By Abhishek Shah
Source: Entrepreneur
Every new year brings with it the promise of a new beginning. 365 new opportunities some say. Well, for marketers like me, it is indeed a single golden opportunity to pick lessons from the past and prepare for a better year ahead. Needless to say one must draw new resolutions — new digital marketing resolutions that will help us convert more, sell more or turn the business into a strong brand.
If you look at it from a bird’s eye view, one year is not a long period as such, never for digital marketing. All the strategies that used to bring website traffic, click-throughs and conversions may not work in the future as they have worked in the past.
With every new year, the marketer must go back to the whiteboard to rethink strategies to keep the digital marketing machinery running in full throttle.
If your marketing has been hitting a plateau or is not bringing in the results as it is intended, perhaps it is time to rethink the entire process. Here are some resolutions that you can make irrespective of the time of the year.
Multi-moment Analysis(MMA)
The multi-moment analysis is a statistical measure of time spent on each activity. It helps in estimating how your time spent and goals achieved compare with each other. Ideally, the activities that you spent more of your time should bring in maximum results.
For instance, if it is organic traffic generation that you spend the most time on, the organic lead count should be higher than leads generated paid traffic.
Why should you do multi-moment analysis as a marketer? Most often, we get carried away with the busyness of coordinating multiple marketing efforts. It is highly probable that we could be spending more time on activities that do not yield any positive return. The idea of MMA is to identify tasks that bring maximum results and to eliminate or spend lesser time on the rest.
Combining Proactive and Reactive Strategies
Like in a game of chess, it is proactive strategies aimed at the final goal that wins. Reactive strategies wear you down. As a marketer, you cannot spend time reinventing your strategy according to market dynamics and customer preferences. A certain amount of proactiveness is required to stay ahead of the game.
For instance, every marketer knows the need to be prepared for the holiday season. Waiting until the knick of the moment and executing a reactive strategy is going to cost you dearly.
The key is to strike a fine balance of proactive and reactive strategies. Proactive strategies to prepare for the known and what is coming for certain, like the holiday season. Reactive strategies to realign your focus according to market behaviour. Example, changes in social media algorithms or search engine ranking signals.
Amplifying Existing Assets
Blogs, case studies, feature pages, guides — think of all the content that you have created in the recent past. As a marketer, this is your assets. Assets that earn value in the short-term as well as long-term. Given the time and resources available, there is only so many assets that can be created. But, it is always possible to amplify the reach and value of these assets.
How exactly can a marketer do it? Content repurposing. Content repurposing refers to several ways of recycling existing content into several forms. Like turning a blog into an infographic or a video, turning a case study into a video, turning a podcast into a blog and so on.
These are all mechanisms of amplifying your existing assets so that they have more value, shelf life and potent to serve the business. One of your resolutions for the coming year could be to focus more on quality and not quantity.
Part of your resolutions should also be a plan to eliminate stuff that does not serve you. Like placing ads on thought leadership.
Don’t Place ads Over Thought Leadership
Thought leadership came to public visibility during the past five years. It can be vaguely described as the process where research analysts, business owners, scholars and experts write and publish columns and interview pieces on their areas of interest. Thought leadership articles spell out what is happening in the present, how the future will pan out and what needs to be done to be prepared.
The trouble with thought leadership is that its claim cannot be established with clarity. How do you identify a person as a thought leader? The internet gives everyone equal space to make their voices heard. That results in a lot of chaos and noise that is unwarranted. Amidst this how does one identify thought leadership that is based on individual opinions and assumptions?
Although thought leadership attracts a lot of eyeballs, a marketer must always know how to use it in a wise way. Most importantly, one must not put money into it. Placing ads on thought leadership ad defeats the very purpose for which it is created. Also, any results that you get from such activities cannot be scaled easily.
Final Thoughts
The consumer market is like an untamed beast. It acts with a mind of its own. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is like a harpoon. In the right marketer’s hand, it is a deadly weapon that can hunt the market. However, it does not remain static. It keeps evolving every year, just like our list of resolutions and goals.
Every smart marketer must make it a point to redraw their marketing strategies, spend more time on tasks that deliver value and cut down on the chunk that does not.
End of the day, the future belongs to those marketers who can make the internet work in their favour. And it demands a constant change of strategies.