Start the year with a bang – it’s time to improve your business marketing
How do you feel about January? Are you someone who likes to hit the ground running, or does it take you ages to motivate yourself after the Christmas break?
At Get Ahead, we’ve learned to start the year with a bang! As soon as the fireworks go off for New Year, we’re feeling excited about what the future has to offer. We look for ways to do better in the coming year, harnessing the power of a fresh start to raise our standards and take our business to a new level.
In this blog, we share some of our ideas for starting marketing with a bang.
Invest in your marketing
Savvy business owners know that marketing is a good investment. Marketing is essential for you to communicate your business messages to the wider world. Without it, no one will know you’re there!
If you’re feeling dubious about investing in your marketing, you’re not alone. However, the marketing experts at Get Ahead recommend focusing on the results, and taking a streamlined approach to leads and conversions. This approach usually shows a great return on your marketing investment. As long as you market your business in the right way for your industry, you’ll see a greater profit increase than if you don’t do any marketing at all.
Plan ahead – it’s the key to consistent marketing
The Get Ahead team have really noticed the power of consistent marketing. Keeping up with our social media, blogging, newsletters and website have helped us communicate better with clients and strengthen our brand.
To maintain this consistency, we plan ahead. It’s only the first week in January but we already know roughly what we’ll be shouting about in April! Of course, finding marketing ideas often takes up more time than actually delivering them. We’ve found that devoting a few hours to finding ideas saves a lot of time, as well as taking the stress out of marketing.
Use the seasons to structure your marketing
One of the barriers to effective marketing is gathering enough content! Themes for your newsletter, social media, upcoming promotions or anything else can be hard to find.
However, we have learned to go with the flow of the year – we find it helps us keep our ideas fresh. For example, many of our clients outsource phone answering and other admin to us while they are away on their summer holidays, so we like to market these services in late spring. If you run a garage, for example, offering winter tyres is a great seasonal marketing opportunity; beauticians might like to share different looks for summer and winter weddings. Graphic designers might like to showcase their skills with different seasonal images, while accountants often leverage key dates in the financial year.
Whatever industry you work in, consider using the different months, seasons and festivals to provide some structure to your marketing. With a forward plan in place, you’ll find future marketing easier.
Outsource your marketing (or some of it!)
If marketing isn’t your strong suit, or you don’t have time to do it, consider outsourcing so you can focus on your core business. You don’t have to outsource all of it – sometimes a consultant can help you come up with ideas and then you can deliver the campaigns yourself. Or you might be great at words but new to video, in which case you might keep your blogs in-house but outsource creation of your YouTube content.
If you think outsourcing might help your business, give us a call. Your local regional director can help you identify what you need and how to get the best results for your business. To find out more, read our case study with Crest Coaching here – it’s a great example of how affordable input from Get Ahead’s virtual experts can empower business owners and streamline their marketing.
