In our last blog, we talked about marketing tasks that you should be doing daily. Now, we would like to address the tasks you should be doing monthly. Don’t worry. We’ll keep it to three:
1. Check your plan. Plans are essential for budgeting and ensuring you have a steady stream of marketing reaching your customers and prospects, but they shouldn’t be so firm that they can’t change.
Before you order the print runs on this month’s mailings or schedule your next emails, take a look at the past two or three months’ efforts. Based on response rates and results of recent printed and online campaigns, you may need to re-evaluate your plans. If a letter performed well, a remail might be in order. If an email didn’t get the click-throughs you were expecting, you may need to make change your text or your approach in the following emails. Were click-throughs high or the number of visitors to a marketed web page great but sales were not? The problem might be with the landing page itself. Rework the text and try again.
Plans made six months to a year ago might not make sense when it comes time to distribute. Be flexible with your campaigns and your plans.
2. Check your mix. No matter how hard traditional marketers want to believe that print marketing is the only way to reach customers, it’s just not true. Likewise, despite all the benefits, bells, and whistles that electronic marketing offers, you just can’t ignore the tactile, physical presence of a printed marketing piece. So…
Every month, check your mix. Make sure you’re reaching customers in every format possible. See which formats customers are responding to. Plan for more campaigns of the same format, and then figure out WHY the original campaigns worked. Can it be applied in your other channels?
Mixing up your approaches, reaching customers where they are—in their mailbox, in their in box, in their social media feeds—enables you to stay top-of-mind and provides more opportunities to build trusting relationships.
3. Check your name. By that we mean Google yourself. Or Yahoo yourself, or use whatever internet browser you prefer. The point is, search the web for your business. See where it pops up.
Does your website appear at the top of the research results? If not, figure out the problem and correct it. Are your press releases being published? Find them, track them, and keep pumping more out. Are customers commenting on your services on review sites? Take note of them and address them, if appropriate. Is there missing or misleading information out there? Fix it. As my friend’s grandfather said, your name and your reputation are the only things you have. Guard them carefully.
Stopping on a regular—but frequent—basis to evaluate your performance and your progress not only prevents you from traveling too far down a road that won’t prove fruitful, but it also helps you improve your performance and increase your response rates.
And that’s a check worth making.
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