As much as many of us like to fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, in business often this just doesn’t cut it. Especially if you are competing against well-oiled business machines that know where they are going and how to get there.
In a business sense, planning clears a path for the activities we need to be engaging in to get the results that we plan for. The results we want may be increased turnover, broaden our customer base, increased social media exposure, gain more website traffic, improve our branding etc.
If you’ve not yet created your 2015 marketing plan, don’t despair, there is still time to crush it leading into the last half of the year.
Having a clear and specific roadmap of where you’re going and how you want to get there is vital to both your short and longer term success.
But what specifics are you going to include in your marketing plan for 2015? Let’s take a look at 5 ideas to help spur your thoughts and perhaps become a part of the plan.
5 Ideas to perhaps include in your 2015 marketing plan
A content marketing campaign – Content is still the order of the day, and creating new and fresh content should be a major part in your plan. Of course this can take several forms, and doesn’t have to be only webpages or blog posts, though those are great. Repurposing your existing textual content for other uses is a smart way to leverage your efforts easily.
Dive deep into video – If you haven’t already started making video an integral piece of your marketing plan, the time is now! There are lots of ways to do this, and a lot of them don’t require that you even be on camera, so being camera shy is no longer an excuse!
Check out your SEO – If you are not obtaining the organic search rankings you are after, it may be time to either do some SEO yourself, (if you are able) or hire it out to someone who knows how. This can pay dividends for some time moving forward.
Find other sources of traffic – Make it your business to investigate other forms of web traffic, and start using them. Simply putting all your eggs into the Google basket has never been wise, and considering that there are many great traffic sources available, the time is now. Perhaps it’s time for you to finally get into paid traffic as well this year.
Build more products and diversify your line – Will this be the year you add a product or two into your business? If so, this too will require loads of planning, and most certainly needs to a part of your annual plan, as it will require loads of time and resources to get this done.
Good planning practices you implement this year will stand you in good stead for next year and all the years to follow. The business activities you need to undertake will change according to the goals you have set out, and how detailed these goals are. And while we are talking about 2015, generally speaking the activities mentioned above could be considered to be “evergreen” which is a simple way of saying that they are activities to be engaged in on an on-going basis.
