Seven Tips for Revamping Your Marketing Strategy in the New Year

Change. It’s the only constant thing in life, so they say.

Successful brands have no choice but to constantly evolve, so what we recommend to our clients is that they evolve in a smart way. As new technologies and competitors surface, best practices that worked six months or even a week ago may no longer be effective, and new best practices must be determined and implemented.

Although there is never a bad time to take a step back and evaluate the strategies you have in place, the beginning of a new year is certainly a popular one. For your company, the date change from a “6” to a “7” might be a natural benchmark for measuring your past year’s performance and setting new goals for the months to come.

Of course, marketing strategies and approaches vary by industry and brand, but here are some general tips that we recommend to our clients as they take the time to review, reform and revamp theirs.

1. Look within. Conduct an internal assessment of your strategies. How did your marketing plan perform in the past year? What are your brand’s goals and were they met – or have they changed?

2. Look up. See whom you’re competing against. Have other brands come into the picture or evolved in a way that might change the way you approach an area of your business?

3. Look out. Assess the landscape of your industry as a whole. What new technologies or ideas have surfaced? How has the marketplace changed?

4. Ask around. Your management team naturally has strategy on the brain all the time, so gathering other perspectives is always beneficial. Open the conversation to all employees to discuss ideas and get buy-in. If you have the time and resources, a survey to customers can also be a highly valuable reality check.

5. Track and measure. You can’t know if you’re successful if you don’t have measures of success in place. Measure your year’s results against the metrics you set last year, and if those aren’t specific, now is a good time to determine what they should be in the next year.

6. Did we mention track and measure?

7. Plan. You are now equipped with the research, ideas and accurate understanding you need to map out an effective strategy for the next year that reapplies what worked and takes into account what didn’t.

Refreshing your marketing strategy is a big undertaking, but it’s a critical step in implementing efforts that will be effective. And we love this stuff. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or just plain stuck as you look at your brand’s strategy for 2017, feel free to reach out to us!