The New Year is a time of fresh starts. It gives us a chance to evaluate our lives, set goals for the year ahead and make plans to revise what isn’t working – in both our personal and professional lives.

As a marketing agency who works with businesses of all sizes and backgrounds, we’ve talked with many brands who come to us after falling into flawed marketing practices. Often, they find themselves there due to their busy work schedules or a simple lack of knowledge. If that sounds like something your business has been dealing with, take advantage of this time of reflection to finally kick those marketing bad habits to the curb. Keep reading to learn which habits you’ve been guilty of and how to make improvements in the year ahead.

Bad Habit #1: Treating social media as a sporadic afterthought.

Be honest: does your business have a fleshed-out social media strategy that you use to develop audience relationships and support marketing initiatives? Or do you intermittently post cell phone photos of company activities when you happen to remember? When we first meet with many of our prospective clients, it’s typically the latter. In 2023, neglecting social media is a missed opportunity. According to research from The Influencer Marketing Factory, more than 80 percent of online shoppers have purchased a product they first discovered on social media.

We understand many businesses don’t have ample time to devote to creating and maintaining a social strategy. That’s why we recommend using a content calendar template to maximize your time and create a schedule of posts in advance. You can plan out the theme of the post, time and date, the written content, and the photo or graphic needed. This kind of calendar is easy to share among co-workers in a Google drive or shared folder, so multiple people can add ideas or share the responsibility. Simply getting in the new habit of planning a month of content in advance can dramatically boost your brand’s social presence.

Bad Habit #2: Pumping money into Google or Facebook ads, even if they’ve stopped producing results.

When we talk to prospective clients, one common pain point we hear often is that they’ve been investing money in digital ads but their results continue to disappoint. As social media ads have become more ubiquitous, it’s become easy for companies to put money behind a post and expect the platform to magically drive clicks. However, in almost every instance, pumping more money into a flawed campaign will only amplify the poor results.

If your brand starts seeing a higher-than-industry-average cost per click (CPC), take it as a sign to either switch up your ad’s message or adjust your audience parameters. The fluctuations in your CPC over time can be a very revealing indicator of where changes are needed. For campaigns that performed well in the first days or weeks, you may need to swap in a fresh graphic or caption to bring the CPC back down. If the campaign struggled from the start, you may need to consider creating a new call to action or targeting different audiences.

Bad Habit #3: Focusing on features instead of benefits.

This is one of the most common habits we see from our clients. For business leaders, it’s natural to want to talk about the amazing capabilities of your product or service, especially if you have a personal connection to the company or have been there a long time. However, if your goal is to catch consumers’ attention and increase sales, it’s much more effective to tell a story about how your product will affect them, rather than explaining the features and hoping each person will connect the dots themselves.

To work around the tendency to focus on features, we rely on a few important questions to understand the problems our clients solve. Ask yourself, how does my product or service make my customer’s life better? What positive outcomes can potential customers expect from using your business? How is the experience of using your product or service different from competitors? Answering these short but crucial questions can help your company quickly pivot to a more effective, benefit-oriented marketing strategy.

Bad Habit #4: Letting your blog page sit untouched.

In the course of our work, we frequently review websites with blog pages that haven’t been updated in months or often years. When we dig deeper, we tend to find that the blog was a fleeting idea that lacked a long-term plan to maintain it. Not only is a vacant blog a missed opportunity to connect with customers who are seeking more information, but it can also make your brand appear outdated or obsolete.

These days, continually adding new content to your website is one of the most essential aspects of SEO. Google aims to provide their searchers with the most relevant and up-to-date results, which means an article from five years ago often gets out-ranked by more timely content. Older content can be helpful in establishing credibility, but in general, search engines will prioritize recently updated pages. If creating a large amount of content feels unrealistic for your company right now, start with the goal of producing just one new article per month. Over time, this effort will help improve your company’s search rankings and drive more web traffic.

Bad Habit #5: Trying to plan promotions at the last minute.

Does your brand find itself scrambling to throw together last-minute promotions on a regular basis? When your company is trying to juggle marketing on top of business operations, it can be hard to look more than a few days ahead to identify opportunities for new campaigns. We’ve heard our clients recount these scenarios too often. Unfortunately, without proper advance planning, eleventh hour promotions often fall flat.

In your newly created social media content calendar, it might be helpful to add space for more general marketing opportunities for the month ahead. If you can start planning even just a few weeks in advance, you’ll have more time to come up with some really creative and effective offers to drive sales. It will also give your team the opportunity to think through all the logistics involved. The only thing worse than a flat promotion is one that results in embarrassment and a black eye for your brand.

For more help getting a jump on your promotional calendar for 2023 (and breaking more bad habits), consider contacting an agency like Radius to take marketing strategy and execution off your plate. https://thinkradius.com/contact-us/