If you didn’t quite hit your marketing goals, you’re not alone. According to Marketing Week, up to 90% of marketing strategies are poorly briefed, badly executed, or don’t happen at all. Statistically, that means that only 10% of your competitors are doing what they should be – an opportunity right?
So, you’re busy, work is coming in, and it’s okay that marketing goes on the back burner for a while. But is it? Here are just a few reasons why making the time to invest in marketing strategy and delivery should be a priority in 2025.
Keeping An Eye On The Competition
When was the last time you checked on the competition? A core part of your strategy should be benchmarking your business and getting regular insight into your market. Even in three months, a competitor may creep in under the radar and start winning your business before you even know they are there. Strategically, you should be analysing competitors with a monthly review with your agency or marketing team. You can automate the analysis digitally with a good platform, use AI to run deeper research, and make competitor tracking part of your monthly marketing insight reports. Take a deeper dive every three months to see who’s winning and who’s coming up through the ranks with rapid growth or new products and services.
Prioritise Your Brand
Without strategic direction and conservatorship, your brand could be in big trouble. You only need a member of staff who is trigger-happy with Canva, someone who loves using Comic Sans in their presentations, and someone else who thinks it’s okay to use Chat GPT to save time on content creation, and by the time you check in you may not recognise that brand you worked so hard to create. Not having a brand strategy can and will cost you business, and you should have a brand roadmap that the whole business understands. Aligning your brand identity consistently across all platforms helps maintain trust and professionalism in fast-moving sectors.
If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It
This is a HUGE one. If you’re investing in digital or print advertising, pay-per-click, sponsorship, or even the services of an agency, how do you know if your money is going down the drain? If you want a moment to put this in perspective, take a look at what you spent on marketing and advertising this year – what’s the ROI? According to Forbes, almost half of businesses can’t measure social media ROI and two-thirds of businesses don’t have any marketing measures in place.
I could (and will) write a whole piece on this, but really, it’s easy if you have the strategy in place. If you’re paying someone internally or externally to deliver your marketing, spend some time with them and your leadership team to define what you’re looking for in your return metrics, how you’re going to measure them, and how you want to see them reported. A clear plan supported by strong SEO copywriting insights can also help you refine your message and elevate ROI with fewer resources.. Think about what you want to see, and how often. For instance, you may want a really detailed Excel spreadsheet (yuck) or graphs and pie charts to show performance. We use CoverageBook and SERanking for reporting, alongside GA4 but we tailor reports with our clients, giving them the metrics they want to see in an on-brand format that can easily be shared and understood across stakeholder groups. Everything is measured, but because we have pre-defined measures in place, it’s not hard to deliver. For our clients, they can consistently see that as their agency we are delivering a great return on investment.
Not Signing Off
From websites and design to content, delays are usually down to one or more people being too busy to sign off. “I’ll look at it this week” often ends up days, weeks or months down the line, and the opportunity is lost. If you do nothing else, prioritise your workflow. If your strategy and KPIs are agreed in place, and you trust your team or agency, you shouldn’t need to micromanage everything that goes out.
In our opinion, reputation management and marketing ROI should be part of your governance risk matrix and reviewed alongside other business-critical items. Here are a few you may want to consider…
Risk: Silence is not golden
- Your social media feeds are tumbleweed, the ‘latest news’ on your website is from December 2020, your last case study is from 2019, and you haven’t communicated with your clients in over a year. You know it’s because you’re busy, but how does it look to your clients and potential clients?
Risk: Talking your eye off your reputation
- You automate the odd post on social media, ‘Happy Easter!’, but no one ever checks or manages your feeds. The two enquiries, a one-star review and a complaint from two months ago, are sitting there unanswered – what does that say about your business?
Risk: Lack of attention to your brand
- Your brand is so much more than your logo. Every visual, digital and physical touchpoint relies on the quality of your brand. You know you’re the best, but what does your brand say? Brand inconsistency can lead to a loss of trust and credibility, and even worse, up to 80% of users will leave your website in seconds if they don’t like what they see, don’t see what they expect to see, or see spelling and grammar errors. It’s a wise investment to take a fresh look at your brand and create an ongoing roadmap for quality, performance and improvement. In other words – make time for it!
Risk: What happens in a crisis?
- You have a crisis, and no one knows what to do. Thanks to digital news and social media, reputational crises can escalate beyond control in a matter of hours. Crisis management should be part of your board governance, with at the very least an agreed plan in place for the ‘what-ifs’. A proactive crisis communications plan ensures your team knows what to do if a reputational issue arises online or in the press.
Risk: Standing still
- Stand still and you will get left behind. If you have watched your competitors picking up awards and being featured in the press and wondered why it’s not you, see point one.
Risk: Failing to keep up
- Ignore your organic content strategy and you’ll end up paying for website traffic forever. A good content and user-experience (UX) strategy can transform your website’s organic performance. Google’s helpful content algorithm is focused on authentic content that is of value to the user. Get it right and you’ll see your business rise up the ranks without relying on pay-per-click.
What’s in your shop window?
My team know I love an analogy, so here goes….
If you had a shop in the High Street of a busy town, and most people glanced in the window but didn’t come in, would you leave the same window display in place? If you had 100 customers coming in every day, not staying long and rarely buying anything, would you advertise for more customers? Or would you take a step back to explore the reasons why no one is buying? Working with a specialist creative agency partner can help you shape realistic goals and deliver them without losing focus to day-to-day distractions.
Digital metrics are vanity metrics until they are understood and aligned with strategy and KPIs. The amazing ability digital gives us is to see, track and understand what our customers want and need, and how they respond to what they see.
Every touchpoint is valuable, and integrating brand, customer experience, reputation and sales should be at the heart of your marketing investment.
To finish, yes, like you I am super busy, but I have a strategy, roadmap and measurable KPIs. I know that however busy I am, my team is working to deliver the objectives we agreed together, I am doing my part in supporting TWI’s client experience, and my team has a clear sight of what we want to achieve.
Is it time for a marketing audit for your business? Let us know if you would like to know more, I can always find the time!