Marketing and communications are hard.

Consider the fact businesses consider a 5% open rate on emails or a 1% engagement rate for social media success.

Another way to look at this is 95% of your customers and prospects do not take two minutes to open an email and read 150 words.

As you begin planning for 2018, we recommend you consider these ten ideas to make your marketing more effective:

#10 – Your website is the first place your customers and prospects visit for information and validation. Make certain it is current, responsive to mobile use and is built to generate leads.

#9 – Leverage influencer marketing to build your customer base and sales. Don’t know how? Ask us.

#8 – Think and act like a direct marketer where your customer and prospects lists are your keys to success.

#7 – Write down your strategies for marketing, sales, content, social media, promotions, pricing, brand, et al. If they are not written down, they do not exist.

#6 – Require your media partners support your social media efforts across all of their print, digital and social media platforms.

#5 – Participate in the Personalization Renaissance. Make a telephone call. Better yet, answer a telephone call. Send a hand written note. Automated marketing has its’ place and so does the personal touch.

#4 – Try geo-targeted advertising. The idea to connecting with your customers and prospects when and where they are making their buying decision seems perfect.

#3 – Time to enlist professionals for your corporate publishing. There is a reason people earn journalism degrees and businesses need to engage them for their blogs, eBooks, white papers and social media content.

#2 – You cannot deny video is THE marketing medium for your company. Even more so, learn how to use video as an integrated marketing tool.  To do so is to ignore your marketing an communications goals for the new year. Be careful, video marketing is a powerful tool that is best managed by trained professionals (see examples to the contrary on YouTube).

#1 – Focus your marketing efforts on lead generation. If your investments of time and money are not driving leads to sales, it best be creating brand equity or it is a bust.

Best of luck with your planning for 2018. Let us know if we can help you.