1. Do a deep dive on UX. The most important marketing skill is the ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. We see our own websites and emails so much that we stop seeing them through our customer’s eyes. Have a friend or acquaintance look at your digital presence with a fresh perspective. Evaluate the user experience for your entire buyer’s journey, your website (on all devices), your social media content, your emails, and any AI tech like chatbots. Have them be on the lookout for anything that might frustrate existing or potential customers. Any Calls To Action should be easy to achieve; don’t make people work to subscribe, unsubscribe, redeem offers, or check out. If you’re using AI to replace customer service, know that most people are rolling their eyes at that decision, especially if it hasn’t been trained well and they can’t get the answers they need. Make sure you aren’t testing patience with slow-loading landing pages, broken links, or contact forms that go unanswered. The more you can provide a good user experience, the happier your customers will be.
2. Spend some time talking to your customers. It may seem old school, but, for most businesses, building relationships will always get you more customers than the rest of your marketing. Talking to people in the real world also helps inform your digital marketing. For one thing, it challenges your assumptions about your target audience. When you talk to people about your business, you find out what people do and don’t know about what you do. This helps you understand your customer’s needs so you can better meet them. It also helps you provide more useful and targeted content. The more you associate your buyer personas with actual people, the better you will do in all aspects of your marketing.
3. Evaluate your ROI with your own time and effort in mind. Free marketing is great, but if you’re spending more time creating content and writing copy than doing what you started your business to do, that free marketing isn’t free. You have to consider your own time and effort when calculating your return on investment. Let your marketing goals inform your priorities, especially when it comes to time consuming tasks. If your main goal is converting your audience into paying customers, email marketing has the highest average ROI across industries, but it requires time and effort to do well. If your goal is to optimize your website for search, regularly updating a blog full of authoritative content and creating a pillar page will yield results, but will require consistent effort. If your goal is to build your social presence, you can do that for free, but trying to do it without a clear strategy and a solid time commitment will make your efforts a waste. Think about what’s most important and spend your effort there. Delegate or outsource tasks that bring in less than you can make doing the actual business of your business.
Substance and Style 