As 2022 winds down, we’re reflecting on what a year it’s been! Your business has had to navigate a lingering pandemic, rising interest rates, and inflation we haven’t seen in over 40 years. Yet with all of that on their plate, many businesses still had a solid year. Hopefully, yours was one of them!
If you haven’t already begun, it’s time to turn your attention to the coming year. To help you out, we have some end-of-year marketing planning thoughts to share that will help set your business up for success in 2023.
Look Back to Look Forward
To know where we’re going we first need to know where we’ve been. So, we recommend starting out by looking back at the year that’s ending. This is a good time to take an objective look at your goals for 2022 and see where you succeeded and where you fell short or failed. Remember – failure is a good thing, but only when you learn from it to make a better outcome the next time.
Falling short or failing at something you tried doesn’t mean disaster. It just means you need to find the lesson and adjust your plan. Maybe some of your 2022 goals were unrealistic. Or maybe conditions changed and you didn’t get a chance to respond. This is a good reminder that your plan needs to be evaluated and adjusted as the year progresses.
Start by taking your 2022 marketing plan down off the shelf, dusting it off, and reviewing it as a team. Don’t worry if you didn’t do one in 2022 – there’s still time to create a plan for the new year! While 2022 hasn’t ended just yet, you should have enough data from Quarters 1, 2, and 3 to make educated decisions.
What did you do well? Which strategies gave you the best results? What didn’t work so well? Did you meet your goals or did you come up short? It’s important to review what you’ve already tried in marketing. This way you can stop wasting time and money on campaigns that don’t work and funnel your resources to more effective channels.
At the same time don’t ditch every idea that didn’t pan out. Just because something didn’t work the way you hoped doesn’t mean it has to be thrown out completely. Sometimes a little tweaking here and there can transform an idea that didn’t work into a winning campaign that will produce real, tangible results in the future.
The key point here is to be willing to examine everything critically with an eye on how you can do it better in 2023.
Focus (or Refocus) on Your Audience
Successful marketing revolves around your audience’s needs. If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to focus on your ideal client by creating buyer personas. Even if you’ve created buyer personas in the past, now is a good time to review them and make sure you’re focused on the right audience. You might even need to add a new persona to the mix.
Closely examine each persona’s customer journey. Where do most of your customers find you? Based on what works, you can optimize your marketing efforts by sticking with the most successful channels. There’s nothing wrong with trying a new channel, just be sure you base it on fact. For example, if you really want to market on Snapchat but your audience isn’t on the platform, that wouldn’t make sense.
One way to acquire deeper insight is to survey your existing customer base. Let your customers tell you why they do business with you. You might be surprised by what you’ll learn when you speak directly to your audience.
Conduct a SWOT Analysis
A SWOT Analysis is a powerful tool to evaluate your company. It helps you identify internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats.
Your business’ SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis will change from year to year, or even more frequently. Be sure to include an up-to-date SWOT analysis in your 2023 marketing plan.
Set SMART Goals and KPIs
After reviewing your 2022 plan, learning more about your audience, and conducting a SWOT analysis, it’s time to set goals for 2022 marketing. Instead of choosing a vague goal like “I want to bring in more customers,” set SMART Goals. SMART Goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. It is a well-established tool that you can use to plan and achieve your goals that will make it much easier to understand whether or not your marketing was successful.
You should also set key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of these goals on a per-team or per-individual basis. KPIs are metrics that are in service of your SMART goals and they will hold your team accountable over the course of 2023.
Set Your Strategy
What social media marketing strategy will support your SMART goals? For example, if you want a 20% increase in brand awareness by March 2023, which approaches will get you there?
Only you can decide the approaches that will work for your brand. To give you an idea of where to start, you might choose a social media strategy made up of one or more of these components:
- Organic social media
- Paid social media advertising
- Public relations
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Video marketing
- Experiential marketing
- Google Ads
- Influencers
Create a Budget
You can’t measure your return on investment (ROI) unless you are aware of how much money you spent marketing your company. That’s why it’s so important to create an overall budget annually that’s broken down by channel.
You should absolutely define an overall 2023 marketing budget, but you need to break down that budget into predetermined buckets to understand where your money is going. As an example, if you have a $55,000 annual marketing budget that might mean you allocate $30,000 to social media and another $25,000 to public relations.
Looking Forward to 2023
So there you have it! We’ve shared some of our end-of-year marketing planning thoughts. By following these steps, you will be setting your business up for success in 2023. Just remember that as the year advances these goals and strategies must be monitored and evaluated so don’t worry if you need to make corrections or adjustments monthly or quarterly.
Being so wrapped up in your business, it can be difficult to look at it objectively. If you’re not sure how to, or if you can do it, our team would be happy to come in and lead your team through an analysis and brainstorming session that will leave you laser-focused on your 2023 goals and produce actionable marketing ideas on how to accomplish them. Get the ball rolling with a free consultation and let’s get you started on the right foot in 2023!
