Whether rushing to get sales in the door during the holiday season or making sure throughout the year that they stay on track to meet goals, or tweaking strategies on the go or looking at next year's marketing budget... hoping it hasn't been slashed (again!), senior marketers are trying to maintain or expand influence inside and outside their organization.
Fortunately, some handy strategies can help.
Everybody has heard of growth hacks... I've outlined five marketing hacks to help get your marketing team up to speed and on track. They don't take a ton of your budget, but they have huge impact on your content creation, customer relations, and sales tactics.
1. Help your sales team
Find out who your top customers' biggest competitors are, do some competitive analysis, and let your sales team know what their customers' competition is up to so the team can sell more effectively.
Note any new legislation or product or service features have just come out, and whether products or services have consolidated or moved to the cloud. Monitor whether or when a more traditional industry starts using similar products or services.
All of those otherwise subtle occurrences can be industry game-changers. Have your team of marketers help the sales team stay on top of critical market updates through competitive monitoring.
2. Do a content inventory
Do you have a content library? If so, you're already ahead of the game. But is it categorized correctly?
Over time, things change and even the most organized marketer can lose track of his or her content. Making sure your content is organized and categorized correctly may not seem like the last priority because it's not incredibly time-sensitive, but losing track of content is a slippery slope.
Make the time to locate and re-categorize content assets correctly, or add additional categories, as needed, so the inability to find content doesn't hold up your social media strategy, website messaging, or email campaigns.
On that note, review older content. Even if you find a piece is a few years old, the takeaways might still be relevant. Repackage old content with your recent branding as well as new graphics, charts, and statistics, and add it to your newly organized inventory.
Also review older content that is already public for expired calls to action and update them. Do a website-wide link-check and update broken links; many content management systems have automated ways of doing this, or you can run a report on brokenlinkcheck.com to find your broken links.
3. Grow your email newsletter list