There's no better time than now to improve your marketing and communications. To start the New Year off right, here are three bad habits to break in 2017.
- Creating content that isn't targeted
Use research to create buyer personas that illustrate your ideal customers and their key characteristics. Tailor the content you create to address the needs of at least one of those target personas.
Pay special attention to your personas' ages and customize messaging to best appeal to each generation. Baby Boomers and Millennials are uniquely motivated and will react differently to the same content. Highly targeted content delivered through an age-appropriate channel will greatly increase effectiveness.
- Chasing shiny objects
If you don't have a strategic plan, stop reading this minute and go schedule a working session with your team. Without a plan, it's much harder to determine if shiny objects like Snapchat sponsored filters or virtual reality applications make sense for your brand. The result is a distracted team that's pulled in too many directions.
Start with your company's highest priority business objectives and explore how communications and marketing can help move the needle in each area. Identifying ways you can positively impact the bottom line, as well as key metrics to prove your effectiveness, sets you up beautifully to break bad habit number three.
- Not measuring ROI
To show the impact of marketing and communications dollars, you'll need lots of data and the right tools to gather it. Before you execute on any tactics in 2017, think about how you will measure success. (HINT: Do this as part of your strategic planning process!)
After you secure the data-with call tracking, bit.ly links, HubSpot, social media, Google Analytics and any other tools that make sense-paint a picture that articulates the effectiveness of your efforts and the impact on your company. This also provides an opportunity to run A/B tests and adjust course when things aren't performing as they should.
You can make 2017 your best year ever by breaking these bad habits. Let us know if you need help and stay tuned for more info on marketing, PR and internal communications.