Show Notes

Planning for the New Year Part 2: How can you plan effectively?

As you look at the first nine months of this year and start to plan next year, there are some things that you’re going to want to focus on to get a really good overview of what has happened so that you can plan for next year effectively. In this episode, I’m going to dive into what you should be looking for and what it means for your business and your marketing.

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Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Hey there, welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker. You know, with the holidays right around the corner, the new year we'll be here before we know it. So this series is all about making the time to begin planning for the upcoming year. I know that planning doesn't come naturally to everyone. Yes. I love to plan, but not everyone does.

However, I also know that by planning ahead, you will save time; instead of coming up with ideas and goals on the spur of the moment, you're going to have thought out plans, so you know where you're going. You're going to be able to focus on other tasks that will really help you move your business forward. And if you have a team built, you get to get everyone on board. And if you don't have a team built, the plan will help you to assess whether or not you need one.

It also can help you avoid big mistakes. Yes, the unforeseen happens. I mean, we've had a pandemic in the last two years. Things happen. However, when you have a plan in place, you're able to see how you can pivot that plan to modify and prepare for the unexpected. It also helps to keep you organized, which I don't know about you, but I know I need.

I need that organization going forward to let me know what's coming down the pike, not just project-wise or client wise, but also to understand where my money is coming from. The influx and outgoing costs and revenue that we get in the company.

As you look at the first nine months of this year and start to plan next year, there are some things that you're going to want to focus on to get a really good overview of what has happened so that you can plan for next year effectively.

So in this episodes we're going to dive into what you should be looking for and really what it means for your business and your marketing. Business planning should include areas of your business, such as finance, sales projections, new products or services, and of course your marketing. While we will touch on some of those pieces, this episode is primarily focused on your marketing and how to assess your business so that you have a really good strategic plan for your marketing. When I review my year and start to plan for the next year, I like to start with the overall vision for my business.

I start with, well, how this last year has gone and whether it was aligned with or supporting my overall vision. The first step in any plan involves really looking at your long-term vision and goals for your business.

By taking the time to analyze your vision, you allow yourself to step back and identify how your business needs to shift in order to hit those goals. Versus looking at the short term and just making well decisions by the seat of your pants.

Oftentimes we're more in the middle of something we make pivots. Our job as business leaders is to really look at where we have been to see if it's going to take us where we want to go. It's important, so freaking important, to remember where you're heading and why.

You see your vision should act as your guide. Really, it should be your GPS, your map of where you're headed. So when you're setting goals, they should be in pursuit of that end destination, your vision. Although things may shift over the last few months, your vision is still your vision and the timeline for it may have extended or shortened or shifted.

You should still be working towards that same end goal.

Unless you ask yourself, if this is still my vision, right? Sometimes we .get into business and we have a vision and a goal. And there are things that have made us change our mind and shift our vision. So at this time of year, it's always good to reassess that. One of the things you can ask yourself is what you have done this year to really move your business toward that end goal. If the things that you've done have aligned and actually pushed your business in that direction.

Awesome.

Continue doing that and do more of it. If however, you found that some of the things, some of the decisions you've made over the last year has not, maybe it's time to look at when, what needs to be changed. Is it your marketing? Is it your sales? Is it your client base? Or is it something else?

Whatever it is we want to avoid doing more of what's not getting us there, and do more of what will take us there. And that strategic plan can really help get you on the way.

One of the best ways I found of identifying what changes I need to make in the upcoming year is really by doing a SWOT analysis, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And we can look at a SWOT analysis from several different lenses.

One, your own personal SWOT, what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as a leader, as a business owner, as a parent, it's endless.

Two, what is your business SWOT?

And the third is really specifically from a marketing perspective.

In reality, much of what you are looking at from a business perspective is going to flow into your marketing SWOT because your business always influences and sets up your marketing.

So the two should be connected. When doing the SWOT for my business. The first thing I look at are my strengths. What does my business do better than anyone else in the industry, and pro tip: this is really important for your marketing. So are most of these questions quite honestly. Second, is what products and services are most profitable or have been most profitable this last year, what products and services are getting our clients the best results? What makes your business unique? Who are your most valuable customers and what results are your clients getting?

All of those things help you to both set up your business, going forward, your product, service, or solutions, as well as your marketing strategy. As a whole, these are very integral pieces and knowing what your business does best is really going to help you to clarify that message and keep your marketing growing.

We then move on to weaknesses. And some of the questions you can ask yourself when it comes to your weakness is, are where can you improve? What product or service is underperforming? What resources do you relax?

What is your churn rate? Meaning how many clients come on and pop off. Now as a coach, consultant, and online course creator, you may or may not have long-term clients. You may have short services that they, they come in and they stay for three months, six months, 10 months, whatever that is. And then they pop off. That's not really your churn rate. Your churn rate are those people that start and never finish with you or start and quit for some reason. Understanding what that reason is really helps you to make your products and services better, which decreases the churn rate and really makes your clients happier.

Finding new clients is more difficult than keeping the ones you have. So make sure to look at your churn rate, do your customers buy from you once or do they come back and buy multiple times? And is that even an option in your business? If it's not, that may be something you also want to add into your business. Are there levels that they successfully go through?

If you have an ongoing subscription or service, how long do people stay with it, or if they are leaving, do you know why they're leaving? You may find you're so focused on getting new customers that you're leaving, the ones that you have dissatisfied. And if that's the case, you want to make sure that your strategy includes some old-fashioned customer service and methods to reengage those prior customers.

We then jump into opportunities. These are things that really give us a chance to change things in our business for the better. So what has changed in your industry? What has changed in the world around you? Your marketing plan is often mapped out, obviously by your organizational goals. And by reviewing these goals, you can see how it impacts your marketing plan.

This can show you what opportunities are present, what changes can you make to create a more efficient brand and business? Are there any changes affecting your business that you need to tweak or create new? Are there new key audiences that you want to connect with and serve? Do you need to remove any marketing goals that are no longer relevant to your business? Are there any new marketing goals that you need to create?

All of these things create new opportunities in our business, which allow us to look at it from a different perspective.

Last part of a SWOT is obviously the threats and threats really consist of all of the outside factors that we don't have any control over, things like a pandemic, for instance. We really had no ability to pre plan for something like that. However, what we can do is assess how we handled it and set up plans for the future, so that we're able to pivot.

Another question might be what's going on in the world right now that it could affect your business in the near future. Is there something in politics or the economy or your audience that is going to affect what's going on in your business?

Things like the new iOS updates that are making waves in the marketing industry, have you looked at how that will affect your business and your lead generation and what can you do to minimize or maximize the effect it will have on your business? Threats are really, again, things that we can't control.

We want to try and think ahead and create some plans that will allow us to pivot, when necessary, by analyzing our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

You're able to guide your business towards strategies that are going to be more likely to be successful and away from those that, well, have been less likely to be successful. Going through the SWOT should give you some really valuable information on and some data on what's been working in your business this past year and what happened, and what hasn't.

We also get to take this opportunity to learn more from that data and look at the analytics. Analytics are information that you gather from your marketing activities and how those have affected your business. Really, I've said this before that marketing is both an art and a science and the analytics are really where we look at the science. This is the data, the cold hard facts.

Did you have a certain goal that you wanted to reach?

Maybe it's a number of followers on Facebook or social media in general. Maybe it's the number of leads you wanted to bring in. Maybe it's the number of sales.

I hope you had those goals this last year, and now's a good time to assess how you did with them. How many visitors did your website get this year? What was your lead generation? What was the cost of it? What was the overall ROI, return on investment, of your marketing?

And most importantly, how can you make that better? It's so important to compare your actual results versus what you wanted to happen. Take some time to review information so that you understand what marketing strategies worked and what didn't work.

The last topic we are going to talk about today, your KPIs.

What specifically does that mean and what you should you be looking at? So there are five categories when it comes to your KPI, lead generation, website and traffic metrics, SEO optimization, paid ads, and social media tracking.

Now my company specializes in lead gen and paid ads. The other three are not specializations of us. And yet we still look at them when it comes to how our business is doing and also how our client's businesses are doing.

So let's jump into lead gen first. This can really be broken down into new leads and prospects. I know, it's kind of obvious by the name and what you're looking to measure here is how your overall lead generation is going. Hopefully this is something you're tracking. If you haven't yet, please start. Whether you're bringing in leads via more manual process, like networking or an automated process, like a funnel, these numbers are essential in knowing what is working and what is not.

Once, you know, the number of leads you bring in your next step is to find out how qualified they were. So this really helps you to assess if the people you're talking, to those leads that you are having discovery call with, or even the ones that you're bringing on to your newsletter or email lists, are they your ideal clients? Or are you just talking to people to talk to people?

What is your cost per lead generated? And what is the cost per sale? What is your overall conversion rate from lead to sale? What is the average time of conversion? So how long does it take someone to go from introduction to commitment when they actually buy from you?

These are all incredibly important questions when it comes to your lead generation. It really helps to assess whether or not what you're doing is working with your business.

Remember that marketing covers all areas of your business, everything that is online and offline is part of your marketing. So looking at it as a whole, and really knowing where your leads come from, whether or not they were quality leads and how long it took you to turn them into a client is super important to understand.

I'm going to touch on the next two options briefly. So website and traffic. You see understanding your website data really helps you to know who is on your site, where they're coming from and what they're doing this really helps to let you know whether or not your website is working in the way it is intended.

So questions like what is the average time on your page? What is the average load time for your website? What is the conversion rate for your page or funnel or product? What is the conversion rate for your call-to-action content?

So blogs and, well, funnels. What is your conversion rate in general from your website? Honestly, this really helps to show you if your site actually works to bring you clients.

It is always really good when you're looking at your website to look at it as a whole, as well as all the individual pieces of it, to know if there's a break in what you're trying to do.

Next is SEO. So search engine optimization. So this is really Google, Yahoo, Bing all of those places that people are going to search for you. And this may or may not be a vital piece of your business, depending on how you're finding your clients.

However, search engine optimization helps you to understand how people are finding your website. So, you know, whether they're coming from inbound links, if you're doing guest blogging, or if you've posted things to social media, you can see how they're getting there, or if they're coming via organic search. And if they're coming via organic search, what are the numbers of leads that come that way? What's the conversion rate and really how well does your site rank on those search engines are all important pieces of your SEO.

Realistically, SEO is a really complex piece, and yet it can still be broken down into data that you can look at and make sure that you understand how your website's working, especially in the search engine life.

Next, I'm going to dive into paid traffic, which is another one of my favorite areas. The first thing we look at when it comes to paid ads is really the ROAS, which really stands for return on ad spend. This lets us know if the overall paid ad strategy is working.

Once we've determined, whether the big strategy is working, we start diving deeper into the campaigns, to discover which ones were successful and which ones could use some work, which copy works, which headlines work, which images work, all of those things should also be assessed. It should honestly be done on a monthly basis.

However, at our year-end review, we can look at everything and assess overall how this worked this last year. What didn't work we can make better. And what did work, we can add more money to, to continue to scale.

Paid traffic, obviously it's an essential part in my business and it's helps us to get a whole lot of data in a very short period of time. And the last piece of this KPI metrics that I would suggest looking at is really your social media marketing.

Your social media efforts should focus on two core ideas; building an engaged community, whether that's on your business page, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, or in a group, and it should turn that audience into customers. So we want to look at things like traffic that comes directly from social media to the website. How many leads are generated from your posts or your groups or your social media activities overall. And most importantly, how many sales are generated from those leads that are directly related to your social media activity.

It really helps to assess what is working on social media as a whole. Your social media marketing should have a strategy, just like every other aspect of your marketing.

And by assessing what's working, you can again do more of that unless of what's not. Using your metrics to just to drive your decisions on your marketing is going to make the biggest difference in how your next year plays out for you.

If you have more than one year of data to review, compare year to year. So comparing January of this year to January of last year, look for trends, see what's happening with your business over time. This can inform your decision for this next coming year.

Maybe you notice that your January launch has not done as well for the last two or three years, but your March launch continues to grow successfully. You get to ask yourself; would it be better to drop the January launch and maybe focus more time and money and effort on the March launch to make that even bigger and more successful?

Or is there a specific reason that the March launch results are better than January? And what can I do to make the January results better? All of this information really does give you an overall trend so that you can decide what to do for this coming year.

These kinds of informed decisions are really what create that upward trajectory of your business. Identifying your sales trends is a huge part of your strategic review because it can help you understand the when and the how to market your business, which overall will help you to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact.

Thank You for listening to the Marketing Matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact connect with me at yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.