What does your Annual Marketing Strategy look like for your small business? Is it detailed and clear or chaotic and confusing? Does it exist?
An Annual Marketing Strategy can be a difference-maker in the success of your brand. This strategy should guide you through the year as you grow and nurture your business, checking off goals and milestones along the way. To make this a reality, there are six key things that your annual marketing strategy needs.
6 Things That Your Annual Marketing Strategy Needs
Clear Marketing Objectives & Goals
A marketing strategy with promise always starts with a clearly defined set of objectives and goals. Marketing can have many purposes for a brand, and it’s so important to understand why you are actioning a marketing strategy in the first place.
To develop a marketing strategy that truly moves the needle in your business, you need to get specific, clear, and ambitious. Are you launching new products or services this year? Can you identify conversion or retention goals? Is one of your goals to increase website traffic? Is increasing customer value important to you right now?
Understanding what your business needs is key to developing a marketing strategy that pushes your efforts in the right direction.
Target Market Analysis
Another important step to complete before you get into the fun of marketing tactics and campaigns is to analyze your target audience. Oh, you did this step last year or the year before? That’s great, but you need to do it yet again.
An annual analysis of your target audience can offer fresh insights that can make a major impact on your strategy. Audiences change over time, whether that means that the business’ target audience has shifted or it remains the same, but the people have changed and the best way to market to them may have as well.
Each year, new social platforms rise in popularity, cultural shifts occur, and trends never stay the same. With this in mind, an annual target market analysis can provide insight into what is important to your audience now, where you can reach them now, and how to engage them, you guessed it, now.
Endeavour to learn about the demographics of your target audience, how and where they consume content, what inspires them to make a purchase, what devices they make those purchases on, who else they are shopping with or hiring, and what they value most today. This research will give you much of what you need to build a marketing strategy that doesn’t just look pretty but actually works.
A Budget Allocated To Marketing
If you want to achieve the goals that you set out for your marketing strategy, you need to allocate a marketing budget. This step is so so important, but many small businesses don’t prioritize it. Even the brands with the most successful organic marketing strategies have paid campaigns, and a budget is necessary to make those campaigns work.
Your marketing campaigns may change and be fluid throughout the year based on performance, so your marketing budget should have wiggle room, but it is important to give yourself a reasonable spend for paid campaigns and marketing support, such as marketing agencies, brand photographers, etc.
If you have no idea where to begin to define your marketing budget, Hubspot has a ton of great budgeting resources.
Tactics That Make Sense For Your Goals
Now that you have a good grasp on your marketing goals, budget, and who your target audience is and where to reach them, it’s time to identify the marketing tactics that will get your brand in front of that audience and convert.
With a wide variety of marketing tactics and platforms to choose from, it’s important to prioritize the tactics and platforms that have traditionally brought in the most conversions or those that your target audience is presently using and engaging with.
If your target audience doesn’t use TikTok, you might not need a TikTok strategy (yet). If research shows that your target audience is becoming more and more engaged with blogs or podcasts, that may be an avenue to invest in. There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy and solely focusing on one platform is also not a winning gameplan, so it’s important to create layers and funnels in your strategy that meet your target audience where they often show up.
A Marketing Calendar
With the wheels now in motion, it’s time to prepare your marketing calendar. This calendar will guide you through the year, outlining key dates, campaigns, and promotions schedules, identifying sales peaks and valleys, and creating synergy between the various marketing tactics that you’re using. This step prevents the ‘What do I post today?’ burnout and primes your brand for each of the seasons you’ll experience throughout the year.
Defined KPIs & Measurement Strategy
Finally, your marketing strategy must include defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a measurement strategy. Without these, it can be difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, tactics, and ROI. Your KPIs and measurement strategy should tie back to your marketing goals and objectives. For example, if one of your goals was to grow website traffic by 10%, you can include website traffic metrics in your measurement strategy and track visits to your site from each of your marketing tactics via site or platform analytics.
Business growth can skyrocket when you implement an annual marketing strategy, rather than taking things as they come throughout the year. Give your brand room to make spontaneous decisions, but let those decisions be the exception, not the rule, and your brand will flourish.
Are you ready to work on an Annual Marketing Strategy for 2024? Sammy Hill Creative can help you build a winning strategy for the year ahead. Schedule a discovery call with us to learn more about our done-for-you Marketing Strategies.
