Did you know that it is estimated that a miserable 8% of new year’s resolutions are kept?! A simple explanation is just lack of will power and determination to see it through. Me I am having a month of detox, no wine and plenty of fruit and veg, but what about the rest of us marketers? What bad habits can we shift?
Going Organic
Search engine optimisation aka SEO has become somewhat of a faux pas in our industry over the course of the year. We have seen Google really cracking down on unnatural links and black hat tactics to increase your website’s visibility on Google. The introduction of Panda saw measures being taken to weed out then rapidly growing numbers of link farms and then Penguin again targeting link networks and spam and finally more recently Hummingbird which aims to move away from simply best-matching keywords of a search query towards understanding the “meaning” behind the search. SEO MOZ, a well known and respected industry specialist, have even rebranded as MOZ in an effort to move away from SEO.
You may hear us talking about inbound marketing rather than SEO. Inbound marketing is the process of building a natural and organic link profile through providing regular valuable content to readers with maximum benefit to the reader. Writing naturally and sharing this content across all forms of social media.
Stop being overly self-indulgent
It is oh so tempting to big up oneself when writing content but quite frankly it is not what the reader wants to see. Content marketing, by definition, requires you to provide useful, high value content for your target market. Over salesy posts are not only ineffective at generating leads but are often counter-productive. Get a decent content strategy in place and stick to it.
Spend time talking to the people you care about
We all get busy and caught up with day to day activities but it is important to continue to remain focused on your customers.
1) A phone call – touching base with your valued clients
2) Social media: Sharing industry news and information on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ among others. It is crazy to think that so many marketers are still not doing this!
3) Email – Keep your clients up to date with news and valuable industry information
I have been modest with just 3 new year’s resolutions and of course there are plenty more we could explore. However, another of my personal resolutions is to remain focused on the main issues rather than being bogged down by taking into account too many non-relevant factors.
I am very excited about 2014, given the growth being seen in the economy and increased confidence in markets. 2014 is bound to bring exciting new opportunities.