We are nearly a quarter of a way through 2022 now and you may be looking at your marketing budget and activities for the next financial year. If marketing isn’t your strength, knowing where to put your money – or how much money to set aside – can be challenging. 

If you’re looking for tips on accelerating your marketing output this year – take a look at these tips!

1. Firstly and most importantly, ask yourself – what do you want to get out of your marketing this year? More customers? More regular work? More referrals? Once you know the answer to this, it’ll be much easier to start coming up with a plan on how you can achieve this.
2. Set aside a morning to work on the next 6 months of marketing. It sounds quite intimidating but you can make changes as you go, keep your plan fluid. Start by planning what product or service you’d like to promote each month – it should tie in with your answer to question one. Focus on what you want to get from your marketing. Then build your monthly marketing ideas around this.
3. Consider creating an integrated campaign plan – ensure social media, email campaigns and other advertising tie in. Once you’ve got the bare bones of what you’d like to promote, consider the channels you would use to do it. Keep a consistent message across all the channels so your concept is instantly recognisable.
4. Look at competitors and other companies you think do marketing well, what can you learn from them? Are there any ideas you could make your own? Don’t copy, but inspiration is important in developing ideas you may not have already looked into. If you see something you like, make a note of it and think about how you could make use it for your business in an original way. 
5. Analysing what has worked is important, and this is something that often scares people. It doesn’t have to be difficult. Measure impressions on social posts, monitor open rates on emails and see what people are clicking through on. Ask people in person how they heard of you or what drew them into wanting to work with you. Once you have enough data, you can start monitoring what posts perform better with your audience. You’ve gain more insight into what interests your followers and that gives you something to build your marketing plan around.
6. Be clear in everything you produce, is it time to go back to basics with your marketing? Just because you understand what you do, doesn’t mean others do too. A good way of testing whether what you’re saying is simple enough, is to get someone with no knowledge of the industry to have a read. They’ll point out confusing words, difficult sentences and concepts that don’t make sense.

Can you allocate a couple of hours a week to marketing to start with, and gradually build up? It can seem difficult to know where to begin, but even small changes can make a difference to your marketing plan. In turn this can save you money on marketing that isn’t working for you.

If you’d like more help and advice on starting a marketing plan for your business, get in touch with The Copy today by calling 01905 887040 or emailing howdy@thecopy.uk.