How to Refresh Your Marketing Strategy in 2020

Before the wedding season begins in earnest, it’s a good time to refresh your marketing strategy and gear up for success while you're busy. Fortunately, refreshing your marketing strategy doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It can be a matter of performing a few simple audits and tweaking your activities slightly. Here are three simple things you can do to zhoosh up your marketing strategy mid-year.

Review your marketing and business goals.

Remember those New Year's resolutions you made for your business? It’s time to take a look at them again. Did you want to increase or hold steady when it comes to traffic, social media audience growth, number of inquiries, income, profit margin? 

Then, look at year-over-year (YOY) metrics. How are you pacing compared to last year? Are you ahead of your goals or behind them on a monthly, quarterly and year-to-date basis?

Understanding where you are at vis-a-vis where you want to be can help you create a plan to continue your success throughout the busy season — or it can provide a chance to course-correct if you’re not pacing to meet your goals.

Audit your marketing platforms.

Once you have a clearer understanding of how well you’re meeting your goals (or pacing toward them), it’s time to find out why (or why not).

First, look at your analytics. Are you getting enough traffic? Are enough of those web visits turning into inquiries? If the answer is no, it may be time to refresh your website.

Now, that doesn’t mean you need to call a web designer and get a whole new website. It could be as simple as making sure there’s enough information on your website that gives your users the information they need in order to do business with you. Or, perhaps you just need to add some logical calls to action throughout your site. While asking them to inquire on every page is fine, not everyone will be ready to inquire. Including a simple transitional call to action to visit your gallery or services page can keep them on your site and give them additional information that builds trust and leads to an inquiry.

As you are reviewing Google Analytics, note any powerful traffic sources, paying attention to pages that have lots of page views but also have a high bounce rate. That bounce rate may indicate the need to refresh the content on that page.

Next, audit your social media insights. Here are some guiding questions to consider:

• Is your audience engaged?

• Are they liking and commenting on your content?

• Do they ask questions about your services by commenting or contacting you through a DM?

• Are your social media channels able to drive traffic to your website?

Note any problem spots and areas that could use optimization. For example, if you notice that more people ask questions about your services through DMs from Instagram Stories, you may want to consider posting less to your main feed and ramping up your Stories game.

Ask yourself three core questions.

Once you’ve conducted a few basic audits based on your goals, it’s time to sit down and fully analyze the results and plan out your strategy. At this point, you should have already identified what’s working and what’s not.

Based on those results, ask yourself these three core questions:

1. What should I start doing?
   For example, if you find that Pinterest is a top traffic driver for your website based on a few powerful old pins, but you rarely spend time on that platform, you might want to consider starting up a more robust and purposeful Pinterest strategy. Be sure to put some metrics in place and map to your overall goals.
   
   Maybe you drive Pinterest traffic to your blog and encourage email sign-ups with a lead magnet. From there, you nurture those leads into inquiries with a personal and highly valuable email autoresponder series that ends in your asking potential clients to schedule a call with you through your Calendly or Acuity calendar.
   

2. What should I improve?
   Let’s say the link in your Instagram bio drives a lot of traffic to your inquiry page, but your traffic-to-conversion rate is low. This could indicate that you need to optimize the content on your inquire page to drive more conversions. Keep an eye out for noticeable gaps and inconsistencies; these are typically a great place to start your optimization plan.
   

3. What should I stop doing?
   There are so many things we think we should do that we don’t really need to do. Once upon a time, you were supposed to share up to five posts on Instagram every day. Content was king and, to get attention, you had to not only have good content but lots of it.

   Now, Engagement is king and you can get away with posting a few times a week, as long as you are liking and commenting on others’ feeds and playing a good hashtag game. While figuring out what to stop doing can take a bit of time to test, you’ll save more time in the long run by saying no to ineffective strategies. You can also audit your paid marketing strategies and stop sinking money into advertising that isn’t working.

With a few quick and dirty audits and a handful of meaningful questions, you can quickly and easily refresh your marketing strategy to make sure you meet your 2020 goals.

Christie Osborne is the owner of Mountainside Media, a company that helps event industry professionals brands develop scalable marketing strategies that bring in more inquiries and leads. Christie is a national educator with recent speaking engagements at NACE Experience, WIPA, and the ABC Conference.