The year is underway, you may be asking yourself if your company’s marketing is living up to its' fullest potential. Are you in a rut? Have sales been lagging or are your leads drying up? Here are five specific areas to focus on when it’s time to breathe some new life into your sales and marketing tactics.

1. Evaluate Your Lead Conversion

Are your customers responding to your current marketing efforts in significant ways? You may be getting decent web traffic but it doesn’t mean much if you aren’t converting those leads to sales. Find out where your sales cycle is breaking down — is your site hard to navigate or slow to load? Do you have qualified staff answering calls and converting leads properly? Do you have an effective system in place for following up with email inquiries?

Write down your workflow processes and brainstorm with your team to find any gaps. Explore new ways to improve efficiency and maximize those lead conversions every step of the way. Sometimes a few small, significant changes can help invigorate your ROI.

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2. Overhaul Your Social Media

Social media budgets generally comprise about 25% of a marketing budget. It only makes sense to fully optimize your spend. When evaluating if your social media strategy is working, think about ways you and your audience interact. Are you engaging in meaningful ways? Do your followers use your products and services, and share their experience through the platform?

One of the best ways to stay relevant in a saturated market is to post better content, more often, in more places. It’s also incredibly important to interact with your customers through the mediums they use the most. Social media is a powerful platform for addressing customer concerns, responding to comments and monitoring brand perception—all in real time. Make sure your company is making the best use of this access and interaction.

3. Create Quality Content

Producing quality content always matters. It’s also a numbers game—the more high-performing content you can get out there, the better. If you don’t have an SEO expert on your team, partner with someone who can help audit your process. You may have stagnant pages that are clogging up the works. Maybe there are relevant and interesting tidbits you can take from old content and re-imagine them for a new audience or with a different angle.

You have the potential to inform and educate your audience while positioning your company as a valuable resource for current and prospective clients. If you have industry-specific knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere—share it! Flex your expertise to show off what you know, and what you have to offer. Look into creating an eBook, info-graphic, webinar or video. Invest time and effort into getting them in front of your potential customers and continue to engage well after the initial posting.

4. Sharpen Your Competitive Edge

Are we staying competitive in the market? Think about how you can differentiate yourself, and where your competitors are surpassing you. This isn’t necessarily a fun thought experiment, but it’s important to stay honest and recognize where your company may be falling short. If you have trouble seeing your faults, ask your employees, survey clients or conduct focus groups. Find ways to expose those pain points so you can begin to heal them.

Explore when and why your potential customers choose your competitor over you. Your competitors have vulnerabilities—we all do—all you have to do is find what they are and how to use them to your advantage. Use this information to leverage and expand on your most positive and differentiating attributes.

From a purely practical standpoint, deleting old web pages, repairing broken links and fixing irrelevant or duplicate content can also do a lot to better optimize your web presence.

5. Develop a Roadmap for Success

Visualize your desired end result and plan the path to actualization. All businesses have shelved or yet-unattainable goals. The only real problem is you haven’t mapped out the path to the success you want. Envision your most important goal and work your way back to make it a reality.

When you start with the end result in mind, you can reverse engineer the process to create a tangible set of steps to get there. The path will be different for everyone, so seek out partners you trust and who understand your business. Then, employ your best assets to figure out how to make it happen. If you put your mind to it, 2019 can be the year your brand truly shines.

Make it Happen

Remember, goals are as individual as the companies making them. We all want to increase ROI, but maybe your main focus is improving customer satisfaction or optimizing internal workflow. Examine your current structure to make sure your marketing efforts are working to fully support your new focus. When you’re ready to invigorate your marketing efforts, contact your Account Executive at SunDance to create a plan that will work for your unique vision.