goals for 2019. Start with a free marketing audit.
