Happy New Year! With a new year and a new decade, now is the time to take an inventory of your current marketing and advertising strategies and put in place some updates and new processes. Here are 5 achievable New Year resolutions for upping your marketing game this year!
1. Google Business Profile– Check in on your Google Business profile. Are your contact number and email up-to-date? Are your hours current? Can you add an offer for prospective clients that find you via search? By keeping your Google Business page current, Google will reward you in search engine rankings.
Protip: The beginning of the year is a great time to ask past customers to leave you a stellar review. Google’s algorithm considers past reviews as one of the most important factors in ranking local businesses so make sure you are getting credit where credit is due!
2. Update Your Social Media: Old Twitter profiles and LinkedIn pages compete against your updated social media profiles to rank when someone searches your business’s name. Don’t let potential customers think that your business is closed because you are inactive or outdated on old profiles. Delete or deactivate past social media accounts and focus-in on the active and current ones.
Protip: Small businesses should be using no more than 2-3 social media accounts. With time already spread thin, make sure your efforts are concentrated and effective by concentrating on the social media that best fits your marketing strategy.
3. Create A Content Calendar: This is the year to finally plan ahead by creating a monthly content calendar! It may seem like a big investment of time to sit down and think of a full month of posts, but for a small business owner it will save you so much time in the long run. Instead of sitting down and trying to generate new posts daily, you will be able to follow a monthly schedule. It eliminates the “uh-oh, I haven’t posted in a week!” realization. Knock it all out at once!
Protip: Take your pictures and videos early too. Store them on your computer and pull them out as needed to use on your social media, blog, website, etc.
4. Use Your Money Wisely: The beginning of the year is a great time for you to sit down and look at all of your marketing and advertising expenses over the last year. With stretched budgets, small businesses shouldn’t be separating their advertising budgets in twenty different ways. To make the greatest impact, pool your marketing spend and use it in a few places to make a bigger dent.
Protip: Don’t disperse your Google Ads or Facebook Ad budget into multiple campaigns. Create a few strong campaigns and utilize your budget there. Split testing is also a great way to make the best impact with a limited online ad budget.
5. Get Comfortable With Video: Like it or not, video is the present and the future of social media. If you don’t want a personal cameo to feature yourself as the face of your business, there are other opportunities for video. Product features, touring the offices, interviewing employees or product tutorials are a few ideas. Video has proven time and time again to get the best engagement rates so don’t shy away.
Protip: Use Facebook caption tools to open your videos up to an audience that doesn’t have their volume on. Easy to use, just make sure to edit the text and grammar if using the auto-generate feature!
AND if you’re at a point in your business that you feel ready to expand your marketing even further, you know where to find us.
