The early bird gets the worm, a concept familiar to all the intrepid marketers outlining their plans for the year to come. Doing so in advance gives you the time and opportunity to think through what your enterprise most needs and then map out an informed path for achieving it. Those who put off this necessary task might be tempted to dive into misguided solutions head first.
It typically takes months to create a comprehensive plan to guide a business through the next year or more of campaigns. So if you haven’t done so yet, time to roll up the sleeves and get started.
Targeted Goals
From CEOs to sales leads, it’s a great time to come together and discuss what overarching goals will steer your campaign. Sharing different perspectives will help you get a better understanding of how your brand strategy will move forward in 2024. That means identifying where you want your brand to be in three or five years.
What’s most important during this stage is to focus on the kind of movement you hope to see in the business itself. Limiting that set of goals to a few at most will help keep everyone working toward what’s most important. Projecting more than a year into the future will help you target the revenue growth that will keep everyone on track to achieve that goal.
Once you’ve determined them as a team, you can move on to more specific questions such as whether the team will plan to launch a new product or penetrate a new industry, and which audience you should be targeting to get there.
A Well-Considered, Organization-Wide Brand Strategy
The next step is to craft an organization-wide brand strategy to match your new year marketing plan. This requires carving out a strategy session with all the key players in your organization. Everyone will need to take a step back and reflect on what they view as important in the year to come. Topics to cover in your strategy session may include:
- Industry trends
- Buying behavior
- New or growing customer demands
- Competitive advantages
- Potential weaknesses
This part of the plan will clarify how to make the most of the marketing dollars available. Even if there is no internal marketing team and the bulk of the work will be outsourced, list components of your current approach that will likely roll over into next year – as well as new tactics you plan to fold into your campaigns.
A Digital Marketing Partner to Integrate the Technology You Need
Does your website reflect the branding changes to come? Is your team positioned to handle all the back-end tagging, analytics and other digital aspects of your plan?
This is a good time to find a marketing specialist that can offer their perspective, walk you through the details and handle the digital elements of your plan. Having a transparent conversation about your needs and what your budget will allow will give you an idea of what to expect in the months ahead.
At Connections Marketing, here’s what our team of specialists can do for you:
- Brand Strategy
- Ongoing Web Support
- Social Media & Content Development
- Metrics & Analysis
- An Expert Perspective
Connections Marketing is ready to help – both in crafting a successful, forward-focused marketing plan, and in implementing it. Contact us to discuss how to get started.