Matt Gall: Five Steps to A Winning Marketing Strategy in 2018

Whether your strategy for the previous year was a rousing success or a monumental failure, it’s a new year. This means that you have an opportunity to either build on your success or correct the mistakes that were made in the past year. A new years usually brings a lot of changes and this also means having to go back to the drawing board and coming up with a new strategy for marketing. Here’s how you can come up with yours;

1. Perform an analysis or autopsy of the previous year’s efforts: Whether your past year was good or bad, it’s important to know what you did right and where you went wrong. Sometimes, the difference between success and failure in marketing is a single factor and you have to know what that is.
2. Generate new ideas for the new year: Regardless of how successful you were in 2017, you’ll need new ideas as you plan for 2018. The competition already saw what you did last year and you can be sure they’re making changes.
3. Strategize: Basically, this means turning the ideas that were generated into an actual strategy for the year.
4. Set goals for the new year: Quantify what you’re looking to achieve in 2018 and how your strategy will help you to meet these goals.
5. Plan out the year: Now that you have a strategy and goals, you need to plan the activities for the next year so you know what you’ll be doing from one month to the next.

Qualities of a Good Marketing Consultant

Hiring a marketing agency or consultant is one thing and it’s another thing to hire a good agency or consultant. The truth is that not all consultants are cut from the same cloth. Therefore, you need to be able to tell whether the person you’re hiring is worth it or whether you should keep looking. When you’re hiring a consultant, you should look for qualities such as:

1. Passion: When you interact with marketing strategists such as Matt Gall, it’s their passion that is immediately apparent. To a good marketing consultant, marketing isn’t a job but a career. It’s something they’re always excited to do.
2. Listening skills: It’s easy to find a consultant who’ll want to tell you what to do. However, you need one who’ll first listen to you and understand what you actually need.
3. Organized: Marketing is not a haphazard series of events. It is a series of planned activities that are designed to meet marketing objectives. How good is the consultant at planning, strategizing and executing their plans?
4. Creativity: Advertising is an important part of marketing. Creativity is important when you need ads that consumers will react to positively.
5. Network: A marketing campaign will need a pool of individuals who are capable of influencing opinions because of who they are, what they do or how they do whatever it is they do. It also needs people who can provide information that’s important in defining the marketing objectives. Does your marketing consultant have such people around them?