5 New Year's resolutions to help your brand performance boom in 2018

The New Year is well underway and, rightly so, January is seen by most internal marketing teams as the time to define an approach for the forthcoming 12 months. If you’re still struggling to think of ideas to boost your brand performance, take a look at these five New Year’s resolutions to implement now.

1 - Consider your objective

Your marketing objective for the New Year needs to be led by your business’ goals. These goals should already have been defined by your MD, Brand Director, or an equivalent. Here’s a few examples of what goals your company should be looking to achieve:

• Top 3 priorities over the next 12-24 months
• Specific company goals, such as product launches and average order values
• Revenue goals for this and next financial year

Using these goals, reset your marketing team’s expectations of what is required in 2018, and ensure the work you are doing is fully supporting the goals of the business.

2 - Try something new every quarter

As part of your brand strategy, you should already have a clear idea of the industries you are looking to break in to, and the buyer personas you are directly looking to target. This information is usually spelled out in a brand guide that features the mission, positioning and messaging required to go to market.

If you haven’t got this information, our Brand Director Neil Perrott has got some useful tips on how you can pull this together.

With this information clear, split up 2018 into four quarters and target one of these industries/buyer personas at a time. Build a marketing strategy around each of them and think about how to best target them and turn them into a genuine lead

3 - set smart goals

Measurement of your brand performance should come from the goals that you’ve originally set, as part of New Year’s resolution #1 - it should be helping to achieve your overall business aims. Marketing goals should be specific, measured on a scorecard, and checked frequently to see if you’re on-track.

Good examples of SMART goals or KPIs you could set your marketing team, include:

• Website visitors… provides stats on growth of brand awareness
• Leads… provides stats on growth of brand engagement
• Marketing-qualified leads… provides insight of individuals with purchasing intent
• Sales-qualified leads… provides your sales team with potential customers
• Customers… self-explanatory! 

4 - implement a campaign

Armed with the business objectives, brand strategy and goals for marketing, now is the time to implement a campaign. Remember talking about doing something every quarter? A campaign is a perfect way to target a industry or persona and generate leads. Typically, from a digital marketing perspective, you should look to create for every campaign:

• Thought-leadership and educational ‘premium’ content in the form of a downloadable guide, interactive tool or video. This content should be persona-driven and answer the pain point that they are suffering from professionally.
• Supporting content, such as blogs, are required to increase awareness of the thought-leadership content you’ve created. Blogs not only provide you with a chance to promote the new content, but also increase your SEO, thus getting more visitors to your website.
• Owned media implementation, such as social media and email communications, to promote the content further, as well as the new blog articles you’ve written.
• Earned media slots in industry publications or online news forums where your buyer personas will be look for solutions to their problems.
• Paid media, utilising PPC or advertising on social media portals, to get your brand and thought-leadership content in front of the audience who need it most.

5 - Prepare for new laws

How many times have you seen the acronym GDPR over the last 12 months, eh? Well it can’t be ignored for much longer - you need to get your act together on your website and other digital marketing forms. Here’s a list of what you need to think about:

• Data collection on your website - Are you informing users that their data will be stored and used by a company when they submit it online?
• Data storage and processing - Can you provide the information you hold on every contact in your database and supply to them quickly?
• End of relationship - Is it easy and accessible for your contacts to unsubscribe from your email communications and change their email preferences?
• You may also want to think about these actions, as compiled by HubSpot.