5 Ways You Will Market Better in 2013

5 Ways You Will Market Better in 2013

Now that were well into 2013, I thought it might be useful to review some ways (5 to be precise) you can commit to improving your marketing this year. New year’s resolutions are so “last month”.

1.) You will improve search performance

Google has made changes. You are very likely aware of both Pandaand Penguin but what have you done to leverage them. Don’t try to outsmart Google– it’s just not worth it. Time is better spent understanding the rules and adapting to them.

2.) You will narrow your focus and broaden your appeal

The recent economic troubles have caused us to be too busy and too inclined to do work strictly for the sake of revenue. Focus is the key to winning the a position in the mind of your customer. in 2013 you will narrow your focus and broaden your appeal. Doing so will make your unique selling proposition easier to articulate and remember.

3.) You will automate and optimize your lead generation

You are fully aware that your email newsletter isn’t enough anymore. Playing with social media is not likely to deliver any results, either. You will get serious this year. Your communications efforts need to be better coordinated and you will. By building content to support every phase of your sales funnel, you’ll optimize your sales resources so that your sales cycles will be tighter and more cost effective.

4.) You will document your Customers’ experience more frequently

Everyone is talking about content marketing. The best content marketing is credible documentation of your customers’ learnings. Best practices are important but they erase distinctions fairly rapidly. The key challenge is to make your best practices readily available so that you can continue to improve on them. Today’s “Best Practices” are tomorrow’s “Standard Operating Procedures”. Insight into how to continually improve that part of the enterprise your offering can best enhance is your key to developing the kind of content that reduces risk of purchase.

5.) You will improve reporting and reduce reports

Most of your competitors and customers are awash in data. Too much data is pretty much as useful as no data. You can improve your marketing by actually putting the data you have to use. This year resolve to review your key metrics and identify the important ones you actually use to make more rational decisions. Further commit to measuring the results of your marketing efforts even when costs are sunk. You can continually improve your efforts if you are willing to accept that failure provides useful metrics from which to refine your efforts going forward. The dissonance around reviewing efforts made in the past is very strong. Resist blaming yourself or others. Make your next marketing initiative better by finding out what went wrong and how to fix it.