Want to Improve Your Business in the New Year?
Of course you do. That wasn’t even a rhetorical question, just SEO.
What might surprise you is that we want that for your business also. True story. DAMN GOOD is the kind of consultative agency that always goes the extra mile to share our expertise with our clients, and anyone else that cares to listen, which is basically you, dear reader.
So please consider this quartet of glorious insight nuggets our New Year’s gift to you.
IDEA 1: Follow the Data
Online marketing has been a dream-come-true for advertisers everywhere for two simple reasons: targeting and tracking. But not equally so.
Digital media is ideal for targeting only the specific audiences you want to reach, allowing your brand to connect with them on a far more precise level. And targeting technologies have been only improving for decades, allowing for more accurate and granular demographic segmenting that paves the way to further targeting precision.
But, without question, the greater prize digital marketing delivers is tracking. Tracking Internet users is exactly how companies like Google, Meta (Facebook & Instagram), Amazon, and others amassed enough data to target, and it’s what ensures that targeting will only improve as the new years pass.
Data is everything. And there’s absolutely no reason you can’t put it to work for your business, or improve upon your current digital efforts. In the right hands, data from a PPC (i.e. Google AdWords) campaign can guide your efforts to continuously optimize it, improving your conversion rate to get as much ROI as possible for your spend.
And it’s not just digital advertising, either. Analysis of email data and web analytics can be equally effective in optimizing your email campaigns and your web presence.
Make it your New Year’s resolution to dig deeper into your data and see what secrets it may reveal for your business.
IDEA 2: Think Twice
One of the nice things about data is that it can help make decisions for you, but there are still plenty of decisions that a business operator will have to make on their own. For those times, perhaps the best advice we can offer is to think twice before doing so.
As consultants, DAMN GOOD often encounters businesses that are run by the entrepreneurs who built them, as well as other executives who are used to wielding authority over their brands. Unfortunately, authority alone is not sufficient for success in any business, which is why expertise and consultation are invaluable to businesses looking to grow.
It’s not uncommon for ANY business to be too wrapped up in itself to “see the forest for the trees.” This is precisely why taking advice from the outside is so necessary. It is no different for individuals than it is for businesses (which happen to be run by individuals). It always helps to get an outside perspective. In some cases, it may even be essential.
For a business, outside perspectives can come from a variety of sources. They can come from consultants like DAMN GOOD, from consumer research such as focus groups, or even from analysis of certain data that may yield business intelligence or reasoning you had not thought to consider. THAT is the value of an outside perspective.
It’s almost 2024. There’s no reason to make decisions on your own. Double up on your perspectives.
IDEA 3: Change It Up, Already
It’s easy to forget that people treat brands a lot like they treat other people. They gravitate toward those that attract and engage them, and ignore those they find boring. The one thing that consumers can’t stand is boredom. Even if they HATE your brand, at least they can have strong feelings about it, but a boring brand fosters the opposite: no feelings at all.
One of the most valuable assets in marketing is actually having something new to present to consumers. It could be a new product or service, or just a new ad campaign. Perhaps your business has an important anniversary to celebrate, a key new staff addition, or a new product or website. It’s essential for brands to stay in motion in order to keep their audiences engaged.
A rebranding effort can be a fantastic way to do this. Not only does it allow you to update your brand’s look and feel, but doing so also gives you the opportunity to reintroduce audiences to your brand. This will almost certainly boost awareness of your brand, and likely sales as well. Rebranding gives consumers a reason to consider your brand anew for some, or for new audiences to meet your brand for the first time. Because of this, rebranding is also a great time to change your brand’s tactics in sales or marketing.
But even if you do not rebrand, you should consider what you can do to freshen up your brand’s presence on a regular basis. What DAMN GOOD tells our clients is that having something – anything – new to share with consumers is priceless simply because it gives you a reason to reach out to them and keep your brand in front of them.
If you don’t have a reason, then it’s time to create one.
IDEA 4: Make Marketing Part of Your Brand
This is invaluable advice to any business willing to hear it.
Many companies look at marketing as if it is an additional expense on top of overhead costs, when, in reality, it is an essential element of their business itself. Obviously, without letting audiences know what your brand offers, they can’t even know it exists.
Established brands often have a problem with this, because they assume that their customers will always be there regardless, so saving money on marketing is a great way to increase profits. But every brand has competitors, and once a brand has been overtaken by them, it is much more difficult to regain their lead than to simply not lose it to begin with.
Today, successful brands are embracing marketing like never before, and essentially fusing marketing into their brand identities. So their brand is no longer merely WHAT they are marketing, but also HOW they are doing it.
This is more than simply “making the medium the message,” it’s really about creating a memorable place in the market based upon a distinctive approach that carries its own brand equity. It’s a sea change that is coming to recognize the demise of consumer attention spans means that corporate brands are ultimately transient, and that it is rather the brand of the marketing itself that really matters most. Because it is the marketing that engages them, not the brand.
BONUS IDEA: Expert Up
While it’s certainly good to grasp the valuable insights revealed above, it’s far more useful to have a marketing team that understands them also to improve your business. Unfortunately, that can be a substantial challenge for businesses, as not all marketing partners are as interested in fostering client growth as DAMN GOOD.
Sorry. We can’t change that. All we can do is continue to apply our exceptional insight and branding expertise for the clients we serve. We’ll leave reforming the marketing industry to someone else.
But we encourage every business to seek out expertise to help them get the most out of their marketing budgets. Because there are really no options for improving your business in the coming year that don’t involve marketing to some degree.
We wish you a new year filled with joy and prosperity. Happy 2024!
