Whether Christmas is a busy time of year for your business or not, there is one other big job that needs to be done during the season – preparing for the New Year.
December is the perfect time for business owners to reflect on what’s working in their marketing and see what changes need to be made. From branding and printed marketing to your website, there’s still time this year to do a business review so you’re ready to start January with a water-tight plan!
What is a marketing review?
A business review will cover different things for different businesses. There’s bound to be a focus on revenue, profit, expenses, employee costs, and other big items that are a part of running a business.
But it’s also an important time to ask some questions about your marketing. This is always key because, without the right marketing, there’s always going to be limits to what you can achieve.
Here are some suggestions for the best questions to ask.
Preparation – what have you got already?
What does your marketing look like right now? What assets do you have and how are well are they working? These could include:
- Do you have systems to measure what’s working and what isn’t?
- Are they up to date and contain the most relevant information about the business?
- Does each type of marketing have a clear message?
- Are you using different formats such as brochures, flyers, business cards and posters as well as website content?
It’s a good idea to assemble all the physical marketing materials you use into one place so you can assess what you have.
Branding check
With that pile of marketing materials and your website in view, the first thing to do is a branding check. Some questions to ask include:
- Is the branding still relevant for the business?
- Is it consistent across all of the marketing materials?
- Does it feel up to date rather than using styles or elements that were on-trend a few years ago?
- Is the branding easy to work with?
Going forward – what works well?
The final part of the assessment is about what works well and what you want to keep using versus what isn’t working so well and needs revamping.
For example, maybe your brochure isn’t being picked up by customers coming into the business. So do you need to change the style and make it more eye-catching? Or does it need to contain more information that makes it useful for the customer?
Maybe your business cards have out of date information on them so having new ones printed is important. Or maybe you just feel they are looking a little tired and a new design is needed. You don’t need a complete re-brand but just tweak what you have to refresh it.
Posters inside the business property can be regularly rotated to highlight different offers, promotions or events. But do you have a system for this to remind someone to make the swap? Can you get new posters printed and implement this?
Be ready for New Year
Print materials work alongside your website to make for powerful marketing tools but you need to regularly review them to make sure everything is doing what you need it to do. Now is the perfect time to do this! Get ready for a fresh start as we move into January!
For help and advice about your business marketing and printing, contact SBS. We’re here to help!