It’s the first week of 2013! Time for self reflection and creating new goals for the New Year. Here’s what I’m thinking for the upcoming year: eat more ice cream (it makes me happy!), get the kids to school on time, and dance more. That was easy. End of blog post.
Oh wait… this is supposed to be about marketing. As Katie mentioned in her Thanksgiving post, we were pretty successful with last year’s Marketing Resolutions. We made strides in everything from SEO to analytics. But what’s on tap for 2013? I like to set myself up for success (see “eat more ice cream”), so here’s what I’m thinking:
- Fail more. (How could you fail at failing?!) The best way to succeed is to let yourself fail. It’s not a new concept. Winston Churchill once said “success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Wow, it really is a new year when I start quoting Churchill. It’s usually Taylor Swift lyrics… which could also apply since she’s turned failing relationships into Grammy Awards. But how does this apply to Marketing? It means that I won’t stick to what’s safe. I will try new lead gen methods, new ad channels, and new content formats. Instead of spending months perfecting one thing, I will try a lot of new things each month. If 9 out of 10 new things fail, so what? As long as that one is a huge success.
- Automate more. Purchasing Marketing Automation in 2012 was a huge step in the right direction for us. But now that we have this amazing tool, it’s time to make the most out of it. We spent much of last year getting up to speed on the software, setting up our first nurture tracks, and refining our lead scoring model. But all of that just opened our eyes to everything we weren’t doing, or how we could (and should) improve our current efforts. In 2013, the goal is to take what we’ve learned about each part of the software and make it all work together so that more of our marketing is… you know… automated.
- Share more. Sharing is caring, right? So why have we been sitting on content that could be shared? Much of last year was spent working on our content strategy, and this year is the time to put that strategy into action. Step one is to figure out what content we already have, clean it up, and get it out there. Between the files drafted in Capterra’s Dropbox, in our content management system, and in Google docs, we have a great start! In 2013, you will see a lot more content coming out of Capterra so stay tuned…
What are your New Year’s Resolutions for marketing?