Get a Game Plan: 10 Tips for Making Your Marketing More Successful in 2010

It seems like just a few months ago we were getting ready for the 2008 holidays, which makes it even harder to imagine that the year 2009 is quickly coming to an end. If you’re like many marketers, you’re wrapping up 2009 and already planning ahead for 2010.  As you’re closing out your 2009 files and looking for ways to add some structure to your pre-holiday workdays, take a few moments to follow these 10 tips for marketing success.

1. Do Some Analytics Housekeeping

The end of the year provides you with a great time to do a little analytics housekeeping, taking a step back and making sure that you’re basing your decisions on good data-something that’s extremely important and can also be somewhat difficult.  The first thing to do is ensure that your analytics and other tracking tags are present on every page of your site, so that you don’t miss out on an ounce of good data.

Next, test your conversions to make sure they are tracking accurately.  Literally ‘do the math’ to ensure that your analytics program tells you the same thing as your back-end CRM and e-commerce systems.  This might take some time, but it’s an investment in your analytics for the future, while also forcing you to do a ‘gut-check’ of your checkout process (or other conversion event).  A likely bonus is that you may find usability improvements.

2. Set Goals with Timelines

Setting goals is great, but setting a goal without an attached timeline is a risky proposition that could cost valuable time and money. Set your performance goals for your campaigns and monitor their progress throughout the prescribed timeframe.   For example, set a goal to decrease your cost per lead by 30% before the end of 2010, then monitor throughout the year to see if you are on track to meet your goal.  If your campaigns don’t achieve the goal or make sufficient progress, revise them or reexamine your goals.   Make sure your time frames are reasonable and give the campaigns time enough to perform, but if you don’t see improvement, don’t be afraid to shift the spend.

3. Create a Maintenance Schedule

Speaking of setting goals with timelines, ensure that one of your first goals is to take the time to improve your marketing on a daily or weekly basis.  The fact is that most of your marketing can be improved if you just spend a little time finding and fixing the things that are not working.  Certainly, there never seem to be enough hours in the day, which makes it even more important to plan and make time for analyzing, optimizing, reporting, learning and communicating.  If you make the time to do a little preemptive marketing maintenance, you’ll save time in putting out fires later on.

4. Analyze and Optimize Your PPC

Not all campaigns are created equally, and this is especially true of pay-per-click ads.  Rather than letting your ads run on autopilot, breaking even or being somewhat profitable, now is the perfect time to take a closer look at your PPC program.  Reorganize or remove your campaigns that aren’t performing well, tighten up your ad groups, tweak your ad spend and weed out the keywords and campaigns that simply aren’t working for you.  Trimming the PPC fat now will save you from getting a PPC stomach ache in the future.

5. Understand and Improve Your Creatives

The best way to understand and improve your creatives is by analyzing campaigns side by side across all search engines.  In this view, you’ll see consistencies among the top-performing creatives.  For example, is there a particular offer that does well, or is there a style of writing that seems to be resonating with the audience and drawing more clicks and conversions?  After reviewing these consistencies, optimize or rewrite any poorly-performing creatives.

6. Report on Measurable Actions

Sure, there is no shortage of metrics that you can report on, but just because it’s in a report doesn’t mean it has meaning to your marketing efforts.  Determine your business goals and then map them into measurable actions.  For example, if one of your business goals is to increase the number of interested clients on your mailing list, you’d want to track the number of people who sign up for your e-newsletter, the number of times your newsletter PPC ad is clicked on, and so on.

By mapping your goals to measurable actions, and then tracking the actions, you’ll have the information you need to determine if your programs and campaigns are on-track.  Use this information in your monthly and quarterly reports, as well as relying on it to help drive both daily and long-term marketing decisions.

7. Stay up to Speed

In case you haven’t noticed, in the world of online marketing, things change fast.  It is likely that social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook weren’t even on your radar (or were just on the edge of it) as you were planning for 2009.  Take the time to research the social networking resources, webinars, conferences and other offerings out there that may have an impact on your online marketing.  Ensuring that you’re plugged in and staying current will increase the chances of your marketing success.

8. Perform Regular Audits

On at least a quarterly basis, schedule time to step back and look at the big picture.  Review all of your marketing programs and how they fit together.  Are there additional opportunities to cross-promote a particular offer, or are your campaigns concentrating on one marketing message, but ignoring others?  Take the time to see what is working, what is not, and what has changed.  By reviewing and re-evaluating your goals, overall strategy and day-to-day tactics, you’ll be taking the right steps toward marketing success.

9. Accurately Attribute Credit

For many marketers, the thought of attribution is one that is overwhelming-marketers think that you must have the perfect attribution solution before you should even take the first step.  This simply isn’t true-some attribution is always better than no attribution.  Every day you postpone using some attribution model, whether it’s an even model, an even with exclusions model or a model that was custom-designed for your particular business-is a day that you are basing your marketing decisions on flawed data.  Don’t go another day without some sort of attribution model firmly in place.

10. Prove your Value

In this still-volatile economy, there’s a lot to be said for reminding your company of just how valuable you are to them and their bottom line.  As you’re making changes to your campaigns, shifting spend to save money and reworking creatives to increase conversions, make sure to take clear notes to share with your supervisors and other team members when the time is right.  By consistently improving your marketing and showing the results in clear business terms, you will easily be able to prove your value to your company.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 8:22 am and is filed under All Blogs, Analytics, Attribution Management, Lead Generation, News, Optimization, PPC, Uncategorized, What's New?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.