The first quarter of the year is when businesses want and need to start to see an increase in traffic and revenue. As the excitement of the holiday’s expire, so does the disposable income and as a result, a great spending hibernation starts and does not let up for months!
For most businesses, this results in a knee-jerk reaction to cut employees and ancillary spending in an effort to drop every savable penny to the bottom line. Even-though a CFO or Accountant would approve this move, these cuts are not created equal and the proper execution of a first quarter marketing plan will mitigate the tough times, keeping employee moral and headcount whole.
Please Read The Next 10 Words Very Carefully…
This is NOT the time to decrease your marketing spend!
This is actually the time you at least HOLD or INCREASE your marketing spend to grab market share and recruit qualified employees that are unemployed or underemployed.
To accomplish both your marketing and your digital footprint, (Google SEO, Website, Social) you will need to be refreshed with new content in order to maintain website rankings as well as attract new employees.
In a recession, it is even more mission critical to have a detailed marketing plan or strategy, to ensure your dollars are spent efficiently. This budget must be broken down by day, week, and month, to not miss any revenue generating and yes, revenue savings opportunities due to lack of formal planning and tracking the results of your industry’s drivers of revenue.
As you start moving into 2023, your marketing plan should be based upon the trends and market factors that keep revenue flowing steadily for 12 full months out of the year!
3 Mission Critical Marketing Trends For 2023:
Please note, our clients don’t have to do any of this, we do it for them…
- SEO is more important than ever before. Your website needs to be refreshed with new and relevant content based upon Google’s new and improved guidelines on a regular basis to ensure a high quality score and preferred delivery during a search.
- In 2023 and beyond, you must have a Geo-Targeting strategy to make sure that your marketing efforts are relevant and will ensure you reach customers who will actually convert.
- Historical meta-data has become harder to acquire as enhanced privacy policies are deployed across digital platforms. So what is the long and short-term solution? A solid plan for organizational memory in regards to meta-data that has psychographic buying behaviors through a historical targeting strategy. Data collected from past years can be applied to allow the identification of trends to determine what type of content works best for your customer base to convert.
A new year means new opportunities to explore new ways to generate more revenue with marketing. With a fresh P&L comes an opportunity to test new markets and deploy new techniques that may not have been possible in previous years. If you have a marketing plan and budget to take you through 2023, that’s great- you have a head start. If you don’t have one, it’s never too late to start managing your revenue though managing your marketing.
Cheers to a happy, healthy and profitable 2023,
-Tom
