How to prioritise your marketing for 2018

By Miles Redgrave in Marketing

As we near the end of 2017 every business becomes slightly reflective on the previous 12 months, was it a good year or was it tougher than expected? Whatever the answer, the truth is we’re always striving to improve on one year to the next, we have to in order to grow our businesses. But how?

We are in no position to talk about the potential in your individual businesses for greater efficiency. What we are qualified to talk about is marketing, and how you can grow your business by winning more business. You no doubt have a list of marketing ideas you’re considering implementing in 2018, but how do you decide which ideas to throw your budget and efforts into and in what order?

This is the one thing you should plan for in 2018

A list of your additional upcoming marketing activities in order of priority.

How to prioritise what you need to do

For most of us, there’s never going to be as much time as we’d like to devote to our marketing. Running a business, a team and looking after clients could already fill two full time jobs and if you’re not in a position to hire for or delegate the marketing responsibility it can all too easily slip to the back burner. This is why it’s so very important to prioritise what you need to be spending your limited time on.

We need a system that makes this easy, as otherwise we would be guessing slightly. Luckily there is such a system called P.I.E we can implement.

P.I.E stands for Potential (what is the potential positive impact on marketing results), Importance (how critical is it to your overall business objectives), and Ease (how difficult is the task to complete).

The steps in P.I.E

You score each section out of ten, 10 being the most potential, importance, or ease of application, if you have a long list for more detail you can use a decimal place but to keep it simple let’s just use round figures.

Potential

This is about how much improvement can be made, it could be website pages that get large amounts of traffic but have no conversions or an area of the town that you do not send any direct mail to. These have higher potential than other items such as increase social media messages.

Importance

This is a score for importance so for example it could be improving web pages where you are sending paid traffic to as the outlay is important to you. It can also be in areas most related to your core offering such as adverts in your local paper would score higher than sponsoring a small charity event.

Ease

This is stems from how much effort or resources you anticipate having to put into each potential task. For example increasing your social activity is much easier than having changes made to your website.

Evaluate the results

After you have totalled up the scores for an idea divide them it by 3 and this is your P.I.E score for that idea, do this for everything on your list and put them in order of priority- highest score to lowest score. This is how you can plan your new marketing activity for 2018 and should be the one thing you do before deciding on adding new things to your marketing mix.

Some ideas to get you started

It is always hard to get started on things like this so to give you a helping hand below is a list of suggestions to get you started:

• Increase marketing email sends, min a monthly email newsletter
• Grow the email database by 500 from landing pages
• Add a stay in touch marketing system
• Increase website speed for the main web pages
• Test a new web page layout for the high traffic pages
• Send out a direct mail to a neighbouring area
• Test radio advertising
• Increase social messaging x 1.5
• Write a weekly blog for the website
• Improve the marketing material we take on valuations
• Try social media paid advertising

P.I.E is a great way to get more strategic about adding tasks to your marketing list so you will be the most effective you can be, there are other prioritisation frameworks but we find P.I.E the most effective for looking ahead at a new year.