Top Marketing Strategies for 2011

New Year’s Resolutions for Marketing that will help you Dominate Your Competition

It’s the start of a fresh new year, and that means New Year;s Resolutions are all the rage – everything from eating better, to getting more exercise, to spending more time away from your Blackberry or iPhone, and so on.

But are you also making 2011 marketing resolutions for your business? Are you setting goals that will take you to the next level? Do you plan on implementing a High Performance Environment (HPE), where your marketing plans, strategies, tactics and programs all work together to create ongoing excellence and profitability?

If not, don’t worry; at least, not yet. Simply make and keep the following 2011 Marketing Resolutions, so that a year from now you’ll look back and say: “Yes, I’ve achieved all of my 2011 marketing resolutions and I’ve taken my business to the next level!”

Instead of saying: “Oh, no, I spent the money this year but I didn’t have a plan to get the results I wanted. Now, my competitors are racing past me on a daily basis, taking my current and future customers away, and making it harder for me to stay afloat. Is there a time machine around here I can borrow?”

2011 Marketing Resolution #1: Exploit All of the Advantages of Integrated Marketing

In 2011, you much commit to using all integrated marketing channels – both online and offline – to spread your message, promote your brand, and influence your target market so that they choose you and not your competition. Sound expensive? Don’t worry! If you know where to look and have the right mix of marketing tools, strategies and tactics, many of the integrated marketing channels you need are FREE, and you can even enable your customers to be part of your marketing solution.

2011 Marketing Resolution #2: Harmonize your Marketing Collateral

In 2011, you need to harmonize your marketing collateral so that individual components compliment, support and work together to drive your brand out there and drive your customers to your business. For example, use your press releases to reinforce your blog posts, use your newspaper advertising to reinforce your Facebook and other social media presence, use your thought leadership articles to reinforce your reputation marketing content, and so on. Up close, it may all look like different pieces of the marketing pie. But seen from above, it all fits together and creates a powerful integrated marketing strategy.

2011 Marketing Resolution #3: Coordinate All Marketing into a Cohesive Plan

In 2011, you need to coordinate your marketing content, channels and strategies into a cohesive, focused and cost-effective plan that goes far outside the convenient little marketing box in an organization chart, and embraces everything from risk management to staff training to service delivery, and everything in between. Your marketing plan and advertising budget must dovetail strategically and financially with your business objectives and you must be able to share vision and expectations with your team in a matter of minutes – not hours or days.

2011 Marketing Resolution #4: Use Social Media as Part of the Marketing Mix

In 2011, you must grasp that social media is a permanent part of the Integrated Marketing picture of your business, but it’s not the ONLY part. Instead, you should integrate social media as part of your marketing mix, using only the platforms and tools that make strategic sense and leaving behind those that may be very cool but have no demonstrable value for your business plan at this time.

2011 Marketing Resolution #5: Use your Marketing to become an Authority

In 2011, you need to anticipate that your customers – including the ones who haven’t heard of you yet – will be influenced and attracted by the leadership you demonstrate. They want to know that you’re not just an ordinary business trying to make a sale, but rather that you’re an authority in your niche and the smartest solution for their specific needs. So in the months ahead, you need to be producing articles, ebooks, blog posts, videos, reports, podcasts, and everything else that establishes you as an authority.

2011 Marketing Resolution #6: Use Reputation Marketing to Make an Impact

In 2011, you need to use a variety of Reputation Marketing strategies and tactics – both online and offline – to showcase and reinforce your brand, and position yourself to be found by the right customers for the right reasons. Your Reputation Marketing strategy must flow from your website to all of the other online spaces where your business appears and competes, including (but not limited to) local search engines, online yellow pages, key review sites, social network communities where your target market interact, and so on.

2011 Marketing Resolution #7: Establish and Promote your Brand Definition

In 2011, you must brand yourself or be branded. Branding is more than having a logo – it’s about sharing the story of what you stand for, what makes you different, and what you’ll deliver to satisfy the needs of your target customers. You need to take control of your brand definition (or, possibly, create it in the first place), and use it to steer your marketing forward, articulate your core value propositions, and determine your overall positioning in an increasingly fragmented marketplace – one where the gaps between big and small blur while the gaps between niche leader and niche follower widen.

2011 Marketing Resolution #8: For Search Engine Marketing, think Global and Local

There are hundreds of local & global online directories — think YellowPages.com, Google Place pages, and Yelp for starters — and your goal must be to have a competitive presence in each one. Think of online directories as storefronts that your current and future customers will visit in the year ahead. In 2011, you need to seize the opportunity these storefronts provide to deliver a warm, inviting, and influential greeting to potential customers in the form of reviews, company information (and by that we mean high-impact, influential marketing information), and links to your website, social media spaces, your authority marketing collateral (e.g. articles, ebooks), and so on.

Get on Track for a Successful and Profitable 2011

We’re all familiar with New Year’s Resolutions that tend to fade away as things get busy. Or sometimes, that metaphorical (or maybe even literal) hill we promised to climb turns in a mountain. And so our resolutions remain unfulfilled or postponed to next year.

Well, there’s some good news and some bad news about that. Let’s start with the bad.

The bad news is that no, you don’t have next year to think about taking action. Because your competitors aren’t procrastinating – they’re taking action. They’re implementing aggressive marketing systems and strategies to lure away your past, current and future customers, and just as alarming, they’re grabbing those former customers’ networks, too. Friends, family, co-workers, people on the same softball teams – you get the idea. You’re not merely losing a single customer. You’re losing a chain of customers and all because of unmet resolutions.

That’s the bad news. Now for the good stuff!

The good news is that you can easily, efficiently and cost-effectively ACHIEVE these 2011 Marketing Resolutions by simply connecting with CastleCS.

At CastleCS, we’ll build the customized, targeted marketing solutions that get you ahead of the crowd, and keep you ahead of the curve – not just for 2011, but into the years ahead.

Plus, unlike others, we won’t freak you out by saying that if you’re not on page one of Google by tomorrow you’ll go out of business, or twist your arm until you agree to a shotgun approach to cover all your bases – when all you really need is a thoughtful, efficient, focused set of strategies, tactics and tools.

Rather, we’ll create customized marketing solutions that uniquely match the dynamics of your business and your brand: where it is, where it’s going, and who it’s up against. We’ll then implement the tactics and strategies that smartly – and cost-effectively – take your business to the next level: one where your marketing plans, strategies, tactics and programs all work together to create ongoing excellence and profitability.

And finally, as long as we’re on a good news roll, we’ll MAKE SURE that, a year from now, you look back on 2011 and say:

“Yes, thanks to the amazing CastleCS team, I achieved all of my 2011 marketing resolutions, I’ve taken my business to the next level in a controlled and predictable way, and I’m enjoying my growing business more than I ever dreamt possible!”