25 Tips to SUPERCHARGE your Marketing in ’25 (part 2)
Part 2 – With funding, time and human resources constantly under pressure, how can you supercharge your marketing quickly and easily?
Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, our 25 top tips will help you plan and deliver a year of successful and measurable marketing activations. Here’s part 2 of the series.
And of course, if you need help to make your ideas fly, get in touch with us today!
6. Start with the end in mind
When devising a campaign, planning an event, or writing thought leadership, imagine what success looks like. Visualise the headline in an industry magazine or newspaper – write it out, if it helps! Having a clear intended outcome will help you to keep clarity of intent across all aspects of your campaign, which in turn makes it easier to measure the impact and results. Needless to say, your headline must match your objectives and intended outcomes.
7. Authentic content is key…
Here’s some good news… Perfection is officially out! Whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, ultimately you’re selling to people – and what people crave is authenticity. What does this mean, in practice? It means that you can share a work-in-progress point of view rather than a fully finessed and massively detailed piece of thought leadership. It means that you can create a greater number of shorter, value-driven videos that feel real and relateable, rather than something longer with lots of unnecessary special effects. Given everyone is pushed for time, shorter and more impactful content is the way to go anyway.
8. …As is interactive content
In the words of Robbie Williams, ‘Let me entertain you!’. With so much *meh* content out there, why not have some fun? This is your opportunity to develop engaging content that fuels people’s imaginations, and inspires them to get involved. Imagine you’re a local brewery (back to selling beer again…): why not run a campaign inviting people to suggest bold new flavours for a seasonal special via Instagram Stories, and then create a poll to choose the winner? Shoppable videos are another great way to engage and drive sales. Polls and quizzes work equally as well in the world of B2B, too. Get people to share their point of view in a LinkedIn post, then you can follow up with the results… and open the door to a sales conversation.
9. Use AI, but carefully
Come on, who hasn’t used ChatGPT when pushed for time to help write that overdue product brochure, or draft last-minute social content? AI is the marketer’s friend when it comes to thinking fast and generating ideas. But it must be used with caution; we’ve all come across websites where the content has clearly not been written by a person. Something feels a bit off; the tone isn’t quite human enough. And, as I’ve said before, authenticity is key. So, use AI for inspiration, but don’t use it to cut corners. Trust me, people will know.
10. Schedule for success
We’ve all been there; we start the year with a commitment to driving out regular, relevant content. Then all of a sudden things get busy, and content goes back to being ad-hoc. Either that, or we develop a detailed plan for the year and bulk-produce materials, only to find in Q2 that the market has changed, and what we’d planned is no longer relevant. I’m a big fan of developing a detailed plan a quarter ahead, with a broader-brush plan-on-a-page through the rest of the year. For your quarterly plan, start with your key themes (see tip 4), then pre-schedule what’s going out under these themes by channel, by week/month. Get your content for the quarter created up-front, fully signed off and ready to go. Punctuate this with the dates of known activities, such as industry events or product launches, and use these to further amplify your content. As you get halfway through a quarter, plan for the next. This way, you keep consistency over your themes and messaging, but have the flexibility to change how you activate against these depending on emerging results, or a change in internal or external factors.