Taking a fresh look at your Marketing: A Guest Blog by Julie Mitchell Mehta

At this time of year it’s a good idea to stop and review what you have been doing with your business over the previous ten or eleven months and decide what you want to achieve next year.
It may be that your goals are the same or you may want to try something a little different. Either way, this is the time to have a look at all you promotional activities to see if they are helping you get where you want to be.
First, take a long, hard look at your current customers. Can you categorise them by size, industry, type of business? What is the biggest category? Is that the type of market you want to be in? If it is, great – keep doing what you are doing! If it’s not, why not? What is it you are doing that is attracting this type of customer? What can you do to reduce the proportion of your business which comes from these customers and increase the work coming from your ideal customer base?
Secondly, take a long hard look at all your marketing from the past year. How much have you spent on each activity (cash and time) and how much business has it brought in? How much of the right kind of business has it brought in?
Once you have tackled these two areas, put them together and work out which marketing activities are most effective in bringing in the customers you want more of next year.
Finally, write yourself a plan to make sure you do the activities which are really going to move your business forward in the direction you want it to go.