Your marketing strategy: 2017 and beyond

123RF

As a result, marketing strategies needs to be sharpened and adjusted to enable you to beat your competition. You need to look at:

• Current situation: Analyse your debt, sales movement and acceptance and popularity of your services or products. Through this you can establish which aspect needs improvement or adjustment.

• Social and other media: Ensure that your social media presence is on par with your competitors and the needs of your followers. Monitor the conversations of your competitors and followers and even join in the conversation, where applicable. This will provide you with ideas on which areas of your marketing strategy needs to improve.
• Marketing spend:You might want to reconsider your budget spend. According to studies, outbound marketing like billboards, print, and/or radio is ‘old school’ and more leads are being generated from inbound efforts. This might translate into doubling on your content writing to develop quality content like blog posts, newsletters or other types of content relevant to your business.
• Goals for next year: Goals give you something specific to work towards and enable you to measure success in terms of growth, profitability, etc.

• Information: Do research and listen to what analysts in your industry say about consumer expectations in the next year. This information is very valuable as you can plan around it.

Fortunately for small businesses, you can be much more flexible to quickly adjust to any changes or challenges in the economy or industry. You and your business can gain a competitive edge by approaching these changes in a structured way.

The new year can offer you an opportunity to find out more and subsequently better address your customers’ needs.