Happy New Year! If you’re a small business owner, you’ve been resilient this past year and certainly have the battle scars to prove it. But the good news is the transition from December to January always brings a fresh start: a new hope paired with exciting opportunities to try different techniques that help build your brand and grow your customer base.
Marketing your brand and services will be more important this year than ever! But this doesn’t need to be a huge overhaul of your current content marketing or website strategies. You can start small and grow from there.
To help you get started, here are 5 effective marketing goals you can easily incorporate into your 2021 plan.
Top 2021 Marketing Resolutions for Your Business
1. Be Strategic with PPC Spending
Depending on your budget, here are some helpful tips on how to spend smart on your 2021 PPC campaigns:
Smaller Budgets
- Focus on your core business and only utilize keywords for your specific products/services.
- It’s okay to start slow. Don’t overextend your campaigns.
- Make sure one campaign is working before adding another.
Larger Budgets
- Don’t be afraid of display. Use Custom Affinity Audiences to target specific types of searchers.
- Retargeting is your friend.
- Never stop testing.
All Budgets
- Don’t pull the plug on a campaign “too” early.
- Watch your campaigns carefully.
- Call in the experts for support! Remember, Google is a business and wants to make money. They will take it any way they can. If these campaigns aren’t being carefully watched, they can be costly to your company. When in doubt, ask a PPC professional for help!
2. Swap “We” with “Thee” in Your Messaging
Well, we don’t mean change your vernacular to Middle English. What we’re proposing here is that you change your messaging’s point of view. Think about when you hear others talk about themselves. You might lose interest quickly or drop out of the conversation. The same scenario applies to researching a business online. At the end of the day, you’re more interested in what the business or product can do for you, the customer. You’re less interested in what the company has to say about itself.
Take some time to review the messaging on your website and social media platforms. Check for instances of “we offer…” or “At our company, we do this or that.” Swap out this language to be more customer-orientated and solution-focused.
Change the perspective from you, and what you do, to how your business helps solve your customers’ challenges:
- Original Messaging: We’ll help you create an effective marketing strategy for 2021.
- Revised Messaging: Boost your organic rankings and build a stronger customer base in 2021 with Brandography digital marketing services.
3. Develop a Brand Voice
While you’re reviewing your brand’s messaging, consider the voice and tone of your company:
- Voice: This is your brand’s positioning: Who you are, what you do, and what your mission is. This voice should be consistent throughout all platforms.
- Tone: Unlike your voice, your tone changes depending on your audience. For instance, your tone might be more fun, playful on your monthly newsletters or podcasts to help connect users on a more personal level vs. your website, which may be more informative and formal.
Ask yourself: Do you have a clear, consistent brand voice that is utilized across all platforms? Or do you notice discrepancies? Work with your team to review each platform and note the differences. The next step will be developing a brand guide that identifies your voice, tone, target audience, and user personas. This is an invaluable tool that you can share with your team to ensure every piece of content pertaining to your company is consistent and on brand.
4. Backup Your Website
You may already know to back up your personal computer, but did you know that your website is just as vulnerable to hackers and online viruses? Imagine losing every photo, file, review, and piece of content on your site’s database?
Just the thought of losing everything you’ve worked so hard to build should scare any business owner into routinely backing up your website and running regular security checks to ensure your site is protected and can be restored, should it crash or you get hacked.
Need help with your site’s security management, contact us to learn about our Guardography services!
5. Look at the Data
Believe it or not, one of the most underutilized tools is still Google Analytics (GA). If you’re a business owner, you may have embedded the free version onto your site to help you track and monitor user engagement. And though you probably know what a bounce rate is, or how to track a user’s average time on a page, the rest of the data can start to look confusing.
Using GA correctly will help inform your marketing campaigns by allowing you to see what’s working, what’s not, and where new opportunities are standing by. Having the ability to interpret these trends will allow you adjust your content or PPC campaigns to reach your target audience, keep users on your site longer, and convert visitors into loyal customers.
Make 2021 Your Best Year Yet
Looking to improve your marketing efforts in 2021? Our team can help you create an effective strategy that has you seeing an increase in ROIs, generating new leads, and creating lifetime customers.
To learn how we can help, contact us today for a consultation! We look forward to helping you achieve success and your marketing goals in 2021.
