A Marketing Checklist for 2020: What Every Business Needs to Grow

The ultimate goal of most marketing efforts is to sell more things. To do this, ensure your audience knows you, trusts you, and is willing to buy from you. 

The marketing arena is continuously evolving. Each year brings in new technologies and trends. So continually updating your business’s marketing strategy is an absolute must.

With tons of tools for digital marketing, it’s become more difficult to keep a marketing strategy organised. To help you stay on top, we created this 2020 marketing checklist so you can address this year’s opportunities and major trends. 

Focus on Areas of Growth

While you might want to market all aspects of your company, hone in on one or two areas of your business to focus on. Concentrating your marketing efforts across many areas can weaken the impact of your campaigns and lessen your potential ROI.

To determine the best areas to focus on consider the areas of your business with the highest month-to-month margins. On the same note, be certain if the market has increased demand for your product. Most importantly, determine what your customers want.

What are touchpoints? Why do I need to worry about them?

A touchpoint is an area where a customer will become aware of your business/brand. They are an important part of the sales process as potential customers can see your business in so many area’s before engaging. There is data that suggests that people need to see up to eight touchpoints before they will even start a conversation or just setup a meeting with your business and they still might not be ready to buy. As an example, below are a few places customers will see you before making contact so it’s a great idea to be branded well, consistent with your graphics and messaging and run great offers and deals to keep them coming back and remembering you when they are ready to buy.

Types of touchpoints include:

Email & Newsletters, Social media, Google searches, Website content and blogs, Reviews & Recommendations, Organic sharing, Community events, Online Advertising, YouTube, Customer service, Retail/Office facilities, Website interaction, Catalogues, Promotions and Coupons, Sales Staff, Phone calls, Point of sale, Billing, Shipping and Receiving, IT support, Apps, Business cards, Car wraps, Print material such as letter box drops and fridge magnets to name a few.

As you can see there are lots of places potential customers can become aware of your brand and then engage with your business. The next few points outline some tips and tricks on how to do it.

Website Design and Optimisation

Take your business online. At the top of any digital marketing checklist is a website. A website is where the big part of internet traffic ends up at some point. 

Operating a well designed website can have beneficial effects on other aspects of your digital campaign strategy. It won’t cost you an arm and a leg to secure a site that works for your company. You can easily secure a site that is optimised to convert leads.

The ideal website should reflect your brand and echo your company’s overall message and image. It should be your reliable source of leads and inspire conversions. Make sure that it loads quickly, viewable on all screens, and easy to navigate.

You need to look like a legitimate business within your industry, simple as that. A website helps with that; it’s the core to a digital marketing campaign. Every section below this heading is secondary to a good quality website. It’s really that simple. You own it, you can update it and you can sell it. It’s going to add value to you and the business long term.

When was the last time you ran an audit on your site and how it’s performing? Fixing some basics can really boost your rankings and convert visitors into sales. If your website is not fast-loading, secure and looking great you will be missing out on business. What if you don’t even have a website? By not even having a basic presence online with some really simple start-up solutions you could be missing out on so much opportunity. Even a one-page website that is optimised is better than absolutely nothing. First up, get an audit on your website. They are generally free and offer some insights into what is going on and what can be improved. Costs will incur when work needs to be done.

Google Ranking Plan

Luck and guessing are not a plan. Understanding what your customers are looking for besides the obvious is a great start in working out your strategy around service and product sales. The aim is to become aware of potential new channels of business that you never knew about and creating pages and content around the plan.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is important in digital marketing since it helps to position businesses in online searches, including Google. While building traffic via search engines is a lengthy process, it remains a key part of a valuable digital marketing checklist.

Optimise your content receptively to attract potential clients looking for answers, improve search rankings and attract organic traffic. To outrank in the search results, your site’s content should centre on your visitors frequently asked questions and to educate them on the products or services you offer and to help solve a problem. 

Competition analysis – What are the competition spending on ads?

Before you start running Google ads of any type, you need a plan and a great start is to find out what ads your competitors are running and how much they are spending. At least then, you will have a ballpark figure on costs as every industry has its own level of competition. Google ads work. Don’t think they don’t and buy into the belief from the losers who tried to do it themselves and failed. You need a plan and every industry is different.

Determine Your Budget

Committing yourself to a marketing budget is a critical aspect of your campaign strategy. After confirming your budget, you’d want to identify the most ideal platforms to use the budget. You should figure out the extent of your campaign.

Always aim to attract sales at the lowest cost, as well as think through your contingency plan. If your campaign, for example, performs really well, do you have extra cash to invest to keep the momentum rolling?

Paid Campaigns and Offers

There are numerous paid marketing products around. Facebook Ads are a top player to include in your marketing list. Facebook also owns Instagram. You can target a particular audience and past website visitors via Facebook.

Video ads, such as YouTube ads can display your video to segmented viewers, based on their demographic and user data. 

Google Adwords is another outstanding option for bidding on “below-the-funnel” keywords. Retargeting ads on the other hand “track” your site visitors around the internet. This encourages them to go back and read more, fill a contact form, or make a purchase.

Social Media Posting & Boosting

With so much rubbish posted to social media every hour of every day, it’s hard to keep on top of what you really need and how much time you need to spend on it. With a content strategy plan based on the entire business marketing strategy, all you will really need to think about is responding to messages and enquiries.

Social media marketing should definitely be on your marketing checklist. Creating a social media presence is one of the greatest ways to attach a feeling of community to your company. 

Social media is a unique advertising tool that allows lots of personal interactions. Running two social networks, popular with your audience, is a good way to start. 

Social media is also a useful tool for tracking feedback. If you unveil a new campaign or change how you do business, you will almost immediately discover how customers feel about it. Because of this, it’s a remarkable way to offer customer service, as most users would rather contact you through social media and not via your website’s ticket system.

To build a connected online community, you need to create a content plan. Your ideal social media team should share every content across your social media networks at the right time.

Content Creation & Marketing

Produce and distribute relevant, valuable, and consistent content to pull in and retain the right audience. This will help to inspire targeted customer action. Content marketing occasionally overlaps with online marketing, so it’s best that you adopt a strategy that incorporates both.

Some of the best strategies include creating a content calendar, leveraging your content, allowing guest posting, and sharing it via social media. Planning how you’re going to execute your content marketing is a good way to start. Create a content calendar that clearly indicates when you’ll create content, and how to distribute it.

There are numerous ways to leverage your content. You can, for example, combine a series of blog posts on related topics to create an eBook.

Allowing guests to write for your blog, and posting on other companies’ blogs can expose you to a wider audience. This is a great way to attract more traffic to your site.

Your content isn’t of much use unless it reaches your target audience wherever they are. Social media platforms can help you with that. All you need is consistent sharing your content across your social networking sites.

Creatives

Graphics are a key part of getting more sales and leads. Every area of your business needs to look professional and consistent and across all your touchpoints. From website design, banners, video thumbnails to Facebook graphics to car wraps, business cards and more. Check out our creative agency for more on graphic design improvements for your business.

Email Marketing

The one customer list you truly own for your business, and it’s not nearly used enough. Get your latest content and deals out to your customers and leads. Struggling for an idea? Use the content strategy plan mentioned above to provide information and get your latest deals out there. Get this information into your website first so it can rank organically and is easy to share to social media as well as your Newsletter system.

Video is everywhere and for good reason. People generally want to watch rather than read about products and services. Basic videos can be created on your phone with a bit of voice-over or background music. It can then be loaded up to YouTube with a few other tricks to get good rankings, followed by embedding these onto your website and also loading up to your social media pages is going to make a huge difference.

Business Directory Audit and Fix

Business listing across the internet can really play havoc on your Google rankings. Get an audit, fix your directories and keep building more with reviews and recommendations to drive new business.

Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram and hundreds if not thousands of directories exist with your business information and it needs to be accurate and consistent.  First, get an audit and secondly fix any errors and ongoing create new directories.

Already too busy?

What if you are already busy but getting worn down because you are doing everything yourself and suffering as a consequence? We can look at your systems and processes and provide recommendations on how to simplify mundane tasks that can possibly be automated or simplified at the very least.

Tip: If you think just Instagram or Facebook is enough to run a business, think again! They are perfect as part of the campaign to raise brand awareness, but generally we find consumers struggle to trust platforms anyone can boost ads and rank for without any authority. When consumers are spending big money, they Google search and require more support and have more questions and this is where a quality website, CRM and effectively branded emails will help.

Solutions

We are here to provide options and solutions to help you understand the basics of a multi-channel approach that is cost-effective and works across most industries. Tradies, Medical, Small Business, Ecommerce and Hospitality can all benefit. The first step is a free 15-minute phone call followed by a strategy meeting and proposal. Get in touch!

What’s On Your Marketing Checklist for 2020?

Interactive marketing can be time-consuming and complex. Thankfully, there are always useful new trends and technologies on the scene to help you with marketing.

In order to convert your leads into customers, you should incorporate several key components in your marketing. Apply the best practices to your marketing strategy. This includes leveraging digital technologies such as social media, websites, and SEO to engage existing clients, and attract new customers.

The items on this marketing checklist are a great choice for your marketing strategy. For more assistance with tailoring a strategy for your business, contact us today for expert advice!