Refresh Your Marketing Strategy: A Comprehensive 10-Point Outline

Whether it is the start or the middle of the year, it is crucial to periodically review your marketing strategy and pinpoint areas that need improvement. This will help you to ensure that your marketing tactics are in line with your business objectives, can adjust to changes in the market, are optimized for resource allocation, and are tailored to meet the needs of your target audience.

This blog post discusses essential areas to focus on while reviewing and devising your marketing strategy. These areas include examining your content and social media strategies and evaluating your website’s search engine optimization performance. 

Steps to Review and Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Optimize Your Content Marketing Plan

Analyze Past Content Performance

Reviewing past content performance is one of the ideal ways to know how to plan your content calendar for the year ahead. Here’s an outline of what to look for: 

• Analyze website traffic data to identify top-performing content
• Use social media analytics to evaluate engagement metrics for past content
• Review email marketing open and click-through rates for previously shared content
• Consider feedback and comments from users on past content
• Identify any content that has consistently performed well over time

Set new goals and create a content calendar

After determining what worked last year in your content marketing, take the following steps to set your content calendar for the year.

• Reflect on the previous year’s accomplishments and areas for improvement.
• Identify specific and measurable goals for the new year.
• Consider your overall business objectives and how the content calendar can support them.
• Research industry trends and audience preferences to inform your content creation.
• Decide what content you should include in the calendar and how often it should be published.
• Allocate resources and establish a realistic timeline for content creation and publication.
• Use tools like Asana or Taskade to plan and organize the content calendar.
• Set regular review periods to assess progress and make adjustments as needed.

Review Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Review your social media marketing strategy to improve your online presence and engage with your audience. Analyze your approach, identify areas for improvement, and develop a comprehensive plan to achieve your goals. Here are some steps to follow:

Audit social media profiles

• Keep your social media profiles consistent with your brand image and up-to-date to maintain a professional online presence.
• Check that all the information on your profiles is accurate and complete.
• Make sure your profiles are optimized for search engines.

Update your social media marketing strategy

• Review and define your social media goals and objectives.
• If your campaigns aren’t reaching your target audience, conduct new research on their interests and behaviors.
• Create new content based on your research, and repurpose past successful content.
• Review the social media channels for your business. Is your audience still engaging with the ones you’ve used? If not, it might be time to check out new ones.

Review your publishing calendar

• Review metrics from the past year’s posts and note what days and times you got the most engagement.
• Update your social media calendar to reflect the best publishing days and times.
• Add follow-up comments to your posts to get further engagement and traffic. Platforms like Nuelink or Content Studio offer this ability.

Analyze and Revamp Your Email Marketing Plan

Improve your email marketing plan by analyzing and improving it. Optimize your campaigns to engage better with subscribers and achieve your marketing goals. Evaluate and refine your strategy to drive better results. Here are steps that will help you revamp your email marketing strategy:

Clean up email lists

• Remove inactive subscribers from your email list to improve your email deliverability and open rates.
• Scrub your email list to remove invalid, duplicate, or unsubscribed email addresses.
• Segment your email list to ensure you deliver relevant content to interested people.

Personalize emails

• Use the subscriber’s name in the email subject line and body to make the email feel more personal.
• Segment your email list based on subscriber interests and behaviors to deliver targeted content.
• Use dynamic content that changes according to a user’s interests, preferences, and behaviors to personalize the email based on the subscriber’s location, preferences, and past interactions with your brand.

Create an email marketing strategy

• Define your email marketing goals and objectives for the new year.
• Take a fresh look at your target audience and research their interests and behaviors.
• Review your email marketing service. Is it working for you? Does it offer automation that helps you set up drip campaigns? Can you quickly launch campaigns and track engagement?
• Develop a content strategy that aligns with your goals and works with your social media, content, and other systems.
• Create an email marketing calendar to plan and schedule your emails.

Update Your SEO Plan

Improve your website’s visibility on search engines by updating your SEO plan. By optimizing your website content and structure, conducting keyword research, and building quality backlinks, you can increase organic traffic to your site and boost your online presence. 

Many of the steps below will involve technical research and implementation that you might need help to do. I highly recommend hiring an expert to help.

If you plan to do it independently, Google offers a range of free tools such as Search Console, Analytics, and its Rich Results Testing Tool that can help with the following. In addition, paid tools such as SEMRush and Raven Tools will help with SEO audits.

Conducting an SEO audit

• Start by conducting a comprehensive SEO audit of your website to identify areas that need improvement. 
• Check your website’s crawlability, speed, and technical SEO.
• Check for HTTPS and security issues.
• Analyze your backlink profile, site structure, and internal linking.
• Evaluate your on-page SEO elements and content quality.
• Monitor your keyword rankings and perform keyword analysis.
• Check for structured data and schema markup.
• Examine user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).
• Evaluate local SEO.

Optimizing website and content for search engines

• Use your findings from your keyword analysis to fine-tune your on-page SEO content strategy.  
• Create high-quality content that incorporates those keywords.
• Optimize website structure and navigation to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index the site.
• Ensure that all website pages have unique and descriptive meta titles and descriptions.
• Build high-quality backlinks from other relevant websites to improve domain authority and search engine rankings.
• Regularly monitor website analytics to track performance and make necessary adjustments to improve search engine visibility.

Conclusion

In conclusion, preparing marketing for the new year is crucial for any business looking to stay ahead of the competition. Companies can create a compelling and impactful marketing strategy that drives growth and success by analyzing the previous year’s performance, setting clear goals, defining a target audience, and utilizing the latest marketing trends and technologies. 

However, it’s essential to remember that marketing is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring, evaluation, and adjustments to ensure maximum results. With the right approach and mindset, businesses can leverage the power of marketing to achieve their goals and thrive in the ever-changing market landscape.