5 Marketing Ideas to Refresh Your Brand

Marketing can seem daunting, but by following a few simple tips, you can make some massive progress is refreshing your strategies.

Your marketing strategy will likely never be “complete.” There are always iterations to make, new trends to try, and experiments to conduct. But that’s part of the fun of marketing! If you’re looking to make some changes to your marketing, here are a few first steps you can take to get you started.

Analyze and Regroup

There are two key aspects to marketing: creativity and research. Let’s discuss the latter part of that equation first.

You’ll want to analyze the marketing data you have at your disposal. Spend a good few days in your Google Analytics, Search Console, and the analytics of all your social media channels. Figure out which tactics have worked best, where most of your audience and conversions have come from, and which tactics haven’t been as successful as you might have hoped.

Once you’ve done that, simply eliminate the worst-performing strategies from your next game plan. Try to shift your focus to more of the best-performing ones. Don’t forget to also add in a dash of something brand new, which brings us to the next part.

Think Outside the Box

And now for the creativity part, which, I’m sorry to say, we’ll boil down to one simple rule: try something you’ve never done before. There will be some risk involved, true. You may want to try a tactic that will end up not working. But that’s the beauty – and the scary part of marketing. You can’t know until you’ve tried.

Make one new tactic a part of your new marketing game plan. That might be a new social media platform, a new way to write blog posts, or making your first video, for example. No matter what you choose, you want to go for something that makes sense and that’s ultimately aligned with your brand’s overarching strategy.

Map out Your Promotion Tactics

To achieve the best possible results, you need to promote your assets cleverly. And your best chance of success is to have a concrete plan for each of them.

When coming up with new content ideas, also consider the best promotion avenues for each. If you discover you don’t actually know how you would promote a blog post or a video, maybe you want to reconsider even creating it. Or maybe you just need to devote some extra time to come up with a promotion solution.

Don’t limit yourself to going through the same motions for every piece of content. Do different things for different pieces. You should definitely get a few links to some of your content if at all possible. But then again, other pieces might benefit from social media ads more. Or maybe you want to be a guest on a podcast and talk about your new ebook.

You get the idea – keep it varied and align your strategies with each individual piece, as opposed to having one overarching strategy for every piece of content you produce.

Tidy up Your Website

Now is also the perfect time to give your website a once-over. You’ll want to consider every aspect of it — starting from the copy itself, which will take up most of your time, to changing the visuals, refreshing your images, removing outdated pages, and so on.

Start with an SEO audit, as this can often uncover some serious errors you could benefit the most from fixing. Then you can jump into a content audit and rework a lot of your blog posts. Don’t forget to also look at the website from a purely human point of view. Consider what it is saying to your audience and how well it is communicating your values, ideas, and messages.

Prepare to Be Flexible

If navigating the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need to be super-flexible in our marketing strategies. And while we strongly advocate having a plan and mapping out the tasks you want to tackle, we definitely encourage you to be prepared to bin a lot of them if the global situation changes significantly.

Keep an eye on the feelings and habits of your target audience and how they are behaving online. You might need to meet them halfway somewhere. For example, you might want to make social media shopping easier for them and not expect them to visit your website as much. Be ready to adapt if the situation demands it. It will certainly come in handy.

Consider some of our tips when coming up with your new marketing strategy, and try not to get overwhelmed by the looming uncertainty. Some best practices, and flexibility above all, remain a given. Most importantly, have fun with it!

Sarah Kaminski is a freelance writer and social media marketer. She works with a number of small businesses to build their brands through more engaging marketing and content.