Creating your Marketing Strategy for 2016 to make the coming year your best yet

Whether you just started using the Internet to market your business, or have been doing so for years, a New Year means a fresh start and is the perfect time to set yourself online marketing goals and targets. Not sure how to plan your 2016 marketing strategy? Read on and discover how to make 2016 your best year yet.

What did you learn in 2015?

Whenever I create any sort of plan or strategy, I will collect as much data and information as I can from the time that has just passed. To make the best decisions for your business, you’ll want supporting evidence to backup your decisions. Ask yourself what worked in 2015 and what didn’t. Don’t be scared to scale back on blogging if you generated zero leads and sales from your last 25 blog posts, even if everyone else is doing it. You may find that Google AdWords yielded more customers even though you only ran 1 campaign for the year. Pro-tip: be on the lookout for false positives too. For example, blogging may be very useful for your business but the reason you generated zero leads was because your content wasn’t good enough. Sometimes it’s wiser to get an outsider to audit your 2015/2016 plan to give you an unbiased assessment.

How are you going to generate leads in 2016?

If you don’t have a plan in 2016 to drive traffic to your website, you’re in big trouble. Without traffic you’re not going to generate leads, and without leads you’re not going to make sales, and without sales you’re not going to make money. I’m stating the obvious, but businesses often get so wrapped up in fulfilling orders, that they forget to formulate a plan to keep the future orders coming in. You should never put all your eggs in one basket by focusing on one traffic source; from the lessons learned in 2015, pick as many channels as possible that you have the time and budget to manage and scale.

How are you going to nurture leads into customers?

Generating leads is only half the battle. You still need to convert them into paying customers. How will you be doing this? What methods are you currently using now and how can they be improved? And once they do convert, do you have any upsells planned or further products to sell them? If yes, how will you market them? If not, will you be creating some? If you cannot answer any of the questions I’ve just put forward, you need to bring your team together and get brainstorming as soon as possible.

Just focus on leads and customers – forget about the rest

There’s a lot of marketing blogs out there that will tell you to create an in-depth social marketing plan for 2016, or to write a year’s worth of blog ideas, or 52 email marketing newsletters. The truth is none of that matters if you don’t have a strategic plan to generate leads and convert them into customers. And even if you do have one, it will most likely have several holes which can be patched and fixed. Only when you have a rock-solid sales funnel that is fully optimised, should you spend any serious amount of time on micro strategies like social media content plans and the like.

Test everything you’re doing

There’s little value in devising a plan in 2016 if you’re not going to measure it. If you’re going to create a better lead magnet, measure how many opt-ins per 100 visitors you receive from the previous one. If you’re going to write blogs to generate opt-ins, try a number of different topics and see how many opt-ins you receive per 100 visitors. The same goes for email marketing, Facebook ads and anything else you do. If you aren’t testing everything you’re doing, you’ll waste time and money doing things that you shouldn’t.

Summary

Don’t over complicate your marketing strategy for 2016. Just ask yourself what you’re going to do in 2016 to get more leads and which methods you’ll use to turn them into customers? The acquisition of these two components will decide whether your business fails or succeeds in 2016. Not sure how you’re going to acquiring leads and customers in 2016? Schedule a marketing strategy session and we’ll help you work out a roadplan to make 2016 your most successful year yet.