How to Be Successful in 2019: 7 Tips for Creating Your New Marketing Plan

You’ve made your New Year’s Resolutions in your personal life, whether they include getting into better shape, saving more money for retirement, or other improvements. Have you done the same for your business?

With a fresh new year ahead, you may be looking forward with optimism for a successful year. To give yourself the best opportunity for success, though, you need to plan for it. A well thought-out and budgeted marketing plan is one of the most important ways you can boost your business in the coming year. To help you start creating that plan, our marketing experts have seven key tips.

1. Don’t Underestimate Strategy

You’ve probably heard the Benjamin Franklin quote, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” That saying applies to marketing in full force. Too many businesses decide to leave their marketing budgets open-ended, saying that they’ll seize opportunities when they arise throughout the year. In reality, what often happens is that either you seize too many opportunities and you go over your budget or you get caught up in the day-to-day grind and marketing skips your mind altogether.

Instead, it’s important to have a clear budget and to define how you plan to spend it. It’s a good idea to leave a portion of your budget as discretionary so you can make adjustments as the year goes on, but that should be a small part of your marketing budget rather than the majority of it.

2. Use Your Own Data

As you plan your marketing strategies for the year, you may not realize how easy it is to predict which campaigns will be successful. That is, it’s easier than you think if you have data and know how to use it. Look at all the information you have from your past marketing efforts, like the amount of revenue you gained from various campaigns. You will also want to analyze why certain campaigns weren’t successful and fix the holes. For example, take a look at which pay-per-click ad campaigns have been the most beneficial. If clients or patients did schedule an appointment but didn’t come back, find out why they didn’t continue to use your company or practice. Your website’s analytics, social media marketing analytics and client surveys are treasure troves of information when analyzing this data. They can tell you how you’re getting traffic and clients and what types of traffic and internal marketing could use some TLC.

3. Start with the Big Picture

It’s easy to say you want to grow your business in 2019, but it’s important to look at how you want to do that. Go through your books and determine where you could be performing better. Which demographics aren’t you reaching? Which products or services aren’t selling as well as they should be? All of this will offer direction and objectives for your marketing plan.

4. Set Specific Deadlines

As you create a plan for your marketing campaigns throughout the year, it’s a good time to start establishing deadlines as well. It’s easy to get caught up with running your business and suddenly realize you’re in a time crunch to get a new campaign off the ground. Particularly when it comes to special events and holiday-focused promotions, your best chance for success is to start marketing early. Something as simple as a reminder on your calendar will help you stay on track and tell you when to start working on your next campaign.

5. Establish Clear Goals

Another important part of your planning should be setting specific goals. You need to have a way to track whether your efforts are successful, and a distinct goal will give you a measure to compare. It’s a good idea to have several goals to measure. For instance, let’s say you’re a plastic surgeon. Set goals for the number of leads you want to get from each campaign, the number of new patients you want to get, the ROI you want to receive from each campaign.

6. Track with Next Year in Mind

We mentioned above that your own data is one of your best tools for making your marketing strategy. While there are some types of data that will automatically be available, like Google analytics and pay-per-click advertising data, this information won’t give you the full picture. It’s important that you set up ways to track other data as well. For instance, every time a new lead gets in touch with you, ask them how they heard about your business. If you have leads that don’t become clients or patients, try to find out why. Find the holes and the missing links internally. Gathering this type of information year-round will help you identify patterns and make more reliable marketing strategies in the future.

7. Bring Your Staff into the Mix

Once you have a marketing plan and a calendar of your campaigns, be sure to keep your staff in the loop. Especially when it comes to receptionists and marketing professionals, your team members can provide valuable insight into your clients’ habits and feedback. When they know your goals and where you want to focus your efforts, they can help you work toward those goals.

There’s a reason many businesses start preparing their marketing plan for the new year in October or November: because combing through data and coming up with a reliable strategy takes time. Still, it’s not too late to make 2019 your best year yet. For a more advanced helping hand, reach out to our team at McCauley Marketing Services to help you come up with a killer marketing plan for the year.