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Marketing in 2017 – A Quick Marketing Audit to Help You Prioritize and Plan

2017 ahead - is your marketing ready2017 will be here before you know it. Here’s a quick list to help you audit your current marketing efforts, plan and prioritize for the new year ahead:

Planning and Positioning

  • Have we taken a hard look lately at who our target market is? Who are our best customers and why? Who do we want to target in 2017?
  • Is our company positioned, in terms of our marketing and public image, to go after our target market?
  • What are our top 3 marketing and public relations goals in 2017? What kind of plan do we have in place to make those goals happen?

Website

  • Is our website up-to-date in terms of words and photos? Hint: if the copyright at the bottom of your page still says 2014 or 2015, it probably hasn’t been updated in a while.
  • Does our website LOOK old and outdated? Maybe it’s up-to-date in terms of words and photos, but is the overall “look” of our site showing its age?
  • Does our website have a responsive design? In other words, does it scale to the size of the user’s screen (computer, tablet, mobile phone)? This kind of design is better for your visitors AND it’s better for your google search rankings. Read more here.

Social Media

  • If we’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or others, did we take a “build it and they will come” approach? Or are we posting to social media regularly? Are our posts garnering engagement? Is the company’s profile on each channel up-to-date?
  • Are we spread too thin on social media? If we don’t have the bandwidth to stay active across 2-5 social media channels, is there one we should really focus on in 2017?
  • Are we advertising on our business Facebook page? If not, can we allocate some funds to Facebook advertising in 2017 to improve our results? If we are already advertising on Facebook, have we analyzed our results?

Marketing Materials

  • If we pull out all our print and online marketing materials (i.e., brochures, business cards, website, etc.) and look at them together, do they look like they came from the same company? Do we use the same logo, colors and other branding elements in all of them … or do they look like distant cousins? Or, worse yet, competing companies?
  • Are our materials up-to-date in terms of content? Have we expanded to new markets, opened new locations and/or rolled out new products or services that aren’t included?
  • Do our marketing materials look outdated?

Public and Community Relations

  • Has our company won awards, contributed to the community or had other good news that we just aren’t letting people know about?
  • Do I or members of my team have unique knowledge we could share to help our target market and spread the word about the solutions we provide? Could we do that via our blog, our enewsletter and/or articles we write for industry media channels?
  • Is our company active in the community in any way? Are there opportunities to give back that we’d like to explore in 2017 that match our company’s vision, values and target market?

In-Person Marketing

  • Have we pulled back on networking meetings and other opportunities this year? Are there organizations we should get more involved with, in person, next year?
  • Are there opportunities for us to share solutions, knowledge and lessons learned via speaking engagements? Do we have any presentations we can create or update? If we have experience speaking to organizations, do we mention this on our company website, LinkedIn profile or to organizations we are part of?
  • Are there trade shows or other events where we can get in front of our target market by attending, speaking and/or exhibiting at them?