Is your small business ready to ramp up marketing efforts in the new year? The past two years have highlighted the need for businesses to be adaptable and prepared—and your marketing plan should be no different.
While your marketing strategy may evolve and shift as needed, these four steps will ensure your brand has strong foundations to build a lasting impact in 2022 and beyond.
Identify Your Ideal Prospect
The foundation of any strong marketing plan is having a clear understanding of who your audience is, and how to reach them. Here at Imbue, we like to go beyond the basics of target audience identification to start defining your prospects as real people—real purchasers with real needs.
What are some common behaviors, goals, and pain points of your ideal prospect? How do they consume information? What do they value most in life? Understanding the motivation behind the actions of your prospects will allow your business to better serve their needs.
Our free workshop walks you through our highly-effective (and fun) “persona development” process, which will help you develop your own plan for clearly defining your core buyer personas and reaching them through more relevant content, designs, and user experiences.
Strengthen Your Brand & Message
Now that you’ve armed yourself with the crucial information on your ideal prospects, infuse this knowledge into your brand and messaging! While a full rebrand may not be necessary, we recommend revisiting your brand with a fresh perspective to identify any areas that may need improvement.
Keep your buyer personas in mind as you answer these questions:
- Is your visual branding appealing to your target audience?
- Does your messaging support your prospects goals, values, and needs?
- Are you creating a memorable experience with your brand?
After this step, remember to audit and update all marketing materials and assets as needed—including your company’s website, social media profiles, brochures, image templates, and more!
Build a Multi-Channel Strategy
The days of relying on just one medium to reach your ideal prospects are long gone, and for good reason. Take social media for example—Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Inc., faced its longest outage in company history this past October, affecting all the company’s properties including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. If your business relies solely on one platform to communicate with customers, you may run into issues like this that are out of your control.
Additionally, with consumers facing more distractions and notifications than ever before, a multi-channel marketing strategy will help your message stand out and be heard. Think about where your ideal prospects spend the most time and consume information—whether it’s in their email inbox, a social media platform, podcasts, newspapers or blogs for example.
Flesh Out Your Sales Funnels
All elements of your marketing plan should ultimately help move your audience to conversion points, so a strong sales funnel is crucial to your success.
Would your ideal prospect want to speak with a sales representative before purchasing? Would they prefer to research and gather information on their own? Either way, how can you streamline your process and develop messaging and content that supports your customers’ journey?
Once your sales funnel is streamlined and effective, your company can utilize paid advertising to fill the top of your funnel with as many qualified leads as possible. Google search ads, programmatic display ads, social media ads are just a few of the many great options to help you effectively reach your prospects and customers.
Want to discuss how Imbue can help your business develop a strong marketing strategy? Get in touch today!
