With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, all eyes will be not only on the players, but also the brands that occupy some of the most visible (and expensive!) ad spaces in the world. While your business probably doesn’t have the kind of marketing budget to spring for a Super Bowl commercial, you can still achieve victory in 2022 by following these 7 steps to a winning marketing strategy.
1. Review past performance. The best way to give yourself a head start is to look back over how your marketing efforts performed in the past, and use those metrics to inform your path forward. What worked well for your business over the past year or so, and what didn’t work so well? Look at how your customers responded to your previous marketing campaigns, and decide if there’s any specific aspects of your current strategy that you’d like to build on.
2. Know your audience. Targeting is a critical component of any successful marketing strategy, and in order for targeting to work you need to know who your audience is. Just trying to reach “as many people as possible” isn’t likely to have great results – you need to get specific so that you’re able to reach the exact consumers who are most likely to convert to actual customers.
3. Assess the competition. You already know that your business does not exist in a vacuum – what are your competitors doing that works for them, and more importantly, what are they not doing that’s leaving a gap in the market? What can you offer that would set your business apart from others in your industry?
4. Set structured goals. Of course you want your business to have its best year ever in 2022, but the chances of exponential growth are much higher if you take things one step at a time. Set up a structure of incremental goals that will give your business the forward momentum necessary to reach those bigger targets.
5. Move forward with purpose. If you’ve seen a lot of ideas for up-and-coming online marketing trends, it can be tempting to try them all at once in the hopes that something sticks. You need to have some sort of game plan so that you know exactly what you’re attempting to achieve with each tactic, how you will measure success, and how you will know when it’s time to pivot in another direction.
6. Test and evaluate. This may sound like the most boring part of the process, but it’s actually where the real magic happens. Setting up testing scenarios and analyzing the results will tell you exactly what you need to know about what your audience responds to, and how you can reach them in a way that will lead to increased revenue for your business.
7. Learn from mistakes. It’s natural to feel discouraged if your first attempts to shake things up don’t amount to much, but seeing what doesn’t work can help you hone in on where you should be pointing your efforts next. Take those setbacks as lessons, and use them to adjust your trajectory.
Want some help winning the digital marketing game in 2022? Contact us for a free consultation, and we’ll get you pointed in the right direction to make 2022 the strongest year yet for your business.
COGO Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and across the nation.