Marketing is an art as much as it’s a science. In other words, you can’t just create a formula, follow it blindly, and expect to improve your marketing.
With modern trends always changing, it can be difficult to predict — let alone keep up with — the shifts and changes taking place in the marketing world. If you don’t make a proactive effort to improve your marketing, the changing marketing trends will quickly leave you behind.
With that in mind, here are three ways that you can safeguard your marketing efforts in order to keep up with marketing trends and push your brand to the forefront of your industry.
1. Utilize content audits.
Marketers have been throwing around the phrase “content is king” for years now. While it has a certain sense of truth to it, though, the only real takeaway of the generic, unactionable statement is that digital content is important for successful 21st-century marketing.
What about the kind of content you need, though? What should it focus on? How should you format it? How long should it be?
- Hint: “Longer is better” is no longer a satisfactory answer to that one.
If you want to generate killer content, you need to look further than the basics. You can use resources like MarketMuse’s suite of content audit tools to gain a comprehensive view of both the quality and quantity of your content.
According to the marketing leader, it’s important to combine KPIs like a content audit score with things like quality score and word count. This provides a holistic analysis of your content compared to other high-performing pieces that cover the same topic.
Content really is king, and marketing trends won’t dethrone it any time soon. But you still have to make sure that you have the right resources to create content that doesn’t just exist. It needs to perform.
2. Set up analytics everywhere.
A good content audit can help you analyze how well you’ve optimized a specific piece of content — and that’s a critical starting point. Even if you put the front-end effort into generating good content, though, you still want to know if it’s providing the results you hoped for.
That’s where analytics comes into the picture. As you create marketing initiatives, always make sure that you have the right analytics in place to track your results. Often, you can find these built right into a tool.
For instance, most social media platforms come with analytics tools. Sometimes developers embed these right in the admin dashboard. At other times, there are separate “tools within the tool,” such as Facebook Pixel. Now rebranded as Meta Pixel, this analytics apparatus allows you to add code to your website so that you can track traffic and conversions from your Facebook marketing efforts.
It’s worth pointing out that if you do this with too many different marketing tools, the results can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are many third-party options out there that can collect all of your marketing data into a single dashboard.
Whether it’s using a handful of analytics tools or collecting your information into a signal dashboard, make sure you’re following the data and using it to improve your marketing.
3. Follow marketing influencers.
The business world has always evolved — but it’s never done so as fast as in the modern era.
Things such as ever-improving technology, informed customers, and data analytics are constantly influencing how marketers behave. Trends shift, tactics change, and it can often feel impossible trying to keep up.
If you want to improve your marketing, you need to create a strategy that helps you do so in perpetuity. In other words, you can’t just use the first two suggestions on this list, conduct an upgrade session, and then let your marketing run on auto-pilot again for a few years. You always need to be refining it.
Of course, as a marketer, you have limited resources available — including time. You can’t always be researching every hint of change in customer interests or tech development. That’s why it’s important to find resources that let others do that work for you.
There are many marketing blogs out there. Often these cover niche areas of the promotional world, such as Brian Dean’s SEO-focused Backlinko. Dean’s brand also conducts periodic training sessions that help his followers keep up on the latest in the world of SEO.
You can also sign up for top-level marketing newsletters that help you keep up with a more general, ongoing view of the marketing world. Digital Marketer has compiled a good list of marketing newsletters worth subscribing to. Sign up for a few that speak to you stylistically and then try to narrow it down to one or two quality sources over time.
Use these three pillars to move ahead with confidence.
Marketing used to be a fairly predictable activity. You promoted a product or service through a select number of non-digital channels in order to reach consumers. Feedback was important. Data was hard to come by. Decision-making was comparatively easy.
Nowadays, there’s a veritable flood of options and information that marketers have to wade through as you seek to improve your marketing. Add in the need to adapt to ever-developing market trends, and finding success can feel more challenging than ever before.
That’s why you want the right resources in place to help guide your marketing over time. From content audits to ongoing data analytics to cutting-edge influencers, use the resources available to establish a marketing infrastructure that can help you stay informed and effective both now and in the future.
