What is Your Marketing Strategy for 2011?

With Q410 starting, so does the planning in terms of evaluating how effective your marketing was in 2010 and what the plan will be for 2011.

Three key steps:

1. Evaluate the Return on Investment from 2010 marketing efforts.

Much can be learned from all that has been done correctly, but a lot can also be learned from areas where the efforts may have been lackluster in terms of performance and customer satisfaction.

Some tips include creating a marketing dashboard that is made up of your marketing efforts for your small-medium business (SMB) and or large organization. To assist you in this step, check out, How To Create Your Marketing Dashboard in Five Easy Steps, which offers some quick tips to get you started.

2. Evaluating whether your marketing organizations and or efforts were siloed or integrated?

One of the common errors evaluated in SMB's and Enterprise organizations is the lack of integration of marketing efforts. For example, if you were looking to leverage social media as a marketing tactic, perhaps by creating a business Facebook page, how would this be tied in to your branding and overall message and perception you would like for your customers (target market) to have of your brand? How would your marketing campaigns be tied into your brand and your Facebook strategy?

Bottom line, your marketing efforts should be integrated for consistency and simplicity of your message.

How did you do on this for 2010?

3. Know what is trending for 2011.

According to Forrester research the article, US Interactive Marketing Spend, 2009 To 2014, the top three areas in the coming years that will grow are:

2011: 1. email marketing, 2. social media, 3.mobile marketing
2012: 1. email marketing, 2. social media, 3.mobile marketing
2013: 1. social marketing, 2. email marketing, 3. mobile marketing
2014: 1. social marketing, 2. email marketing, 3.mobile marketing

Ensure that you evaluate your target market, and remember as you do this that the economy has changed perceptions, so be aware of what is currently important to your target market(s) and apply them to the marketing tactics that are trending.

Social Media - Do you need a Strategy?

Yes!

According to emarketer.com 52% of marketers are acting without a game plan. What are the impacts to this that I have observed?

I have heard Marketers and Clients say....

1. "Let's sign up for all the Social Media Applications so we can increase optimization."

• The issue with this is while you may have solved one issue (partially) you have created another if you are not updating your social media sites in a way that supports your brand.
• In addition, optimization is also maximized by how often you update your social media applications.

2. "Don't worry about the business plan, our focus is the marketing plan."

• The issue with this is your marketing plan needs to be 100% tied back to your business plan. If I were asked to create a marketing plan to sell 1000 widgets in one state, I would create a marketing plan to support this as I would if asked to create a marketing plan to sell 4000 widgets in four states...the bottom line is the plans would look very different.
• Know your business goals and build your marketing plan to support them

3. "Let's just focus on the Social Media Strategy."

• A quality marketing plan is integrated and all marketing components are evaluated and tactics are designed to work together and complement one another to reach revenue goals.
• The old saying..."No Man is an Island" also stands true in that Social Media is not an island....integrate with your overall business and marketing strategy...see image at beginning of post.

Be smart in your approach and create the social media strategy (road map) and integrate within your overall business and marketing plans.