New Year’s Resolutions for an Optimized Digital Marketing Strategy

We all get lazy. We start to cut corners. Sometimes what’s “good enough for now” becomes the standard. But for an optimized digital marketing strategy, it’s important to shake those bad habits. Let’s see how we can start 2017 off on the right foot. Here are some things to keep in mind as you craft your marketing new year’s resolutions.

Define your process

How often do things get done without a full process in place? 2017 is the year to institute a process across all of your marketing initiatives. Make sure you know who owns which pieces of your digital marketing strategy.

Even if you’ve established processes for every aspect of your plan, the new year is the perfect time to review this. Maybe there’s a hole in the process or too many people involved. If there is an opportunity to cut out time and make yourselves more efficient, do it.

Reevaluate your goals

What were your goals in 2016? If you reached those goals, don’t set the same ones. Stretch yourself. Learn from the past year and create fresh campaigns with high-reach KPIs. It’s too easy to play it safe. In order to grow your business, you need to define ahead of time what kind of year you want 2017 to be. Is your focus on PPC, social, content, tradeshows, or something completely different? Highlight everything you want to accomplish, and then decide how you’ll get there.

But allow for some wiggle room. Digital marketing is constantly changing, and it’s important to be flexible. That’s why you should reevaluate your goals not just yearly, but quarterly to stay on track.

Collaborate

You don’t have to be an island unto yourself in this crazy digital marketing space. Collaboration is so important. If you’re accustomed to working independently on the things you need to get done, try reaching out. Ask your colleagues for their opinions. Brainstorm together. When everyone is communicating, great things can happen. You can also catch errors the others might not be aware of.

See your projects through to the end

So you launch a campaign and halfway through you don’t get the results you want. Don’t scrap the campaign and start over. Optimize and TEST. Take what you’ve learned about your customers and continue the campaign, making changes based on your knowledge. Once it’s finished you’ll have a full picture, rather than just an assumption. You’ll also be able to compare results as you made changes and tested new theories. This should already be built into your digital marketing strategy, but all too often campaigns are simply abandoned. We don’t want to see any of that in 2017.

It just looks bad when you don’t follow a campaign through to completion, both to customers and co-workers. Marketing should be the department that follows everything through to its conclusion, analyzing and optimizing through the end and using that knowledge for the next project.

Cross-training

You’re a social media marketing guru and your team members are AdWords masters. But just because someone else has the expertise you’re lacking, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it yourself. You don’t have to make it your specialty, but acquainting yourself with an aspect of digital marketing that you haven’t before is so important. As marketers, we should always be learning and stretching ourselves to take on new challenges.

Throughout the year take a few courses in your company’s marketing automation platform. Get your Google AdWords certification. Then go write a blog post telling everyone what it was like to teach yourself something new.

Test, test, test

The best habit you can get into is to test every part of your campaigns multiple times. Invite your co-workers to help you catch the things you might have missed. This is something you should already be doing, but I want to build on this good habit and make it even better.

That campaign you’ve been running since last March? Have you tested it recently? Test it. Things break. Links change accidentally or even unknowingly. Digital marketing means dealing with tools that aren’t always 100 percent reliable. To stay on top of problems that might occur, ensure you’re going into your campaigns on a monthly basis through 2017 to check-in. You never want a customer to experience a broken campaign before you do.

Stick to it

We know new year’s resolutions can sometimes fall apart. Only 46 percent of those who make resolutions actually stick to them after 6 months. But we don’t want you to be a part of that 64 percent! We know that if you stay on top of it, you can make this your most productive year yet!

Now you’re ready to dive headfirst into 2017. Make sure to check the DemandZEN blog weekly for additional marketing tips throughout the year so you’re constantly improving your digital marketing strategy. Still have questions about how to make 2017 your best year yet? Talk to DemandZEN.