New Year, New Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Small Business Or Nonprofit
With the holiday season hustle behind us, it’s the perfect time to take a step back and review your business’s successes and failures in 2023. What were some of your best performing promotional efforts and which fell flat? Did you have time to create consistent content for your company’s website and social media pages and keep everything up-to-date?
Having a comprehensive understanding of what did and did not work for your small business or nonprofit last year will help you create a successful strategy for the future. In fact, businesses that proactively evaluate and update their digital marketing plans are better positioned for success in today’s competitive and quickly evolving marketplace.
Below are some steps small business and nonprofit owners should consider taking both now and throughout the year to set themselves up for a rewarding 2024.
Step One: Understand the Current Climate of Your Business
Start off the new year by analyzing how your company is performing, as well as how you are meeting the needs of your clients and standing out from competitors. By getting a big picture perspective of your current business climate, you’ll be able to better identify which aspects of your digital marketing strategy need improving or changing.
How to review your 2023 performance:
Pull digital marketing-related statistics from 2023 and analyze what your business is doing right as well as what it can improve on. This data can include the number of unique visitors your website received, how much time your visitors spent on site, social media engagement and follower count, and where your business has appeared in the media. Be sure to look into and note the differences in metrics between your most and least successful 2023 campaigns.
Audit all promotional materials to see if your brand is consistent across the board. This includes your website, social media platforms, handouts/fliers, and company swag, among others. Consistency is key in building your brand and standing out from the crowd.
Research what other businesses in your industry are doing that you are either doing better or can start implementing yourself (within reason). Are they posting more frequently on social media and receiving a higher engagement rate? How are they positioning themselves in their content to stand out from competitors? Learning about and from your competition is essential for growth.
Step Two: Strengthen Your Company’s Foundation
Once you understand your company’s current positioning within the marketplace, you can use that information to set realistic micro goals for 2024. Review the results of your data pull, brand audit, and competitor research to identify your business’s areas for improvement. Then, create action items that will help you address any concerns.
Create “bite-sized” objectives to accomplish throughout the new year that are aimed at helping fulfill larger marketing goals over time. For example, if you’re aiming to increase the number of unique website visitors by 35%, plan to post one blog post per month on your website to improve discoverability and encourage new visitors. Or, if your goal is to increase social media engagement by 35%, develop a content calendar that focuses on the post topics that drew the most engagement in 2023 and create posts multiple times per week.
As part of your 2024 micro goals, prioritize reworking any and all messaging to reflect the current state of your business and ensure alignment as researched in Step One. Although this may seem like a tedious and insignificant task, your content plays an important role in setting guidelines and expectations for your business, so it’s important they mirror your most up-to-date business goals.
Step Three: Track Outcomes and Gather Input
Rather than waiting until 2025 to analyze your 2024 standing, consider evaluating your company and its digital marketing-related content on a monthly basis. By auditing your content more regularly, you can see how any changes you incorporate are impacting your business and can quickly make the appropriate adjustments
This is also a great time to get community input on your brand and related promotional materials. Take note of what your customers or clients ask for that you may not be currently providing. Ask them for feedback on what they like about your company and if they have any suggestions on making it more appealing to them. At the end of the day, your business relies on those you’re serving, so why not get them involved?
Step Four: Create a 2025 Plan
It’s never too early to plan for the future! Develop an outline of where you would like your business to be two years from now, and what you can do to get there. Stay on top of developments and trends while also analyzing where additional improvements can be made. Make regular updates to your plan as you gather data throughout the year. Then, by the time January 1, 2025 comes, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running into the new year!
Get Professional Digital Marketing Help And Guidance
If these steps seem daunting, or if you just don’t have the time to run your business and develop an integrated marketing plan, we’re here to help. Wild Ivy Media is a digital marketing consulting firm that’s dedicated to helping small businesses and nonprofits grow and thrive.
Whether you need quick idea generation for content topics or complete social media management, we are here for you. Learn more about what we can do for your business on our Services page, and reach out today at hello@wildivymedia.com!
