Get your marketing off to a great start in 2015

Posted on by Kylie Fennell
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/freedigitalphotos.net
The new year is a great time to refocus your marketing efforts. 
To help you along I have trawled through some of my favourite blogs and popular sites for marketing in 2015.
Here are my top 5 tips to help your business and marketing along in 2015. 
1. Nail your online presence and digital marketing
In my last post I outlined 12 steps to sort out your digital marketing and I’m not the only one saying how important digital is.
Digital marketing is not going away. This blog post from EnMast explains that more clients will come to you through your website in 2015
“If you aren’t using your website to strategically capture new business, you need to get started. 2015 has the makings of a perfect storm that will drive buyers to the web for purchasing decisions. If the economy does grow significantly in 2015, your prospects are going to need your help — but they are going to be time starved. They are going to want to do most of the purchasing research themselves. These buyers are getting younger every year; they are more comfortable with using the web to support their purchasing decisions, and they rely on search engines to guide them along the way.”
Check out my previous posts on websitesand SEOto get the most out of your online presence.

2. Get focused
You will need to get yourself a marketing strategy and make the strategy actually happen. A great tip here from zenhabits.net is to create habits, not goals or resolutions in 2015.
“Resolutions are like wishful thinking, that fade away inevitably as the year’s newness wears off. Goals are great, but it’s hard to juggle 5-10 new goals when you have a lot of other things always going on. Instead, focus on one new habit at a time, and give it your full attention, until it becomes automatic. Then do another new habit.”
In terms of getting things done on a daily basis, set yourself three top tasks for the day and get onto them first thing each day.
3. Don’t be scared of uncertainty
Seth Godin has to be one of my all time favourite marketing and business experts.
Godin advocates being open to uncertain outcomes, which is very different from large risks.
“The question to ask every organisation, manager, artist or yourself is, ‘are you hesitating because you’re not sure the future will match your specific vision, or is there truly a project-endangering risk here?’”
4. Really, I mean REALLY, get to know your customers
If you have been following my blog for a while, you would already know I strongly believe in the marketing value of developing customer personas.
This blog post found at blog.visual.lyreiterates the importance of micro-targeting.
“If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you won’t know what to say. Committing to buyer persona development lets you deep dive into needs, lifestyle, and motivations of your buyers. The work is well worth the ability to construct more relevant content strategies throughout the buying cycle, post-purchase efforts, and account-based marketing activities.”
5. Know what to stop doing
This marketing blog post from blog.hubspot.comhas some detailed tips on what to cut from your marketing activities in 2015.
Some of these include:
  • Over-Fixating on Real-Time Marketing and ineffective or insensitive newsjacking of popular stories/trends/hashtags
  • Engaging on Social Networks That Aren’t Working
  • Expecting People to Discover Your Content Just Because It’s Great – the post recommends devoting time to building an email list and regularly notifying them of new and updated content as well as pitching relevant stories to reporters, influencers, and other trade media writers.
  • Reporting on Data That Doesn’t Matter – does the CEO really care about how many ‘re-tweets’ you have?

For expert marketing advice find us at www.kyliefennell.com
Kylie Fennell
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