How To Develop Your 2020 Marketing Strategy?

The first step is to analyze what your competitors  and your industry are doing because, let's be honest, everybody is doing this. People are coming up with a marketing plan to put you out of business.  You need to take this time and find out what are they doing or what did they do and see if you can project or kind of identify what you believe they're going to do for the remainder of this year.  Maybe you had a marketing misstep and they jumped all over it and had a great opportunity. They took a misstep of yours and turned it into an opportunity of theirs. If you have created a flexible company  and a flexible franchise marketing campaign, you will be able to do the same to them. Nobody is perfect all the time. No one's able to achieve all of their goals all of the time. You will still have these, but if you've created a good,  agile marketing strategy you'll be able to adjust and adapt.  

As a part of this, I always like to recommend  you have to consider or reconsider your 2020 budget.  We all know this. Costs go up, prices go up. You have to pay more, maybe the wages have gone up,  your insurance costs have gone up, things like that. Everything increases and it increases for a reason (aliexpress best sellers).  If you are still using the same 2019 budget for 2020 you are already behind.  At bare minimum you need to increase by 3%. 3% keeps up with inflation, that's the bare minimum  you have to increase your marketing budget. I would highly suggest that you look deeply at where you spent your money,  what were the successes, this is a part of that SWOT analysis, where were your successes, where were your weaknesses, adjust your budget as necessary,  but you do need to increase the amount that you're spending. Just due to inflation it's got to go up by 3%. Really, you should be increasing more because  your competitors are going to be doing the same, especially if they had a gangbuster's year they're going to be putting more into their marketing. And if you aren't, you're going to be behind the eight ball.  So, by balancing your budget against your milestones and against your strengths and your opportunities you're able to identify where the budget needs to go.  

Next step of this is we're going to set a timeframe.  Write it down. You've written down your milestones. We've talked about that.  You know your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You know what your budget is going to be.  Now set yourself some milestones and goals. These don't have to be completely set in stone. But by writing these down and giving  yourself a deadline you'll actually do it. Part of this is just going to be forecasting your marketing expenses and your marketing strategy.  By forecasting that and saying, okay, I need to have X marketing campaign, X done by this date, you're much more likely to actually have completed that.  That gives you some runway, some extra time in case you need to make adjustments and you need to be a little bit more agile. Maybe there's a technology issue.  Something goes wrong with your website. Or maybe there's a personnel issue and you can't afford to take on more projects until you hire more people. All this is, all these milestones are, are just identifying where are you in your marketing  plan so that you can make adjustments as necessary. Write them down, have somebody that you're accountable to, whether it's your partner, your spouse, somebody within the organization that has some marketing buy-in. By having that you'll actually reach and achieve these  goals and you'll work towards keeping with this calendar. It's incredibly important. We all know, as small business owners, as entrepreneurs, the day, the year, just gets away from you. There's so much going on that if you don't write these down and hold yourself to it, you're never actually going to do them.  It's extremely important to be able to set those milestones.  

This is also how you can do a pulse check on your marketing throughout the year.  How far away are you from these milestones? Are you missing them? Are you not achieving the goals  that you've set out for yourself? Or, hopefully, if we've planned correctly, your past milestones, so what can you do to speed up,  what can you do to set yourself a more audacious goal that you want to achieve, and how does your marketing campaign and plan need to adjust for that?  

So, you've set your timeframe, you've set your milestones,  when do you want to achieve X by what date. This isn't just revenue and sales, it's when do I need to have this done  so I can be ready for the next stage of my marketing campaign? From here, once we've set our goals, this is when you begin to reverse engineer what channels  and what kinds of marketing you actually need to do. We've talked about this before. You'll hear it everywhere. You're looking at a sales funnel, right? You know, you've got your top of mind,  your awareness, feeding the people into that, you've got the middle of the funnel, which is that nurturing cycle, and then, down at the bottom if you're doing all that correctly your leads and your sales and  your conversions are falling out the end there. Now, not every lead, not every conversion, is actually going to result in a sale or result in a increase to your net business, but that's where the nurturing comes in  and you continue to feed that nurturing funnel and you've got your sales coming out there. You have to identify what channels are you going to use to feed the funnel (ie with the help of dropship spy).  

Now, obviously, one of the greatest channels  that you can possibly use is going to be digital.  Digital marketing, hands down, consistently is the greatest kind of channels that you can use,  but there's a myriad of those, right? We can talk about paid advertising. If we're talking about Google or Bing,  YouTube, all of those would be that paid advertising there. You can look at your social advertising, whether that's social media management,  you're posting and engaging with your follower group, or if you're doing social media marketing. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter you could probably consider YouTube in there, as well.  Any other social network that makes sense for you and your business. Maybe your demographic demands that Snapchat is a part of your marketing mix. Or maybe you're a little bit more B to B,  so LinkedIn is something you need to consider. By identifying the different channels that you need to utilize and the channels that work best for your industry and your organization, that's how you can start to identify your budget.