There’s always an opportunity to start afresh with your marketing plans and work on ideas to attract new customers at any time during the year but there’s something about the New Year that adds extra weight and focus towards making renewed efforts.  Your business deserves to succeed, so now is the time to reflect on what happened in 2017 and take note of the things that did and didn’t work for you, including your marketing strategy and those in charge of implementing it.  Historical data can also give us valuable clues about how to move forward and make the right choices.

Most importantly, you need to keep reaching out to new businesses and paying attention to the data that you currently hold, especially as we get closer to the GDPR changes (you can read about this in our previous blogs).  As business data is changing and growing all the time – each year there are more and more start-ups looking for the services you provide, perhaps openings for potential partners or investing and businesses scaling up or down – this means changes within your database such as a contact’s role with a company’s structure, the company’s focus for growth and even change in location, so you need you need to be reviewing and adding to your data to keep up with those changes.

Look at Upcoming Trends for This Year

Your tried and tested campaigns may have got you through this past year but is there something new for you to entertain in 2018?  If you are doing any online marketing, you may be excited to know that you will be able to target prospects through emails in another way, just as you would via Facebook or Twitter ads.  If you have an online store or need to start using paid advertising to attract new customers, you should think about the emails which you already hold for potential customers as a way to show them ads for products/services more pertinent to their choice.

Technology from LiveRamp uses an Open Ad or mobile device ID to utilise your customer’s email via a cookie and gives them the results based on what they are looking for and it’s they’ve taken into consideration GDPR’s new rules too:

“…a website with space for an ad sees that cookie, and the DSP that’s about to bid for that website’s ad space matches that cookie to the email address via an IdentityLink mapping table — in milliseconds, of course.” (Source: http://bit.ly/2BWGwXW)

Focusing in on consumer data in such a way is very useful to keep attention on your brand at all times and maintain that connection and flow with your customers, when they search for a service which you provide you want them to see your company first not your competitors.  If you are not doing paid advertising yet or want to re-evaluate your plan, then get in touch with us about how we can grow your business via this method.

Update & Refresh Your Brand

You may want to start the year with updating your website if it needs a fresh look and feel, as this is the first impression of your company so it’s good to get it right.  Think about how you want your business to be portrayed to the world and perhaps review your company’s mission statement, to ensure you’re attracting the right customer base.  Knowing more about your ideal prospects will help you to design your website in the best way and develop content that best suits your audience.

Once you have made any changes such as the above you may want to consider sending out a newsletter to your email marketing lists and perhaps new business data, so that they are aware of these changes and can peruse the new/updated website.

We wish your business every success this year!