Have you started thinking about your New Year’s resolutions yet? January is traditionally a time when we commit to freshening up some aspects of our own lives, but what about our marketing? As 2016 begins, you’d better not still be using ineffective, outdated tactics from years past. It’s time for a marketing update.
In the new year, leave these marketing tactics behind:
Marketing needs to be data-driven, but simply gathering data is not enough. You need to know how to analyze it. Let’s be real: raw data is dirty. It needs to be cleaned up, and it needs to be evaluated in context. Marketing decisions based on statistically-insignificant data or misunderstood insights might as well be made with no data at all. To ensure accurate data-driven predictions, you need trained data analysts on your marketing team. So in the coming year, invest in improving your data practices.
Keywords are important to search engine optimization (SEO), but they must be used thoughtfully in order to have success. Keyword density is only one factor in search engine ranking, and it’s far from the most important. In fact, these days, keyword placement is more important than keyword density. What else is important? User experience. Overstuffing keywords into your content reads as spammy and not at all educational or easy to read. So in 2016, skip cramming keywords into your blog posts and just write naturally. If your content is on-topic, you should be using the relevant keywords throughout it anyway.
In order to reach your audience, your marketing efforts must be multi-channel and include a variety of content. But generating lots of content and sharing it everywhere you possibly can won’t do anything for your organization if you’re working without an overarching strategy.
In 2016, vow to deploy only marketing tactics that tie into your overall strategy. And that means crafting a comprehensive strategy: one that takes your various audience segments and their needs into account, as well as the many channels you use to reach them.
Are there other outdated marketing practices your organization hopes to leave behind in 2015? Give us a call to discuss how you can renew your marketing efforts for 2016.
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