4 ways to keep your marketing resolutions

You’ve made your New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, learn a language, play the guitar or some other goal you’ve setup for yourself for the upcoming year. Just as you make your personal resolutions, you should also make your business resolutions. As we kick off a new year, it’s important to remember a few ground rules that should be basic for everyone. 

When trying to obtain a goal, it’s human nature to over look the basic building blocks in an effort to hurry up and get the desired results. If you take a moment and do these four things, you’ll see better results not just in your marketing efforts but in other projects as well. 

Create a plan: Take an hour and map out what you want to accomplish in the next year. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Do you want to increase sales? Map out your goals. These aren’t written in stone so it’s ok if two months down the road they change. This is meant to be a starting place. Create a time plan on when you want to accomplish your goals. It seems simple and basic but often people start down a road without clear objectives and then wonder why they failed.  

Know your audience: Believe it or not, you are not talking to everyone. You are talking to a small group of people at any given time and that group can and will change constantly. The more you know your audience the better you can cater to their needs. Think of your audience as school of fish. They swim together in the same direction but at any moment, they can quickly change direction or shift slightly right or left. If you know your audience, you can anticipate their needs and shift with them or even better, be there before they even move.

Don’t do everything: Pick one thing and do it well. There are hundreds of tools out there to help you connect to your audience. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare and the list goes on. The trick isn’t being a pro at all of them. Start slow. Pick one. Once you understand how to use it as a pro, add another. If you jump into too many sites at once, you’ll run the risk of doing none of them well, which can alienate your audience.

Solve problems: Find out what your audience wants and fill those needs. This goes back to tip #2. By listening to your audience, you can help solve problems they have and potentially help with problems they didn’t even known they had. Solving problems establishes you as an authority, which can lead to new business.

These four tips might seem rudimentary but they are the basic building blocks that will help you with any effort you take on.  What other basic steps do you use to guarantee success?

Comments

[Maria Payroll]

Know your audience. Be sure you get their attention. Ask for their feedback. It's not beneficial to be the one providing all the time.