Marketing Goal Setting and Preparing for Next Year

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. Erin Ollila 00:00 Last week, we talked all about reviewing your marketing strategy at the end of 2020. To this week, we’re going to talk about doing all the prep work to make sure your 2023 marketing strategy is aligned with the future goals you set, that it feels good. And then it’s also attainable based on your bandwidth, interest and energy. Doing this will help make sure that you are working with intention over the next 12 months, and not just aimlessly trying to accomplish goals that you set with a no direction for yourself. So this is all to say, we aren’t setting goals in this episode. We aren’t planning your year, which I might have said something like that in the last episode that this is going to be about goals and content creation. What this is, is actually a middle ground. As I did my own goal planning this week, I realized there’s actually a lot of work that happens after the review and before the goal setting. And that work consists of new research, confirming old research, and realigning some of the things that the data I’ve interpreted from my 2022 review told me, so I thought we should focus this end of the year episode on just that the prep work required before you focus on goal setting or content ideation. Alright, so I’m assuming with this episode that you’ve listened to last week’s, if you haven’t, it really might be a good idea to pause this episode and go back to last week and listen in on how I do all of my end of year marketing reviews. It’s only about 18 or 19 minutes, so it’s not going to take you too long. But I may occasionally mentioned the review during this episode. And I don’t want you to feel confused at all as to what I’m telling you to do. Now, we’re gonna assume you take my advice, and you actually listen to the reviewing episode. And you’ve done your own review for your annual marketing. Now we’re going to jump into the research phase of both reviewing and planning, specifically client competitor and SEO research. If you’ve done any of this in the past, that’s awesome. You are one step ahead of the game, you can simply and quickly review and update as necessary. If you haven’t, well, it’s really time to sit down and do some basic client competitor and SEO research. Regardless of what two categories you fall in, like whether you have it or whether you don’t. Here are some of the things you want to cover when it comes to these three main categories. Let’s start with competitor research. Do you know who some of your closest competitors are? If not, now is the time to find out. First, look at some of the names you see frequently popping up in Facebook groups on Instagram or on podcast you may listen to that do similar work as you do. Another way to do competitor research, especially if you have quality website content or data. And you’ve invested in SEO is to use one of the SEO tools to find out who your competitors are based on similar website data. I won’t go too far into how to do competitor research and this episode. We’ll save that for an episode in the future. But those are just two starting points for you to get an idea of who your competitors are. If you are starting at square one here. Once you know who they are, you’ll want to start your research. You can make this as simple or as detailed as you’d like. A simple review would be just a peek at their socials and their website and take a few notes on one to three things that you like and dislike. A detailed review could include SEO Research website page by page audits, doing a pros and cons list as to how their message is being received and so many other things. I absolutely want to point out that you should never do any competitor research from the perspective of copying your competitors. Why? Well because plagiarism is a sleazy thing to do but also because you are two completely different businesses. Even if you are providing the same services to your clients. You are an individual, they are their own person or persons depending on the size of the business. And you come with different value props. So when we do competitor research, we really want to look at them and how they’re running their business. So as a starting place a jump off and inspiration, not anything that we should be doing the same thing for. So, after you’ve completed all your competitor research, what you’ll want are notes on things that your competitors are doing well. So you can spark ideas on how you can also improve different aspects of your own business. Again, no copying here, just inspiration and ideation. You’ll want to note things that you dislike, too. And this is something that my clients are always anxious about, right? Like, it’s difficult to indicate who your competitors are to start with. But when you start picking apart what you don’t like a lot of people will hold back. Well, there’s a reason we want to look at our competitors to determine what it is we dislike. The same reason as why we look at what we like for inspiration and ideation. You may see things here where you could improve your own marketing, things that you also might want to stop doing in your marketing. Or maybe you might indicate where there are messaging, terms, messaging ideas that you could adjust, because they’re missing the mark. So you use the subject as an inspiration, but speak more directly to your ideal clients wants, needs and desires. And speaking of the ideal client, let’s transition from competitor research into client research. If you have client research from things you’ve done in the past, like voc interviews, which is voice of customer interviews, case study, interviews, or anything like that, pull them out now. First, ask yourself, are they current? Are there any other marketing and messaging insights that you can draw from these interviews and use in your new marketing in the upcoming year, maybe there’s something that you haven’t covered much in the past that is really salient for your business at this time. Once that’s done, think about how you can add to the client research you already have. Can you invite 2022 clients to case study interviews with you in quarter one of 2023. Or maybe your voc research is older and it needs to be updated in the coming year. If so, those two things themselves can transition into goals for 2023. But if you’re listening and thinking that you don’t even have any client research to begin with, we’ll consider getting that done in 2023 is one of your main goals. I’ll actually take a pause here to remind you that this is actually something I can help you with as part of a VIP intensive. If you need help with voc research or any type of client research, we can work together to complete it, it isn’t something you need to do on your own. But even if you have no data and you want to make this 2023 quarter one goal, I want you to take a few notes yourself now. So grab a pen and paper and ask yourself some of the following questions. What type of transformation? Do I offer my clients? Who needs that type of transformation? Erin Ollila 08:26 Who do I like working with? What’s holding these people back from working with me? What are these leads needs? Before working with me? How do I help my clients during our time together? What do my clients often share with me after we’re done working together? And why is it that you would like working with the type of clients you’ve identified working with in the form of questions that I asked? So these questions, they’re not a complete way to get client research. Because we have our own blinders on when it comes to our business. We may know what our clients need. But we forget that when clients do their shopping or begin to learn about what they need when it comes to working with our service providers, they’re actually in term searching for what they want, not what they need. So just as an example, when it comes to things like SEO, sometimes people will come to me and just let me know that they really want more leads coming into their business and then SEO is the end result. So they may not come to me looking for SEO Help. They may just come to me because they need leads. So it’s important to remember that answering all those questions and knowing what your clients need are actually coming from the perspective of your own perception. So I will plug the importance of Voice of Customer race Search again, because it really is vital to getting your clients own words and insights to strategically inform your messaging. Okay, we’ve covered client research, we’ve covered competitor research. And I mentioned I really did want to talk about SEO research here, because I want you to be thinking of that, especially going into 2023. Let’s start with the people who don’t think that they have any SEO data or haven’t put in any effort into SEO in the past year. My key suggestion for you is to make sure that you turn on Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Now, if you haven’t already done this, and you really want to make sure that the Google Analytics version that you’re using is GA for because you want to be collecting data on the new Google Analytics as the old Google Analytics, the Universal Analytics will be sunsetting in July of this year, and you will not be able to get any future data from that after July of 2023. So if you’re confused at all, by what I’m talking about, I highly suggest you hop back a couple episodes to listen to the episode I did with Deena Pruitt, on how to turn on Google Analytics for and capture data using that moving forward, I will put the link to that in the show notes. So you have easy access to that. So assuming you have those two already, if you do review the data briefly, how are people using your website? What keywords and keyword phrases? Are you ranking for? If any? And are they relevant to your business? If you have been working on SEO in the past year, then you’ve already have more data to work with. So review what’s worked, what hasn’t? How you can optimize what is working and how you can improve on what isn’t, I highly suggest focusing on SEO in 2023. You know, blogging is not dead. And I think pre pandemic, a lot of small businesses or medium businesses thought that there was no ROI in investing in online blog content. And that could not have been further from the truth. And I think the pandemic proved that to us. Suddenly, we’re all at home and asking questions about so many things to Google, like how do I make bread? And how do I do this? And how do I do that. And all of those posts that were already written were the ones that moved up the ranking immediately because they were questions that people had that were extremely relevant at the time. So with all this talk about the economy in 2023, which I won’t get into in detail here, because I think that many online marketers use this conversation as a bit of a scare tactic. But I will simply address it because there may be an economic shift that many marketing experts are addressing. But they’re also recommending spending on SEO and 2023 as a smart strategy. And I wholeheartedly agree, in fact, I highly suggest that you make SEO an entire year effort and not just something that you focus on for a quarter at a time. If you’re curious about how I could help you with SEO in 2023, I do have a few ways that we can work together. First, if you are a copywriter, content creator, or at least the sole person who does all of the writing in your business, I suggest joining my cohort based SEO for copywriters program that is starting this month. If that’s not you, I have two SEO packages that may help you, the superhero and the sidekick. And they act as jumping off points in your for your website pages, your post and any future editorial calendar you’re building. But finally, we can work together if you’ve already amassed a lot of content because I see this happening very often. Podcast hosts, for example, write a ton of show notes. And they’re not considering SEO when it comes to the show notes. Or businesses have written really great educational blogs, but they haven’t factored in SEO when it comes to their writing. So they’ve amassed content, and now they’re looking at it as how can it perform better for me. So in a situation like that, I would recommend a customized VIP day to update. You know those previously written blog post those case studies that you have shownotes so that you can follow SEO best practices, and really begin ranking for all of the hard work you’ve already done. All right, friends. That’s really it. That is your end of the year post review, but pre goal setting framework. The one quick thing I want to say before ending this episode and sending you on your merry way is that if you do this work now. And yes, it might take a bit of effort, you won’t have to do as much of it later. This prep work can simply be something that you review and update next year. So if you have the opportunity now, don’t overlook doing this. So you can reap the rewards of all of your hard work next year when you sit down to review and plan for 2024. All right, friends, that is that thank you so much for listening into the top copy to me podcast in our first year in 2022. I can’t even begin to tell you how much you’re listening, which I do see via my podcast apps means to me and how touched I am when listeners reach out to me to share their thoughts, which is a reminder you can do anytime on Instagram or if you want to connect with me anywhere else on social or when they leave reviews. For me it’s a lot of work goes into podcasts. And I don’t think I recognized that as a podcast listener until I became a podcast hosts. So it was really nice to hear from so many of you in 2022. And I really hope that in 2023, you will reach out and share more with me. Specifically if there is an type of episode that you would like for this show. If you’re if you have questions and you really want them to be answered by an expert, let me know. I do have quarter one fully planned for 2023. But if there’s anything else, let’s do it in quarter two. So reach out. You can email me a high at Erin ollila.com. Or again, connect with me on social and let me know what it is that you want from the talk copied me podcast in 2023. All right, pals. That’s it for me. See you next year.