Your top 5 New Year's marketing resolutions
January is boom time for gym memberships, lettuces and pottery classes. As a restaurateur or hotelier, you can expect to sell fewer glasses of Chablis and a few more salads. At least until around January 27th, when the UK’s willpower apparently breaks.
But the New Year is a great time to assess your marketing plans for the year ahead, and reflect back on 2015’s successes and lessons.
Our top five marketing resolutions below are manageable and effective, to help you focus your marketing efforts for 2016.
1. Have a plan
A marketing plan is vital. We all know that by now, right?
But businesses, markets and technologies are constantly changing. Pull your old, dusty marketing plan from the cupboard and you’ll probably find it doesn’t fit any more.
Start with a set of clear goals for the year - X% turnover increase, Y% customer retention, etc. - and work back from there to create a plan of action. If a marketing action isn’t working towards those goals then it might be time to reassess its value.
Your 2016 plan needs to be mindful of current technological and marketing trends, which leads us to...
2. Focus on your mobile offering
Following Google’s ‘mobilegeddon’ crackdown on non-responsive websites in 2015, everyone and their dog now has a mobile friendly site.
But, since mobile has now overtaken desktop as the primary source of web views, shouldn’t your mobile offer be more than just a poor relation of your desktop site?
2016 is the year to ensure your mobile site is beautiful, engaging and user friendly.
3. Make the most of video
2016 is also a big year for video marketing. Online video now accounts for around 50% of all mobile traffic, and has been shown to increase email clickthrough and website dwell time (stats here), as well as boosting consumer confidence in your product or service.
Could this be the year to factor video into your marketing arsenal?
4. Reflect and learn
Is your buyer persona the same as you originally thought? Are the social channels you chose doing as well as expected? Did 2015 throw up any major surprises?
Now is the time to reflect on what worked last year, and what didn’t. Be humble. Be adaptive. Canvas opinion from your team, or consider working through your marketing plan with a consultant.
5. Use your time wisely
Marketing automation is big business, and can free up the time usually spent curating, posting and sharing content.
Social media clients like Buffer and Hootsuite can take care of scheduling and posting across multiple channels, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Pinterest. Sites like Feedly make short work of curating shareable content. All of which frees you up to do what you do best.
Here’s to a successful 2016.
