5 Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2016

Caid Christiansen• November, 09 2015

It may only be November, but it’s not too early to start thinking about changes you’ll need to make to your marketing heading into 2016.

In fact, there’s no better time than now to make sure your plans are in place. Wait too long, and you’ll find yourself scrambling to make decisions when next year finally rolls around.

So: what do you need to do heading into 2016? Here are a few ideas for marketing-related New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Revisit (and revise) your content strategy. To work well, your content strategy must be clear in its goals. Building out a strategy does you no good if you put it on the backburner and don’t bother revisiting it. Review yours. Does it still fit your overall marketing goals? Are the actions you’re taking in line with the strategy you have in place? If not, it’s time to go through the process again, revise your strategy, and set a plan to execute.
2. Set attainable, trackable goals for 2016. Just as you’re setting yourself up to fail if you say you want to “get fit” in 2016 (What is fit? How will you know if you are fit? What steps will you take to get there?), saying you want your marketing to get better in 2016 is practically useless. Review sales numbers and marketing data from this year. How much improvement would you like to see? What metrics are in place that will enable you to track this improvement? What will you do if you aren’t improving? Being specific about what you want to accomplish is the key to actually getting anything done.
3. Trim the fat. Have certain tactics not performed well for you this year? Not sure what the ROI is of some marketing actions you’ve taken? It’s simple: either find out what needs to change for these tactics to work, and make that change, or get rid of them. That money can be better spent elsewhere in your marketing, and holding onto something just because you’ve been doing it for a long time is a bad excuse.
4. Focus on data. Gone are the days of cushy ad buys and a shortage of data. (Actually, those days have been gone for a while now.) These days, there’s no excuse for not prioritizing data and using it to inform every single marketing decision you make. When done correctly, implementing a data-first approach to your marketing will send positive effects throughout the rest of your efforts.
5. Clarify marketing roles in (and outside of) your organization. Especially as marketing has become more data-driven, roles of C-levels and executives (CIO meets CMO meets CTO) have become less clear. Especially if you’re working with an outside organization (but even if you aren’t), this lack of clarity can stall efforts to improve and make it difficult to hold people accountable. Even though marketing will continue to evolve, clarifying who exactly is responsible for which aspects of your marketing is tremendously important.

A lot of these are simple activities in theory, but executing them–and executing them well–takes time. Get started on putting your marketing in shape for 2016 now, and you’ll likely find yourself and your business with a good bit of momentum heading into the New Year.