The new year is a great time for resolutions, for fresh starts and new beginnings. It’s also a great time for a fresh marketing strategy. 2020 is the year for bold, new ideas, and our panel of experts is stuffed to the gills with such ideas. Learn from eight highly successful marketing professionals about what’s changed in their marketing approach, and face the new year with boldness. Don’t let anything stop you from achieving your marketing goals next year.
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Growth Hackers
In 2020, we’ve decided to create a more systemic approach to our marketing. We’ll document every action we take, every single detail and process so we can more easily repeat our techniques, train new people, and scale.
The goal will be to create more SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for new hires and also focus on customer experience by offering them a smoother onboarding process as well as better collaboration.
StartUp Mindset
The number one tip for changing any marketing approach is the ability to be willing to change and adapt as the landscape changes. Personalization is becoming more and more important, so we are doing our best to speak to our readers, followers, and customers directly and in a less generic manner. We also want to enhance our audience’s experience by engaging with them more on social.
Shep Hyken
Customers expect a good experience. The bar is set by rock-star companies that deliver excellent service and focus on the experience.
Customer experience is a powerful marketing strategy, and if you want to take that experience to the next level, be convenient to do business with. Eliminate or reduce friction from your process. Don’t make customers wait. Have easy and intuitive self-service solutions to give customers quick and easy access to their questions. What can you deliver to a customer, rather than making them come to you?
Eliminate steps in the buying process to make it easier – as in more convenient – to do business with. Convenience is what will separate you from the competition. Look at what Uber and Lyft did to disrupt the taxi-cab industry. Consider what Amazon did to retail. They won by being more convenient. Find ways to be more convenient and you’ll reap the benefits of disrupting your competitors – and maybe an entire industry.
Jerry Banfield
Think long term (5 to 50 years). With eight years of experience marketing online, the number one mistake I have made is thinking short-term, such as “How do I get more traffic this week, this month, this quarter, or this year?” For 2020, I am focusing on “How do I give immense value in a way that will increase my organic traffic indefinitely and allow what I do today to contribute to an increase in 2021, 2025, 2030, and 2050?”
This leaves me ruling out any short-term solutions and focusing on creating where there is a clear need for something better (i.e. Google search results return nothing helpful or the existing rules are bad). Often this approach takes a long time to work and gets put aside in favor of more “urgent” tasks. Today, I have put all those tasks aside and focused on what really matters.
Business Storytelling Tips
Don’t change what works, but always try new things and try them quickly, to see what new technologies and strategies you can implement. I’m currently a big fan of testing immersive video, which gets easier and easier to use, and podcasting is definitely on the upswing.
Mod Girl Marketing
Show a human element in everything you do! Show the PEOPLE behind your brand. People want REAL. They are tired of landing on websites full of stock imagery and hyped-up jargon. They want to do business with REAL people.
So my #1 tip for changing your marketing approach in 2020 is to get REAL. Showcase you and your employees. Don’t hide behind the computer. Relationships are the foundation of every business. And it’s really hard to build relationships when your brand is stale and no one knows who the people behind the business really are or what they stand for.
Detailed
I think a big one for our team is to do far fewer things but execute on each thing in a far greater style.
Basically following the old, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” adage.
So not trying to be everywhere on every single channel, but giving the few channels and side projects we do decide on as much attention as they truly deserve.
Maria Johnsen
Get rid of the strategies which don’t work and stick with the ones that work.
Every marketing plan starts with reviewing what worked in 2019 and how well did you reach those goals.
If the KPIs worked well and gave good results, it doesn’t mean that they would give the same positive results in 2020.
It all depends on your industry, your markets, your customers, and most importantly your business growth objectives. So in process of your marketing plan evaluation, make sure to modify your KPI. Once you’ve identified the right sales and marketing goals and KPIs to measure and analyze in 2020, you’ll be able to estimate the actual gap between the results your current efforts are getting today and the goals you’ve set.
In May 2019, my verified Twitter account with 200,000 followers got hacked, although I had a strong password and phone number. This hacking incident was a blessing in disguise and the best thing that happened to me. I notified Twitter and decided not to use it anymore and had my crew and clients not use it either. It’s waste of time, energy and you don’t get customers via Twitter either. The two most important reasons are A) security issues B) It’s filled with bots; as a result, you won’t see sales via this social media site.
Twitter has become a dysfunctional, all politics and bot-generated social site. Why would anybody waste their time on Twitter?
So what exactly will work in 2020? Paid advertising and paid social media advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. As for organic marketing, I’d use inbound and outbound marketing and take Twitter out of the equation.
You should lay out the marketing initiatives at only a high level as needed to align with the yearly business goals, whereas quarterly roadmaps are the tactical plans for the year. Why roadmaps? Because they make it possible to adjust your annual plan. The data earned through that tells you how well your marketing strategy and tactics are working.
More tools have become equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning, which means you have to perform better to get them to work for you including AI search engines.
