It's easy, we know, to look at December as a month where we just let the business take care of itself. We've worked so hard. No one is working in December... right? Some of your competition might be sliding in December, but others are forging ahead and are determined to end the year strong. Into which camp do you fall?
If you want to take the week off between Christmas and New Years to spend time with family, great! What we recommend, though is that you take that week between those two major holidays to get your first quarter marketing plan and your financial goals for that quarter set.
End the year strong AND start 2020 strong. We have a marketing review plan.
Why You Need To Review Marketing Strategy Regularly
1. Pull out the marketing budget. Tally up the line items and see if you'd spent what you'd planned. If you overspent was there a reason for it? It could have been a miscalculation or because the promotion went so well you wanted to expand upon it. Knowing why you overspent on a marketing line item will help you determine its success.
2. Pull out the social media plan. Did you set numbers for the followers you wanted to reach? Have you posted as frequently as you'd planned to? Is your ad spend for social media (this will also be part of #1) reap the results you'd hoped for? What was the return on investment? What were you spending on? If, for example, you wanted to spend on Facebook to get more followers... what did you get from those followers? If it's just a numbers game (hey, we have 1 million followers) was there a benefit? If you spent on social media to drive people to your website can you tie in dollars spent on sales made?
3. What were your assumptions? Almost every marketing plan has some "assumption" built into it. "If we spend X we will get back Y" is an assumption or at the very least an educated guess. Look at what you assumed your marketing strategy would bring in and then put hard numbers to it. Remove assumption and add in measurements.
4. Lessons learned. What lessons did you learn from the marketing strategy you'd put into place at the beginning of the year? How fully did you follow the marketing strategy you'd designed? We get it, many business owners have great intentions, they put a marketing strategy together, they color code it, they add in numbers and metrics... then they put the document in a drawer and forget about it until they do a year-end review.
Now what?
Take what you did that worked out well or exceeded expectations and determine why. Were you in the right place at the right time? Did your product or service fit a unique need in the market at the time it was released? What can you do to make this happen again?
Strategies that worked should be added to your 2020 marketing plan. Strategies that faltered should be looked at as learning experiences and most likely won't be part of the 2020 marketing plan.
Implement the 2020 marketing plan.
1. Write down your 2020 marketing budget. Break it down by quarter, or month or whatever fits in with your marketing strategy.
2. Make note of when you want to spend your budget. If you go to unique industry-specific trade shows in the middle of the year, make sure your budget reflects that potential increase in spending. Know when your customers are more likely to spend with you.
3. What do you want to do this year that you've never tried in the past? Do you want to reach a new audience? How can you do that? As a company who has helped non-pet-centric brands like Tito's Vodka, Subaru and others we know that those businesses have found many of their customers are pet lovers. These big brands have found ways to connect with them in unique ways by offering branded pet products. Does your demographic, or your ideal customer, love pets? If so, speak to their love of their furbaby and devote part of your marketing budget to branded products those pet lovers will want to share with their pups!
PrideBites connects brands to dog owners in a way that forges an amazing emotional connection and converts customers to loyal followers. PrideBites’ turnkey solution helps you differentiate yourself from your competition in a way that your followers won’t stop talking about.
For information on branded and promotional products for your business, contact PrideBites today and corner your market on the share of consumer dollars spent on pets by pet parents.
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