What’s your digital marketing strategy for 2023?
Is the thought of creating a new marketing strategy overwhelming, causing stress and anxiety? Wondering where to even begin? Or maybe there wasn’t a digital marketing strategy in the first place. What tactics will get the best results next year?
A digital marketing strategy is essential to reach your target market and grow your business. It is vital to the overall success of your business.
As the new year rapidly approaches and 2022 comes to an end, successful businesses take the time to review results and shortcomings.
Step 1 – Analyze Last Year’s Performance
Before planning 2023, review what happened over the last few years. Use analytics, reports, sales and KPI’s to measure results and organize data while answering these questions.
- What worked? Include things that almost worked and identify the weaknesses.
- Identify tactics that didn’t work? Why didn’t it work?
- Which products or services brought in the most revenue?
- Were you under budget? Is additional marketing $$$ needed for 2023?
- How did your competitors do in 2023? What was their outcome? Did you lose business to the competition?
- Which social media platforms had the most engagement? Conversions?
Past performance dictates future performance. When things aren’t working, change them. If things went well and goals were accomplished, refine and adjust previous strategies for 2023 while integrating new marketing trends.
Step 2 -Set New Goals
Identify the accomplishments you hope to achieve by the end of 2023. How will results be measured? What Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) will be used?
KPI’s are measurable values such as revenue increase versus previous year. Number of new website visitors and conversion rates could be used as KPI’s. Carefully align KPI’s with your marketing goals to measure results.
Some goals and objectives might be:
- Increase gross sales by 20%.
- Expand brand awareness.
- Grow market share by 10%.
- Launch new products or services.
- Target new customers.
- Enter new markets.
- Improve current customer relationships.
- Increase client or patient retention.
- Lower ad spend per conversion.
The goals above are general for the purposes of this post. Be more specific with your own goals. Such as Increase revenue by 15% versus year ago. Or maybe something like “get 20 new patient visits per month”.
Step 3: Review Your Target Audiences
Were your target audiences well defined and accurate? Did you understand needs and problems customers want solved? Consider contacting them and asking questions or send out a survey. Craft questions that require long form answers. Find out what sorts of problems they face? What needs improvement. What tools will help them in 2023? Get clarification.
Revise and adapt your plans to meet the needs of your customers. Take the time to apply what you learned in 2022 to update existing personas and develop new ones. Know what your target market needs to make their life or business better.
Examples of common problems with healthcare and beauty businesses:
1. Getting new patients or clients.
2. Increase client retention.
3. Managing your reputation – getting positive reviews.
Knowing who your ideal client or patient is and improving and weaknesses is key to growing your business.
Step 4: Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Brand Awareness
Branding is more than a name and logo. Names should be recognizable and related to your business. If the business is a MedSpa a name should reflect that — Eastside Medical Spa. High Street MedSpa. Something Medical Spa.
Clear messaging is essential. Use words that tell people what your business does. Tag lines should resonate with your target audience. Brand presentation needs to be consistent in every way. A blog post you make like about tag lines is “How To Craft A Powerful Tagline For Your Business?”
Website Management
Websites are the first impression of your business. Much like meeting someone in person, you only get once chance to engage with our potential client or patient. Within seconds your prospect makes an assumption.
Create a modern, advanced website with all the latest features and designs that are available at that time. Include video, relevant media, testimonials, infographics, portfolio, testimonials and blog posts. A website should offer potential clients or customers solutions to their problems and why they should choose your business. However, a website can’t be found without Search Engine Optimization.
Include in your plan how often you will update your website. Test 3-4 times per year for user experience and SEO. Create a new website every 3 – 5 years.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With each and every one of our new clients, SEO has been the biggest opportunity for improvement. In other words, SEO wasn’t executed or had been done incorrectly. Although these businesses have beautiful functioning websites, it is difficult to find them during a google search. They do not have first page rankings or show up in search engines. Reasons range from having a completely unrelated Domain Name, not being listed in directories including Google, and media that isn’t optimized. It hasn’t been just a few clients that fall into this category, it’s been all of them. Creating a website without SEO is a strategy I like to call “Launch and Pray”.
SEO is an ongoing operation. If it is ignored, businesses can be paralyzed. Invest in an SEO manager or use Digital Marketing Consultant if hiring a full time employee isn’t possible. Most small businesses will outsource their digital marketing. Many of the small businesses attempt to do their own digital marketing and have been met with many challenges. Think about this, would you hire a marketing professional to do surgery? Of course not. Then why would you have a surgeon do your digital marketing?
Adding new content on a regular basis with greatly improve SEO. Include a blog post schedule in your digital marketing strategy and add these to your website on a regular basis. I recommend 2 – 4 posts per month for healthcare and beauty business, MedSpas, etc. Share these posts on social media, industry media and with your email subscribers.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is using value added and relevant content such as blog posts and videos to attract your ideal target audience to your website. Conversion tactics on your website will help turn visitors into customers. For more details check out the post “3 Marketing Trends to Use in 2020“.
Video
Video Marketing is the most engaging form of media. Creating videos is easier than ever before and accessible to businesses of all sizes. As such, video is growing quickly and is predicted to be 80% of all online content by 2020. (WebFx)
Video has transformed from a form of media to a strategy. It is one of 2020’s marketing trends to include in your strategy. Check out “3 Marketing Trends to Use in 2020“.
Social Media
Social media marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness. Be where your clients are so they can get to know, like and trust you. Social media is much more than posting, liking and commenting. Successful businesses carefully craft social media strategies while choosing the right platforms to focus on. Each social media platform is different. Create an integrated strategy across all platforms while optimizing for each platform. For example: Before and After pictures can be used on Instagram and not on Facebook. Links can be used on Facebook; whereas, they cannot be used on Instagram. Every social media platform you are on should provide a different experience.
By identifying your target audience (Step 3), you should know where to find potential clients and patients.
The top social media platforms to consider are:
- Tiktok
Email Marketing
Stay in touch with website visitors, social media followers, current customers and clients and anyone else that has given permission to email them. Depending on the business, we use email marketing for different things. MedSpas and physician’s email works very well for client retention and selling more products and services to current customers. Real Estate Brokers use email for branding and staying in touch with all contacts. For marketing businesses – lead generation and conversions. Here are “10 Reasons why you should use Email Marketing” .
Paid Traffic / Online Advertising
Need results quickly? SEO takes time and is a building process while paid traffic can get quick and sometimes immediate website visits. A combination of both SEO and paid traffic will get the best results. Paid traffic is covered in more detail in the blog post “3 Marketing Trends to Use in 2019”.
Offline or Traditional Marketing
Offline or traditional forms of marketing can include:
- Advertising: print, mail, television, radio
- Events: education, new office, product launch
- Loyalty Programs
- Public Relations
- Networking
- Client or Physician Referrals
In 2022 the highest source of website visits for our clients was organic search. Organic traffic is due to excellent Inbound Marketing and SEO. The highest conversion rates were a result of Paid traffic. With this in mind, our focus for 2022 is on Content, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, SEO, Social Media and Video.
After researching and analyzing all data, 3 marketing trends or opportunities were identified. To find out more read “3 Marketing Trends for Your 2020 Marketing Strategy”.
Step 5: Budget
Invest in your business for gains in the future. Decide how much to spend. Budgets will vary greatly from business to business. As a general rule businesses spend between 5%-10% of revenue on marketing. During a launch businesses will typically spend more.
Summary
The 5 Steps to Creating a NEW Marketing Strategy
- Analyze last years performance
- Set new goals and objectives
- Review and redefine your target audience(s)
- Create your digital marketing strategy
- Define your budget
Now that you have a strategy it’s time to get to work. Plan your content in advance using a content calendar that integrates with social media, paid advertising and email marketing (10 Reasons Why You Should Use Email Marketing). Create relevant videos that educate, inspire or entertain your ideal target audience. Use paid traffic to advertise these videos and attract visitors to your website. Once on your website, conversion tactics will help turn website visitors into customers.
With so many options, new technology and marketing trends, focus on a few tactics rather than trying to be everywhere at once. Invest time, energy and $$$ into these tactics. Break it down even further to focus on your exact target.
If it’s not working, change it!
