Get a Jumpstart on Your 2010 Marketing Strategy

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With the new year right around the corner, it is important for every company to begin thinking about their marketing strategy for 2010.  Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind when creating your marketing strategy for the new year.

Create a Marketing Timeline

Have a plan.  Start by laying out a detailed strategy for at least the first two quarters of the year.  This way you can begin to budget and allocate internal resources needed to make the strategy successful.

Keep What Has Been Working

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  Keep doing what has been working in the past.  You may be able to make a few minor adjustments to make those marketing tactics even better.

Test a Different Marketing Approach

If every year you decide to do the exact same marketing, you will never really know if other types of marketing are more successful.  Marketing tactics have changed drastically compared to 30 years ago…even 5 years ago.  Don’t be afraid to try different things.  Even if your marketing budget is small, do the research, understand where your target market is communicating, and find a new way to reach out to them.

Here are a few things you can try:

• Sponsor an industry newsletter
• Write a guest blog post for a well respected, high traffic blog
• Host/Sponsor a local meet-up in your area
• Invite clients and potential clients to your office for a Free Seminar
• Create a great piece of content that you can give away on your site (white papers, free tools, etc.)
• Test different discounts, special offers, promotions

Monitor, Analyze, Adjust…Repeat

In any marketing campaign it is important to be able to measure its success.  In order to do that, you need to define what you consider a conversion.  Is it a download? A contact form submission? A phone call?  For traditional media it can be a bit harder, especially for radio, TV, and billboard advertising.  But for the Internet everything is trackable!

Make sure you have a good analytics program to track what people are doing on your site.  You may want to invest in a phone tracking solution, so you can track calls that originate from your website.

Once you have a significant amount of data, it is important to analyze it by seeing which campaigns were more successful.  If certain marketing programs are generating more business and a better ROI, start allocating more budget towards those campaigns.  For the campaigns that did not return a positive ROI, you could try tweaking things like messaging, offers, keywords, etc.  Sometimes a simple tweak can bring back a big return.

Marketing Trends for the Upcoming Year

Forrester Research reported that Internet Marketing spending will increase another 13% in 2010.  More and more companies are starting to shift their advertising dollars from traditional media methods to things like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, video creation, e-mail marketing and mobile marketing.

We are really starting to see a major shift in how companies are marketing their products and services.  With social communication tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; companies are able to track and monitor the progress of their Internet marketing campaigns unlike traditional marketing.  In this down economy, business owners are being smarter with their advertising dollars.  Make sure you do the same and invest is marketing programs that are well-researched, targeted and measurable.

So…have you planned your 2010 marketing strategy?