Business moves at light speed and most business leaders feel as if they’re constantly playing catch-up. That’s why pausing to plan in Q4 is critical. Following three simple steps will help you get ahead of the curve and have a smoother, more successful 2023.

A common question from business leaders is how to best focus their marketing efforts to help them gain and maintain traction. The simple answer is: a little planning goes a long way. If you find yourself in the “what do we need to do differently for greater growth in 2023” conundrum, we suggest three places to look.

First Things First: Revisit Your Marketing Plan

The business landscape has changed significantly over the last couple of years, and taking a look at a few key elements of your marketing plan – and whether they need to be refreshed – will go a long way towards hitting the mark in 2023.

  1. Has your market morphed? Clarifying who you are selling to delivers dividends. You may have multiple targets including existing clients, prospects in various industries, and circles of influencers who refer your company. Understanding the personas of each of these audiences can help you better focus your messaging and the channels you use to reach them.
  2. What do you want your marketing programs to achieve? All too often, companies expend lots of effort and money exploring numerous outreach directions without being able to determine what’s working and what’s not. We recommend focusing on three unique strategic marketing objectives and then building and measuring tactics around those.
  3. Have you set clear goals with ways to measure success? The true value of having a great marketing strategy in place is that you know what you are going after and how you are going to measure it. We execute our clients’ marketing programs in 90-day sprints. This delivers equal snapshots in time with which to measure success and determine next steps, based on the results. And 90 days provides enough time for the market to respond while not allowing “shiny object syndrome” to cause knee-jerk reactions and constantly changing targets.

If you don’t currently have a marketing plan in place, now is an ideal time to develop one.

Second: Audit Your Website

When was the last time you looked at your company’s website from a prospect or client’s perspective?  Websites that were once interesting, well-branded, and ideally-messaged have a tendency to get disjointed as new information is patched in over time. This often creates an unclear call to action with messaging that is confusing or incongruous or worse – irrelevant or inaccurate.

The marketing plan you’ve developed should describe who you serve and how you make a difference, a short, compelling statement that communicates why your organization should be chosen, and the unique qualities you offer that are valued by your target market. These equate to your mission statement, value proposition, and differentiation statements, respectively. This core messaging is the foundation for all outbound communications, including your website. When possible, have a neutral, outside source evaluate your website to gain an understanding of what they think your company does, what next steps you’d like them to take, and how well you provide the content that will help them make their decision to work with you.

Finally, Evaluate Your Social Presence

Many of our B2B clients rely on social media – particularly LinkedIn – to provide thought leadership, answer questions about their processes, tout the solutions they provide to their customers, and engage with each of their target audiences using custom messaging and graphics. If your company hasn’t posted on LinkedIn in a while, or you do so sporadically, now is a great time to consider how you’d like to educate your audiences in the coming year.

Again, we utilize the well-developed marketing plan to provide the higher-level messaging and unique attributes of your target audience in order to create just the right rhythm for posts. Publishing articles/blogs on your LinkedIn profile page is also a great way to create evergreen content when your prospects are doing their research on you and your company. Adding these to your website will also improve your SEO and direct people to your website – which, if you’ve updated it, will drive them to a clear call to action. This demonstrates why these three areas are critical and how they support each other to propel your results forward.

Side Note: Another Q4 Action is to Get Google Analytics 4 in Place

While not part of the critical few planning steps, Google Analytics 4 should be on your Q4 actions list. You may already know that Google is replacing the current installment of Google Analytics on July 1, 2023, with their new version, Google Analytics 4 (GA4). GA4 offers a new approach to analytics and is a very different type of tool than the Universal Analytics with which we are all familiar.

GA4 will not bring forward any historical data from the current version of Google Analytics, so we recommend adding GA4 to your account by the end of the calendar year so you can start collecting data as soon as possible to use for comparison purposes, month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter. You will likely need to configure your GA4 reports to give you those you’ve come to rely on with UA.

Need a Trusted Resource?

Hopefully, these tips will renew your focus on your marketing objectives. If you need an expert by your side in the process, we’re here to help. 5280 Accelerator is a trusted resource – we’ve helped companies gain traction in their marketing pursuits for more than two decades. Preparing and executing strategic marketing plans for company growth is our specialty and we’re ready to help you plan for a successful 2023 – with smart marketing to accelerate your business. Reach out if we can be of assistance.