Make your New Year marketing resolutions

January is always a time to set new goals and reflect on progress made over the past year. With your digital marketing it’s a good chance to take stock and review what you are doing and why. It’s easy to get carried away with new trends and spend your budget without working out which platform, strategy or activity are performing well. Here are some simple actions you can take to be back in the marketing driving seat and start the decade as you mean to go on:

Do a content audit

Being disciplined and producing innovative content can seem like a chore but it does pay off and helps to bring high quality traffic to your site. Rather than just concentrating on new content, doing an existing content audit is just as important.

Start by checking for accuracy – look at changes in staff, opening hours, contact information, products and business updates. Then check to see whether any content has become stale, outdated or does not reflect your current business objectives. Finally, see which content is performing and review your analytics – how are your customer’s engaging with your content, is it driving the desired response and ultimately are you reaching your goals?

Review your on-page SEO

Search is still the biggest traffic driver to your website, so it’s very important that your pages display what you want your customers to see on the search results page. This makes the difference between a click through to a relevant page or a scroll past to a competitor. Make sure your title tags are in place and clearly describe what you want your customer to see – 50-60 characters with a keyword and your brand name included. Think about the ‘how, what and why’ and create a sense of urgency.

Create a customer journey map

Produce a map that shows you the steps that your customers go through when they interact with your company. This should extend beyond just purchasing a product on your website, look at social media interaction and online advertising too. You should also consider the post-sale customer journey as this is important to show you the overall customer experience.

By spending time mapping out the customer journey you can ensure that all of your team understand how people are influenced at each touchpoint.

Produce a content calendar

This is one of those marketing tasks that always gets pushed down to the bottom of a marketer’s to-do list. Spending the time now will make a difference throughout the year to your content. Try not to worry about including everything, just put the foundations in place by marking key business dates, product updates, industry news and seasonal content to give you a basis to work from.

Once you have a basis in place, share this with your team and open up a conversation with other employees to gain their buy-in which will help with spreading the content’s engagement once it has been posted.