Q2 Check-In: Are You On Track to Reach Your Yearly Marketing Goals?
Believe it or not, Q1 is over! By now, you’ve probably realized sticking to the goals you made at the start of the year is tricky—especially as those goals relate to your business. If you feel like you’ve gotten swept up in the whirlwind of a new year and fallen behind, now is a great time to call on an experienced marketing agency.
Below we’ve outlined four ways a marketing agency can get you back on track with your 2023 goals and position you for future success.
1. Refresh Your Brand
Does your brand resonate with the right audiences? Just as we form first impressions about the people we meet, customers form opinions about a business in less than a minute of first being introduced. Faced with so many choices in the market, customers are likely to move on if their first impressions are anything but positive.
Updating your logo and brand assets can be a great way to reinvigorate your brand and draw attention to your organization. For brands that have been around for years, a brand refresh can make your visual identity more relevant while increasing visibility and reinforcing your brand promise to customers.
But a brand refresh is about more than aesthetics, and it doesn’t always mean you’ll be scrapping your old brand. A large part of rebranding includes identifying the strengths of your current brand, as well as the weaknesses, and how your target audiences interact with your brand. Additionally, rebranding is a great opportunity to conduct in-depth competitor research and customer surveys and explore how the industry has evolved. It can also be an ideal time to adjust your pricing and offerings. Updating your brand can increase sales and keep your business top of mind.
Meld can help refresh your brand identity and messaging. This might include updating or solidifying your visual identity—logo, brand colors, and visual styling—and refreshing your tagline and strategic messaging. Through an extensive discovery process, we explore the current state of your brand while helping you create a plan for achieving your future goals.
2. Enhance Your Content Firepower
What happens when you have a clear marketing vision, but lack the firepower to bring it to life? Many of the clients we work with find that the thing they struggle with most is content production. They know they need to post regularly on social media, write blog posts, send out email campaigns, and keep their website updated. But they simply don’t have the time or resources to make it happen.
This is where a marketing agency can step in and assist. Even if your organization is lucky enough to have a dedicated marketing team, a little extra content firepower can go a long way. And if you’ve been appointed as the marketing team of one in your organization, having a few extra hands on deck can give you some breathing room in your workday.
At Meld, we help clients establish a content strategy based on their objectives and current efforts. From there, we can help you determine what types of content will move the needle quickly. This might include building up your library of blog posts, generating a monthly email newsletter, or crafting a weekly cadence of posts on your top social platforms.
Clients often tell us that just documenting their strategy and having a clear plan for measuring progress toward their goals is a major weight lifted. Not only can having a solid content strategy help you attract new customers and fill your lead pipeline, but it can also position you as a thought leader so you can better engage or reengage current and previous customers.
3. Better Understand Your Impact and Audiences
Even something minor can majorly hinder your marketing results. When results are lackluster, it can be hard for the people immersed in the business to take a step back and determine what needs to change to get things back on track.
Marketing agencies are great, neutral assets when auditing your brand’s effectiveness. At Meld, we dive deep into your messaging, visual identity, audiences, and marketing efforts. An audit can help you establish a clearer picture of your brand and set goals that are both measurable and achievable. Meld provides a comprehensive report that will serve as the foundation to guide your business and help you stay on track. If your marketing has wandered from the goals you set out to achieve, an audit can pinpoint where things drifted off course.
While audits help to define problems, they’re also great for preventing these issues from occurring at all. Has it been a while since you’ve reviewed your brand guide, double-checked your brand colors, or given your website a once-over? It’s likely time to drill back down to the foundation of your marketing.
4. Get Outside Your Comfort Zone
You should always ask yourself, ‘How am I differentiating my business from competitors?’ And while you may have already considered this question as it relates to your products and services, your marketing should also be up for the challenge.
One of the benefits of working with a marketing agency like Meld is that we keep a finger on the pulse of multiple industries. Agencies know what’s new and can help keep your brand at the forefront of technology and innovation. Whether it’s hopping on the newest TikTok trend, testing a new ad format in Google based on the latest updates, or exploring SMS marketing, a marketing agency can help you stay in front of your audience while staying true to your brand. They’ll also know all of the best practices to make sure you’re getting the most out of your published content.
How do you discover what works best for your brand? Test it! Make sure you choose a marketing agency that can dedicate the proper time and attention to running and monitoring various testing strategies. Through this testing, your agency can introduce your brand to new platforms and strategies that will keep you top of mind, even as new technologies emerge.
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Ready to get your 2023 marketing goals back on track but not sure where to start? Reach out and let’s have a conversation!
