Is your marketing strategy helping you accomplish your goals?

Willing to bet it isn’t? Maybe at least not all of them. And, if it’s not, that means there are things you could be doing better.

The tricky thing, of course, is figuring out what those things are. They aren’t going to walk up and announce themselves, right? (But wouldn’t it be great if they did?)

Since we can’t count on marketing suggestions to go knocking on doors, here are 7 things you can start doing right now to help market your business better.

#1: Identify Your Unmet Goals Where You Expected to Do Better

The first step is to review the marketing plan and business plan and figure out what still has yet to be accomplished. There might be specific goals that remain out of reach, like attracting a certain number of new customers this year or passing a profit milestone.

Even a goal hasn’t been articulated, there might still be disappointed feelings about some of the marketing. Maybe readers aren’t finding the blog or not getting as many people to sign up for a newsletter as hoped.

Whatever it is that isn’t meeting expectations, write it down.

#2: Update Your Market Research

The answers to marketing difficulties are nearly always found in the data. If it’s been a while since any serious conducted market research, it’s time to retest those waters and see what’s new.

Gathering two sets of information about the people in the target audience Is a great place to start. They are:

  • Demographic information, including age, gender, marital status, education, income, and geographical location; and
  • Psychographic information, including likes, dislikes, problems, concerns, and preferences.

The information collected is what will be used to revamp marketing to connect with the people most likely to make purchases.

#3: Sneak a Peek at Your Competitors’ Marketing  

Competitor research doesn’t get enough attention, and if those competitors are never checked for marketing ideas, there lies a gap of things a business is missing out on.

The Business should be looking to see:

  • How they differentiate themselves from their competitors
  • Which keywords they’re targeting
  • Which social media sites they’re using
  • How many followers they have
  • Where they’re spending money on advertising
  • How they get customers to engage with them

Such an important topic! Make sure to not take any competitors for granted.

#4: Find Out Where Your Target Audience Is

Once any or all competitors are evaluated, it’s time to start thinking about where to focus the marketing efforts to reach a target audience. For example, if your customers are mostly women and you have an aspirational product, then your marketing budget will be well spent on Pinterest. If you’re a B2B company, the focus should shift on LinkedIn.

Thinking beyond social media and asking how the target audience will find the desired business is also good to implement. Remember that voice search is on the rise and think about where people are going to look for products – and how they’ll do it.

#5: Revamp Your Marketing Plan

This is step is a big one – but it’s necessary if the business wants to achieve the marketing and growth goals. Take all the information gathered and sit down and rethink the marketing plan. There should be planning towards:

  • Which short-term and long-term goals are most important to you
  • How much money you’re prepared to spend to achieve them
  • What methods you will use to reach your goals (content marketing, email marketing, retargeting, etc.)
  • Which platforms you want to use (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Bing, etc.)
  • What kind of content you will create
  • How you will track your results and measure your goals

In other words, this should be a complete, soup-to-nuts plan of how to achieve those goals.

#6: Automate as Much as Possible

Marketing automation can save a ton of time and money as working to achieve goals. If everything is being attempted to be done in house, it may wind up missing deadlines or failing to keep up with intentions.

Email automation for marketing is highly recommended. There are tons of good marketing email providers, including companies like AWeber and Constant Contact. Use them to create email sequences to send out to subscribers – or hire someone to create them.

It’s also suggested using automation to monitor social media mentions and post on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. The business will need to set up the posts and schedule them, but the beauty of this approach is that it means there’s no need to worry about remembering when to post something. The automation will do it.

Another thing is to consider setting up automatic replies on a Facebook page. Lots of companies use bots to handle customer questions and increase engagement – and your business should think about it, too.

#7: Test Everything (and We Mean Everything)

The final step is not to assume that a new marketing plan is perfect. Even seasoned marketers make mistakes. They guess wrong and need to correct course.

Tracking results will help figure out what’s working and what isn’t. The thing it should know:

  • How many people open the emails you send
  • What your click-through and conversion rates are
  • Which social media posts get the most engagement

Once it’s known which efforts aren’t delivering, new versions of them can be tested. For emails, it might mean testing new headlines, content, and calls to action. Or, if there is notice that video content gets three times as much engagement on Facebook as everything else done…. may need to revisit the marketing budget and allot more resources to video.

And there they are…

Marketing isn’t an exact science but doing these 7 things can help you realign your marketing strategy with your most important business goals – and at the same time, increase your profits and help you attract new customers.