This post is contributed by Jason Dirkham.
Marketing your business involves so many different steps. It can all be a little overwhelming if hundreds of big and small tasks are staring you down, and you can’t quite see how they should all come together. Just knowing where to start is tough when you’re not sure what’s most important and which tasks you should prioritize over others. You need a way to get organized and start arranging your marketing activities to align with the goals of your business. So where should you begin? There are multiple steps you can take to get your priorities in order and develop a marketing strategy that works for your brand.
Examine Your Current Position
Before you do anything else, you need to know where you currently stand. What marketing efforts have you already undertaken? What results have you got from them? You need to know your starting position so that you can determine where to go from there. There could be certain things that you’re already doing well, which you could focus on to achieve even more. Or you might be highlighting issues that need to be addressed and choosing the best ways to correct them.
There are several ways you might take stock of your current position so that you know where to get started. One of the most important steps for modern businesses is auditing your SEO. Search engine optimization is a significant part of digital marketing, and it can be surprisingly difficult to get right. An audit takes a good look at your current SEO position, examining how your website is performing and helping you to prioritize what you’re doing. There are different types of SEO, including on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Each type should be looked at in an audit to get a full picture of what’s going on and what should be improved.
SEO audits aren’t the only way to look at your current marketing position. You can also take a good look at other marketing efforts you might have already undertaken or important factors such as brand recognition. This could involve looking at your email marketing campaigns and how they’ve performed, or examining the results of PPC campaigns.
Leverage What You’ve Got
After you’ve looked at what’s currently working and what isn’t, you can start to think about how to make the most of what you’ve got. Instead of focusing on starting new initiatives, focus on making the most of the resources you already have. For example, you might already have a significant amount of online traffic, social media followers, or email list members. These can all be leveraged to improve your marketing and start increasing your sales. Identify your most engaged users and determine how you can get them to engage further.
You could consider steps such as creating a lead magnet to start generating some more leads, or encouraging your existing customers to make referrals. You can often make your marketing more affordable by focusing on what you’re already doing well and ramping up your efforts.
Align Marketing with Business Goals
It’s essential to ensure your marketing strategy is always in alignment with the overall goals of your business. This will help you to prioritize your marketing efforts and make sure you’re focusing on the right things. When you set marketing goals, you need to check that they will help to further the key goals of your business. So start with your main business goals first and work from there, deciding which marketing goals will best help you to grow your business. You will need to think about what you want to achieve, how you will measure your success, and what resources you might need to fulfill your goals.
Outline Actionable Improvements
You want to understand what your goals are and what improvements you might need to make, but you can’t leave things too abstract. Once you understand the direction you want to take, you have to turn your objectives into actions. This might be part of your assessment of certain areas of your marketing. For example, when you conduct an SEO audit (or get someone else to do it for you), one of the tasks might be to identify exactly what steps you need to take to fix any issues that arise. Fixing any major problems should be a top priority before you do anything else.
Identify the Most Critical Tasks
To take care of important marketing tasks in order, it’s crucial to identify the most critical tasks first. Some marketing tasks are essential to your success, while others can take a backseat without having too much of a negative effect. Some of these tasks might be things that have a deadline, which you have to get started on as soon as you can to complete them on time. Others might be marketing tasks that are directly linked to your revenue, which you need to focus on if you want to keep money coming in so that you can invest it back into your marketing.
Delegate Tasks If You Can
Finding the time to get all of your marketing completed can be challenging. If you’re trying to do it all in-house or get it done yourself, you could definitely struggle. When you have people who can help you, ensuring you make use of their time and talents is essential. Delegating tasks will free up some of your time and enable several important tasks to be completed at once. You might focus on the most critical things while you delegate less important tasks to others. Or you might make sure it’s all hands on deck to address some of the most crucial tasks first and get them done faster.
Speak to a Marketing Agency
If you don’t have your own team to help out with marketing, or they don’t have the time or skills to help, there are other options. Outsourcing your marketing is a smart move if you want to get your priorities right in regard to your marketing. A good marketing agency will organize everything for you and help you reach both your marketing and business goals. There are different options for marketing agencies that you might consider. Some are very focused on digital marketing and may even offer services for a specific type of digital marketing, such as SEO or email marketing. Others may be able to help with offline marketing methods, depending on what your goals are.
Outsourcing can make your marketing more affordable and make it easier to prioritize. When you have marketing experts to help you out, you can outline what your goals are and what steps you should be focusing on to meet them. You’ll be working together with the agency, so you still get to retain control over your marketing activities and how they benefit your business.
Set Deadlines
To prioritize marketing tasks, it definitely makes sense to have deadlines. Once you’ve started thinking about which tasks need to be finished first, you can set clear deadlines for everything that you need to do. The most critical tasks might not always have the soonest deadline to complete them, but they’re likely to be first in line for you to get started on them. Less important tasks can wait, or perhaps might not even require a deadline just yet. Depending on the tasks on your list, your deadlines could be weeks away, months away, or maybe even further in the future.
Keep the Ball Rolling Once You Get Started
Some marketing tasks and activities can’t be completed until you’ve started others. This is one of the reasons it can be so important to prioritize everything and get it all in the right order. Make sure you have a good schedule of events planned out so that once you get started on those initial tasks, you know what to do next. Even before your first tasks are completed, it could be time to get started with related tasks that support them. But don’t begin anything new until you’re sure it’s the right time to do so.
Use the Right Software
Keeping track of all of the marketing tasks on your list isn’t easy, especially as it can grow as you get started on it. Using software and planning tools to track everything can make it a lot easier, giving you a clear overview of what you’re doing and what to do next. There are various options for project management tools and marketing tools that could help you out. If you want a free way to track tasks, consider using a Trello board to create cards for each task. You can move them around as you’re working on them or archive them when they’re completed. There’s also project management software like Asana, which can be great for working in a team. You can assign tasks to different people and monitor the process of everything, as well as communicate with people within the app.
Getting your marketing priorities right can take some time, but it’s worth getting organized if you want everything to fall into place.
