2024 To-do list for Marketers:

Prepare your Prospecting and SEO plan to generate new leads and drive traffic to your Company.

A marketing plan is certainly a roadmap. When you have defined goals, it shows you how to get there. Improvisations in marketing can cost too much. That’s why creating a marketing plan is one of the key tasks of any business owner.

However, as a surprise, nearly half of companies (47%) admit they don’t have a clear digital marketing strategy, even though everyone is doing it every day (according to The Future of Digital Marketing trends report from Smart Insights). Hopefully your company isn’t one of them, and you understand the importance of timely planning.

Marketing goals fall into five main areas:

• Increase of brand awareness and visibility
• Lead generation
• Attention retention
• Increase of customer value
• Growth of the number of brand fans.

All of these goals should be reflected in your 2024 to-do list.

1.Every business starts with traffic

In our everyday life we make a lot of decisions, big and small. But no matter how we think it through, still the bulk of them are not spontaneous in any way. More often than not, our decisions are tied to certain goals in one way or another.

It’s the same in business. You don’t launch marketing campaigns just for the sake of launching them! You expect that your efforts and expenses will be justified and you will get the result you are aiming for.

That is, having a goal provides clarity. You need a plan of marketing activities to bring traffic, to use  ‘magnets’  to win the attention of prospects, to set up a warm-up system, to launch a sales funnel.

If the marketing department will act chaotically, rushing from side to side, the sales department in 2024 will have a hard time. Leads will flow to managers intermittently, and you may face failures even if you have a great product and a qualified sales team.

2.Target audience, segmentation

Create a description of your target audience

An important part of developing a marketing plan involves identifying your target audience.

As a rule, when asked about the target audience, brand owners used to answer: ‘Everyone’. Or another option: ‘Companies from large cities’.

But this is an erroneous approach. If you focus your efforts on everyone, it will not work. You simply will not be able to create a universal offer that will attract the attention of 100% of the audience.

Portrait of ideal clients

The work of marketers in 2024 will not be in vain if you understand who exactly needs your product or service, and who can buy them. And it is crucial that not only their interest, but also their opportunities and powers converged.

After all, there are often such situations when a person is interested in your product, though the decision to buy is made not by him, but by someone else.

So you will have to work to answer the questions:

1. Who are your ideal customers
2. What their goals are
3. What problems they are experiencing
4. How your product can solve those problems

Ways to conduct research on your target audience

To understand who your target audience is, you can use the following tools:

• Engage online prospecting tools (e.g. EasyBusiness by Kompass, developed specifically to analyze your potential market, identify new prospects to feed your sales team, run emailing campaigns to generate hot leads)
• Analyze the audience of competitors
• Try focus groups

Segment your target audience

Think that’s it? Not at all! When you have the answers to your questions, you will surely see that even with common attributes, the target audience is divided into segments.

Your product or service may be of interest to certain business owners, top managers, or office employees. So take the time to identify and understand the characteristics of each of your target audience segments so that it’s easier to create the right content and attract your ideal customers.

3.Content Strategy

Specify your initiatives and strategies

CMI’s B2B content marketing survey found that 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy; 33% have a strategy but it’s not documented; and 27% have no strategy at all.

There are different types of content and channels available to companies today. And it’s important to decide what you’re going to use and how you’re going to use it. For example:

• Which content you’ll create to reach your goal. This could be digital presentations that include articles, news, infographics, videos, product descriptions, etc. Booster packages are ideal for this purpose, designed specifically to increase visibility, improve SEO rankings, and enhance your content marketing strategy.
• Which channels you’ll be leveraging. These can be B2B martech platforms, social media, YouTube, blogs, search engines, etc.
• What consistency and volume you will use. You can create content daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. It all depends on the goals and objectives of your marketing plan.
• Which key performance indicators for each type of content you’ll apply. Here you need to give maximum specificity. That is, define KPIs not in general, but specifically for each element of the strategy.

Think through the content strategy depending on the stages of the funnel

The marketing sales funnel is divided into three stages that require their own content:

• Entry point to the funnel: at this stage you target your market with online prospecting tools, or potential customers find your company themselves thanks to your professional online presentation
• Middle of the funnel: here it is important to collect users’ contacts, understand what problem they want to solve and choose the right communication channel
• Bottom of the funnel: this is the stage where the user has to make a decision and close the deal

Accordingly, the content should correspond to the tasks of each stage (visibility content, commercial offer, work with objections, etc.).

Sales Accelerator by Kompass is here to organize and streamline the work of your sales team at all stages of the sales funnel. This all-in-one solution will allow you to launch a sales pipeline, starting with market segmentation and ending with monitoring the ROI of your actions thanks to Sales Accelerator clever and simple dashboard.

4.Marketing Channels

Make a list of marketing channels

So, it’s clear that buying online is rarely enough like love at first sight. The user may fall in love with your product, but the payment is more likely to wait its turn.

And since everything revolves around information, it is important to decide which channels you will use for this in 2024. That is, your marketing plan should reflect where exactly you publish content that would attract and inform users, encourage them to take further action, display information about the company, brand, product.

Pay attention to email marketing

Deliver useful content not only through a blog or social media, but also through email campaigns. The following factors affect the open rate:

1. Email contacts should be targeted.
2. Email database needs to be of high quality.
3. Messages should be readable: fonts, layout and other elements – all without overloading, the main thing is the semantic load.

Determine the relationship between channels and digital tools

Everything in marketing should be interconnected – tools don’t work in isolation. Professional B2B platforms, social networks, search engines, SEO, contextual or targeted advertising, chatbots – you need to clearly understand how they will complement each other.

It is clear that the marketing plan should provide for the sequential introduction of tools and channels. After all, it will be quite expensive to implement everything all at once. But the implementation should take place in such a way that the whole chain is connected and live.

5.Responsibilities

Determine the list of the participants and their responsibilities

So, you have a detailed marketing plan for 2024 to increase your sales and visibility. Goals, objectives, target audience, strategies, and budget have been defined. Now we need to understand who will do what.

Of course, you can do without the names of specific employees. But there must be an understanding of where the responsibility of your own departments lies, and where that of a contractor (for example, a SEO agency or the owner of an email campaign provider), and who is responsible for implementing and monitoring the key performance indicators outlined in the plan.

The year 2024 does not promise to be easy. That’s why it’s crucial for you to prepare for the challenges of expanding  brand visibility and building seamless lead generation. Kompass digital solutions can help you do just that – contact our experts in more than 70 countries around the world, and they will give you sound advice on how to boost your business in 2024.