It’s that time of year again. Amidst all the baking and shopping and wrapping and decking the halls, it’s also time to wrap up another year and get ready for the next one. For those of us who own our own businesses, it’s also time to start our business planning for 2025.
This means it’s time to think about what you want your business to achieve in the next 12 months, or even 3-5 years out.
My job is to make sure your marketing efforts will help you achieve those goals, so let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
- Measure Your Results
- What Are Your Business Goals for 2025?
- Who’s Your Ideal Client?
- Is It Time to Update Your Brand?
- Putting It All Together
- Build Your Funnel
- Need Help?
Measure Your Results
Unless you’re a brand-new business that has yet to do any marketing, the very first thing you need to do before deciding what to do next year is to take a look at what worked this year.
Let’s start with your website:
- How much traffic did your website get?
- Where did most of that traffic come from?
- What search terms are you ranking for?
- How much time are people spending on your website?
- Which pages are getting the most traffic?
- How many pages do people tend to visit before either clicking away or scheduling a consultation?
- How much time do people tend to spend on each page?
- Which pages get the most traffic?
- Which pages are people spending the most time on?
Now, it’s time to look at your newsletter.
- What’s your open rate?
- What’s your click-through rate (CTR)?
- How many subscribers do you have?
- Has your subscriber list grown or shrunk over the past year? If so, how much?
- Where do most of your new subscribers come from?
Next, let’s take a look at your social media. For each channel, consider:
- Has your audience grown over the past year? If so, how much?
- If your audience has grown, what activities have helped you grow your audience?
- What’s the engagement rate on your posts? Which posts are getting the most engagement?
- Who’s engaging with your posts? Is it your ideal clients? Your power partners? Or your competitors?
Any other activities your company has engaged in to try to increase your brand awareness also needs to be measured, including:
- Podcasting
- Guesting on podcasts
- Webinars
- Guest blogging
- Speaking events
- Networking
- Cold outreach
- Press releases
Any activities that drive more traffic to your website, increase your followers on social media, or actually get people to reach out to you to learn more about your services, need to be included when deciding what to keep doing and what to give up going into 2025.
When deciding which activities to keep and which ones to adjust or ditch, it’s important to remember that quantity isn’t everything. Yes, you need a certain number of leads coming in if you’re going to have any hope of filling your pipeline and meeting your sales goal for the month/quarter/year.
But if all the leads coming in are low-quality leads who aren’t interested in your services, that doesn’t do you any good. In fact, it’s a negative, because it sucks up a lot of your time and energy without giving you the result you need to keep your business going.
So, in addition to looking at the number of leads each activity is bringing in, also consider the quality of those leads. Where do the people you love to work with tend to come from? What can you do to get more clients like that?
With that in mind, let’s take a look at your goals.
What Are Your Business Goals for 2025?
You can’t know whether certain marketing activities will help you achieve your goals if you don’t know what your goals are. So let’s start there:
- What do you want to achieve?
- How will you measure success?
- A certain number of clients?
- A certain amount of revenue?
- Landing the biggest client you’ve ever landed?
- Who are your ideal clients?
Only once you’ve identified your business goals can you start putting together a marketing plan to get you there.
Who’s Your Ideal Client?
As always, everything starts with your ideal client.
Maybe you just want to reach more people like the ones you’re already working with, and that’s great. In that case, take a look back at the activities that helped you get in front of those people in 2024 and plan to do more of that. Ditch anything that did not get you in front of the right people.
If you’re looking to work with people you haven’t worked with before, you’ll need to create a new marketing persona (or multiple marketing personas) to either replace or supplement your existing personas.
If you need help creating a marketing persona, this article takes you through the process, step by step.
Is It Time to Update Your Brand?
If your goals for 2025 involve doing more of what you did in 2024, then it’s probably safe to leave your brand as it is, as long as it hasn’t been too long since it was last updated.
But, if you’re looking to make a shift in 2025, whether it’s to branch into new markets and/or switch up your offerings, you’ll want to take a look at your brand and make sure it reflects the company that can achieve what you’re looking to achieve in 2025.
If you decide it’s time to refresh your brand, remember that means more than just your logo. It means updating everything your brand touches, including:
- your logo,
- your brand style guide,
- your brand voice guidelines,
- your website,
- your social media profiles,
- your email templates, etc.
Changing your name is pretty drastic, so I don’t normally recommend it, unless you’re merging with another company. But if the change in direction you’re taking is big enough, changing the name might make sense.
If you’re considering making any changes to your brand, I highly recommend speaking with a branding expert. If you need some recommendations, there’s my friend Jen Strezo of Red Seal Design and Bridget Baker of Bridget Baker Branding, just to name a couple.
Putting It All Together
If you’ve decided it’s time for a rebrand, one of the first questions any branding expert will ask you is, “Who is your ideal client?” So, if you have not already created a new marketing personal to represent your new ideal client, start there.
Once you have your new marketing persona dialed in, the first questions you need to answer are:
- Where does this person hang out, both in person and IRL?
- What types of content does this person like to consume?
- What problems does this person have that we’re trying to solve for them?
- How urgent is the problem?
- How will they go about trying to solve/look for information on the problem?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you can start researching keywords to find the search terms they’ll be most likely to use to try to find you. Then you’ll need to create content that answers the questions those keywords are asking.
Build Your Funnel
In a survey Forrester conducted asking marketers about their activities and results when it comes to content marketing, 87% said they struggle to create content that resonates with their ideal clients. One reason given for this struggle was they were not matching content to the various stages of the buyer journey.
When you’re developing your marketing strategy for 2025, you need to remember that your clients will probably go on a journey with your brand before they make the decision to become a client. That means you need to take a look at each of your goals for your 2025 marketing strategy and figure out the steps your prospects will take to get to there.
This will involve a lot of market research and analyzing the parts of your existing marketing strategy that have been working, and what parts have not been working.
As a hint, consider looking back at the beginning of this post when I laid out the different parts of your marketing efforts you’ll need to analyze for effectiveness. I started at the bottom of the funnel and worked my way up.
Of course, your funnel might not look like my funnel, which is why I wrote this article that goes over the entire process of creating a marketing funnel that drives results for your business.
Need Help?
Whether you’re looking to create a whole new marketing strategy for 2025, or just make adjustments to your existing strategy, I’d love to help. Marketing strategy is a sandbox I love to play in, so if the idea of breaking down your marketing strategy and building a bigger, better marketing strategy for 2025 feels overwhelming to you, why not hand it off to someone who’s looking forward to doing just that so can spend more time doing the things you look forward to doing?
If that sounds like something that could benefit your business in 2025, let’s chat.
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