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December 5, 2020

Atilus Video Q&A: Preparing for 2021

Author: Valerie Baker

2021 is right around the corner and it’s time to start thinking about your marketing plan. In this video, we discuss things you can do right now to prepare for 2021.

We’ll cover:

  • What you can do RIGHT NOW to prepare for 2021
  • Common planning mistakes to avoid
  • Top things to consider to add to your marketing in 2021

Watch our Preparing for 2021 Q&A Video

Full Video Transcript

Kristen:

Hi, everyone. We’re here for another Atilus video Q&A session. Today, right now when we’re posting this, it will be late November or December. So, 2021 is right around the corner. What we wanted to do was take this video to focus a little bit on what you can do to prepare for 2021, if you haven’t started already, and just talk a little bit about some recommendations we have as we lead into the new year. The first kind of question I want to pose to Gabby and myself would be, what’s something that companies can do right now to get ready for 2021?

I guess I’ll go ahead and I’ll go first. I think the first thing to do is to take a real hard look at your website and audit the content, see if it makes sense, if you’re trying to aggressively maintain an organic search listing, see how that is doing now. That all depends on who you’re working with on that. Just take a hard look at your website, make sure the content is right, make sure your services or products are listed. Just in general, review what you’ve got, and make improvements as you go into the new year. Gabby, do you have anything to add to that?

Gabby:

Yes, I would definitely recommend having a very strong digital presence if you are not on Facebook enough or if you’re not posting enough on Instagram, or any other kind of social media that you’re using, I would highly recommend to do so. Just to get in front of everyone, you have to be on top of that. Actually, that ties back into what you were saying about the website. It drives traffic to your website, it’s going to make you have a very strong presence, and everyone is now on the internet. Everyone’s looking at their Facebook, everyone’s looking at the social media. So, it’s a very good way to target customers and to get them to go to your website.

Kristen:

Yeah, definitely great, especially with COVID. I can assume this won’t be changing significantly anytime soon, so definitely establishing, if you haven’t already, getting on, at the very least, on Facebook, makes sense for your business, but definitely having some sort of social presence for sure.

Gabby:

Exactly.

Kristen:

Awesome. Then, as you know, we are thinking about our own 2021 planning, and having done this for a few years now for Atilus and for a few of our clients along the way, I just think about some planning mistakes that might happen. So, I think a really big mistake that happens is that people plan too much and too far in advance. I guess it’s a pet peeve of mine to make a plan and then have that plan go nowhere, have it just not be acted on in some way. So, my personal preference and what I try to instill here is that we do things on a quarterly basis.

So, I think it makes sense for the whole year to have some sort of loose plan. Or, say you have a big trade show every July and you know for a fact that that’s going to happen every year, obviously plan for things like that starting in December and January. But in terms of your content calendar, social media calendar, any sort of webinars, or if you’re doing podcasts and things like that, I think it’s a little overwhelming to plan a full year’s worth of content and take it just three months at a time.

So what we try to do here is that, for example, when we reached the end of November, we’re going to have a plan in place for quarter one 2021. So I think for sanity’s sake, it’s important to just do three months at a time. Plan mostly for the year, but I think that’s a big mistake that happens where you plan too much for the year and then things just fall to the wayside and you forget or things get too busy.

Gabby:

Yeah.

Kristen:

I know we’re guilty of that internally here. Gabby, any planning, mistakes that you can think of or call out?

Gabby:

It’s pretty much what you said, especially with social media. You can’t really plan too much ahead or be too specific. Yes, you can have a plan to have an idea of the content that you want to put out there, but you have to stay on the moment too. You have to share things that are happening right now, things that are affecting people right now. Example for COVID, we didn’t know this was going to happen. So, you might have to put posts about COVID right now, obviously didn’t plan for it. So, I would say just stay on top of what’s going on right now, and obviously, like Kristen said, have a loose plan of what you want to see on your social media, on your website, or your digital marketing.

Kristen:

Yeah. I would also say, too, as a part of the planning, I guess this ties into both topics, where what can companies do now and planning mistakes? I would say that a planning mistake might be not wanting to change because it’s “always worked.” We’ve seen that with some of our clients. It depends on the industry, obviously too, but at the end of the year or the beginning of the new year, you want to take a hard look at where you’ve spent your dollars, where do you get the lowest cost per lead or lowest cost per acquisition, and plan accordingly.

Obviously, I know that there are companies out there that want to maintain a brand awareness, a brand presence, so that’s a little bit of a different goal, but analyze your goals, analyze your ideal cost per conversion cost per lead, and then take that into account. Don’t just plan a content calendar, a marketing calendar for the sake of planning one. Make sure it’s impactful and that it’s going to get you closer to your goals.

So, I would say one mistake I see is not having that clear picture before you get started. So, definitely make sure to review some of that before you get into your marketing planning for the new year.

Gabby:

Yeah, exactly.

Kristen:

Then, the last topic I want to talk about is we did this in our last video where we said if we were going to recommend just one thing for digital marketing, what would we recommend? I want to do the same thing here. So if there was one recommendation for the new year that you would give, as far as digital website goes, Gabby, what would it be though? Go.

Gabby:

I would say blogging and content writing, and just putting useful information out there. That’s really going to help you with SEO. Obviously there’s more into it, but we’re not going to get too into it right now, but I would definitely recommend trying to put fresh content out there. Definitely content writing, I’m sure you probably interact with the customers. You probably know the questions that they have, you probably know what topics they’re interested in. So take that information, and you can write it into a blog or you can give them useful information that they will look forward to.

Kristen:

Yeah, definitely. That’s a really great one, because I feel like blogging, I don’t want to say has a negative connotation to it, but business owners are like, “Blogging? Why do I need to do that?” Because I feel like blogging is considered more like a personal thing, like, “I’m going to have my journal online,” but from a business standpoint, adding content to your website, fresh new content consistently is going to help, for sure.

I would say if I were to give one recommendation, it would be to consider and/or investigate making your website ADA compliant. We did a previous video series on this. If you followed our social media for a while or been on our website, you know this is something that we talk a lot about. But if you haven’t considered making your website compliant already, we definitely recommend doing that in 2021. I think that the way mobile websites or responsive websites were treated for so long were, in Google’s eyes, they were nice to have. It was sort of like if you have a responsive website, you’re ahead of the game.

So right now, ADA compliance is that, where you’re ahead of the game if you’re ADA compliant and it’ll just help you avoid any lawsuits in the future. In general, it’s just better usability for everybody. But I think give it a few years, I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be the standard, that your website needs to be compliant. So, to get the jump on that now in 2021, I think would be probably one of the most beneficial things you could do for your website, for your marketing, because having an ADA compliant website is a lot in line with SEO best practices, and then it’ll just help your business in the long run to establish that soon.

That’s really all we had for this video series, or this video episode today. So, we’ll continue this into the new year. If you have any ideas for topics that you want to hear us talk about, any questions you want to hear us cover, we’ll be happy to do that. If you have any questions about what we talked about today, just drop us a comment or you can always contact us on our website. So, thanks for watching, and Happy New Year. Bye.

Gabby:

Happy New Year, bye.

Valerie Baker

Valerie is the Support Lead here at Atilus. Her background includes digital marketing and web development. She takes amazing care of our clients and assists with overall website updates and development.

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