Approaching your marketing without a plan is pretty much like approaching your marketing with a plan to fail. Marketing is one of those things that has a million moving parts and can be crazy overwhelming, but it’s also one of those things that if you simply have a plan in place, it’s a million times easier to manage. 

You pickin’ up what we’re putting down? 

Your 2021 Marketing Strategy should be made, ideally, before 2021 arrives. Here is a quick view at what you need to do. 

Dive Into Your Business 

Identify where you are now and where you want to be. This means dig up the details, the data, the facts, and establish your goals for your business. Dive right into your metrics to see things like website traffic performance, social media performance, conversion rates, email performance, and social community impact. This will help to create some benchmark spots for you, so that you can measure your success. It will also help you figure out what is working well for you and what isn’t. Looking forward at what you want to achieve will help you identify where you need to be putting in some targeted efforts at boosting.  

Get Clear On Your Target Audience 

Get a clear picture of who your target audience is. Create that Ideal Client Avatar or Client Persona. Dive into their demographics and psychographics. Get a solid understanding of them so you know exactly who you are targeting, where to find them, and how to talk to them. Then do a quick SWOT analysis on your current audience and ask yourself “Am I currently attracting the right person??” Look at your engagement metrics (aka the things you did up above!) to help you determine that. If all is good, carry on! 

Get Clear on Your Message 

We love talking about putting out the right kind of message, don’t we? When it comes to your marketing, consistent, on-brand, and goal-focused messages are critical to connecting with your audience and seeing business growth. Clearly sharing your unique value helps your target understand just how awesome it would be to do business with you. Add sharing that message in all the right places, and you’ve got a recipe for success. (Tip: Understanding your audience and knowing where to find them connects to this!) 

Create Your Marketing Plan 

Every business is different. Everyone is going to have a different approach to how they promote, launch, sell…all the things. BUT, having a clear plan laid out that helps you take each step one at a time and with confidence. Your marketing plan connects back to your goals, what services or products you are offering, how you are offering them, and how frequently you offer them. Think about creating an overall annual plan and a quarterly plan that supports all of that. In there, you will need to figure out what kind of assets you need (or already have!!) to help you promote, how you want to reach your audience, where you want to reach them, how to leverage an organic strategy and if paid ads are for you. 

Implementing and Monitoring Your Marketing Strategy 

When it’s go time, implementing your plan can be made easier by taking advantage of workflow tools and scheduling tools. Creating a calendar that guides what goes where and when takes the guess work out of what you need to do and allows you to spend time creating your content and marketing assets in advance. (Say goodbye to sitting at your desk every day staring at the screen wondering what the heck you are supposed to post!) Once you have executed your plan, keeping track of how things are performing for you will help you know what to keep doing, what to stop, and what to change. Comparing the new data that you gather as you go along to past data (ie the metrics you gathered when you were starting your plan) will help you see how you have grown and changed.  

Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, right?? Or is it more easy-peasy-lemon-WTF-is-that??? If it’s the latter, you know what to do!! Connect with us ASAP and we’ll help you to get clear, focused, and organized for your 2021 marketing strategy. 

PS Do we follow each other on Instagram??? We’d love to connect with you there! Find us at @defineanddesign.co and shoot us a message to say hey!