4 Marketing Habits to Ditch in the New Year 

It’s always exciting when the ball drops and the New Year is celebrated. We’ve grown accustomed to treating the New Year as a clean slate, and this translates to both our personal and professional lives. As you review your marketing strategy for 2018, you probably have specific goals in mind. This is good, because it allows you to create a strategy that supports your objectives. What you don’t want to do is carry bad habits into another year. Unfortunately, it can be hard to break old customs.
Below are four marketing habits to throw out in 2018. You’ll be happier and more successful!
1. Relying Solely on Unpaid Marketing Efforts
It’s understandable why so many small and midsize businesses rely on unpaid marketing. It’s less expensive than paid advertising, so small or young businesses can get by without spending a small fortune. Unfortunately, relying only on unpaid marketing can stop your business from reaching its full potential. In order to be competitive and drive in new business, you must give some attention to paid marketing tactics.
Paid marketing includes things like pay per click (PPC) and paid ads on social media. The benefit is that they give you endless ways to target the right audience. This way, you don’t have to worry about paying to show your ads to the wrong people. By understanding your audience and split testing your ads, you can be effective in delivering the right message at the right time.
There are other benefits to paid advertising that can’t be overlooked. Consider the following:

• Only pay for the ads that are clicked on
• You set the budget to your needs
• Reach the right audience at the right time
• See traffic and conversions immediately
• Track and measure results
• Use PPC data to improve other marketing channels

Most importantly, PPC helps your audience find you online. Organic traffic is GREAT – but don’t forget that paid efforts can help you reach your goals too.
2. Not Tracking Where Your Money Goes
On the opposite end of the spectrum is spending money on various marketing tactics and not measuring your results or tracking spend. This is an easy way to lose money!
Marketers don’t intend to throw their budget into the fire. Usually this happens because they’re not sure where to invest their money. Everything sounds promising – email marketing, paid ads, SEO, social media, content marketing – so it doesn’t take long to allocate their budget out. Advertising doesn’t come cheap, after all.
When choosing the right marketing channels, be sure they’re worth the investment. Your audience should be there and be active. You should be able to market your product or service effectively. And, it should help you reach your marketing objectives. Just because an expensive email campaign worked for a friend does not mean it will for you.
Also, investing money does not necessarily guarantee results. Take organic traffic, for instance. If you work with an SEO agency that promises first page results, that’s great! But, having a large amount of traffic coming to your site doesn’t mean that you will get leads, conversions and sales. You need qualified traffic. Before you throw money into a campaign, be sure that it’s targeting people who actually care about your product.
3. Keeping Your Marketing Plan the Same
Your marketing plan should be continually updated – not just at the start of the New Year. Though this is a popular time to review marketing strategies, you should be doing this on a regular basis. Too often, SMBs get busy with other things (rightfully so) and end up forgetting about their marketing strategy and how it’s working for them.
This year, make it a goal to give more attention to your marketing plans so that you can evaluate what is working and what is not. You’ll thank yourself later, as you can track your campaigns and the areas that need attention. To ensure that you’re making smart, data-driven decisions, use your analytics software to your advantage. Google Analytics, for example, let’s you track and measure things such as the following:

• Acquisition
• Page views
• Bounce rates
• Conversions
• Site content
• Site speed
• Site search
• Multi-channel funnels
• Attribution
• Audience/demographics
• And so much more! 

4. Not Asking for Help
As a small business, it’s easy to pass off working with a digital marketing agency to save money. There’s a lot of costs to cover, and you can essentially take care of your own social media and website in the beginning. However, as your business grows, this becomes difficult and can actually stall your business’ growth. Unless you put money into your company, you can’t reach more audiences and expand it.
Asking for help is part of running a business. It’s your job to understand where your weaknesses are and reach out for help to fill them. You’ll be happier knowing that your marketing is being taken care of, and your business will be growing and meeting its goals.
Let’s look at the key benefits to working with a digital marketing agency like WSI Net Advantage.

• Get a team of experts that will guide you through all aspects of marketing
• Enjoy a significant return on your investment
• Grow your business by reaching a wider audience and entering new markets
• Get reporting and analytics
• Receive one-on-one attention from your account manager
• Focus your attention and energy on other aspects of your business
• Ensure that you’re following the latest trends/best practices
• Get access to the most up-to-date technology and tools

2018 can be a great year. Call WSI Net Advantage to learn more about our competitive, customized and successful digital marketing services. We can be reached at 510-687-9737 or by filling out our contact form.