Success in 2023 will require an understanding of trends and a wary eye toward possible pitfalls. Building meaningful connections with your workforce is proving just as critical as with your customers, and connecting with your audience now requires much more than a catchy headline.
Keep this to-do list handy as you make your marketing plans for the coming year.
1. Prioritize Client AND Employee Experience
Connection and engagement with your brand are at the heart of creating a positive experience. This starts with trust, which you can build by showing your customers and employees that you understand their needs.
For clients, share insights that are new and valuable to them. Demonstrate that you understand their pains and challenges. Establish your business as an expert with solutions by starting with empathy. Bring fresh perspectives to their challenges and keep communications personal and relatable to stand out from the noise. Then carry that same level of engagement throughout their entire experience, so they continue to partner with you.
Satisfied, skilled employees are key to user experience, making employee retention critical. Loyal employees can also be great advocates and partners for sharing company messaging on social media. Customer service and satisfaction have suffered across industries from the “great resignation,” so just as with your clients, take time to understand your employees’ pains and challenges and build employee communications, programs, and perks around them.
Because your audience does not experience and evaluate your business piece by piece but as a whole, marketing shouldn’t be limited to the selling/recruitment stage. Take a wide view of the experience you provide and make sure it meets or exceeds expectations at every step, from the accessibility and quality of your story through satisfaction with what you provide.
Here are a few tactics to ensure a positive experience:
Segment these audiences and develop personalized messaging that shares what’s in it for them when they start/continue engagement with your business.
Recognize their accomplishments by sharing them on social media or in a newsletter.
Contact us to learn more about hyper-personalization and account-based marketing.
2. Create a Digital-first Strategy
As marketers and business owners, we must embrace a digital-first mindset and evaluate our client and employee experience through a digital-first lens. Digital transformation has been happening for years. If you’re not thinking, acting, and measuring results in digital terms, you will be left in the dust. Below are some tactics that align with a digital-first strategy. Have you considered…
Using Google Analytics 4
Testing search ads, display ads, or location-based ads
Customizing for SEO
Focusing on email marketing automation and responsive drip campaigns
Exploring AI
Investing in video and animation
Offering chat boxes
Tying your content and digital marketing strategies with keyword-rich content
3. Leverage Visual Content
Clients and Employees have options and preferences for how they receive information, and you can elevate your story with the format that best connects with each audience. Have you ever wished to insert an emoji in a hand-written note to express a feeling? Would you choose to watch a video demonstration or read a description of something? Visual content, like infographics (and emojis), is a powerful and eye-catching way to convey information concisely. Video is obviously a great tool for storytelling and can be shared across your digital platforms. (Of course, there will always be those who cherish the written word, so don’t ditch the copy entirely. Click here for great ways to boost your blog game.)
When is the last time you…
Updated your brand photography
Told your story through video
Conveyed complex information with an infographic
Made branded visuals part of your social strategy
Bonus: Virtual Marketing Partner
The ongoing evolution of marketing keeps us on our toes! If this list has given you more goals than your team can support, TMC is here to partner with you. As a virtual marketing partner, we act as an extension of your marketing team/business. This means we don’t set strategies and walk away, we help evolve them as your business, industry, and marketplace change.
