With any endeavor, setting specific goals at the beginning of the year usually correlates directly with success at year’s end. The logic is – if you know where you’re heading and have a clearly-defined path to follow, meeting your company’s objectives becomes that much easier.

Your marketing strategy should be no exception. Seeing success at the end of the year means starting your plan today.

Here’s a three-step marketing exercise we recommend for every business:

1. Envision that it is December of 2021. Where do you want your business to be then? If you don’t have a goal in mind, build one. And once you have a goal in mind, start planning out steps that must be taken to reach it. If you don’t know where to start, we can help.

 

2. Analyze your marketing strategy by outlining your SWOT:

• Strengths: What are you good at?
• Weaknesses: What do you need to shore up?
• Opportunities: What could you be offering that’s different?
• Threats: Is the competition getting ahead of you?

 

3. Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, outline a plan to act on your strengths and opportunities and combat weaknesses and threats. From there, you can create a marketing plan with goals that will carry you through to the end of the year.

 

Further, by meeting your marketing goals, you are creating profitability not just for one year, but far into the future. It’s a positive domino effect.