Marketing Checklist

Each year as the holidays approach and the year comes to a close, it’s easy for everyone to be distracted by anything else but marketing. Schedules fill up, priorities shift, people are on vacation, etc. Doing a full-blown marketing “winter cleaning” doesn’t sound very appealing when you’re probably scrambling to wrap things up before December 31st. However, your end-of-year marketing checklist should include a few things that will help you tackle priorities come January 1st. We’ve compiled the top three tasks you and your team should work through before the new year.

1. Sweep Your Social Media Profiles

Social media is one of the aspects of B2B marketing often put on the “back burner” over and over. If you’re not actively monitoring social profiles, you might find yourself making lackluster posts out of necessity instead of creating posts that drive engagement. Here’s how you can clean up your social media profiles and plans so you are ready to start the next year strong:

Add Keywords: Revisit your bios and popular and recent posts to add in targeted keywords and hashtags.
Refresh Imagery: Change up your banner and profile images to keep your branding fresh.
Dive Deep on LinkedIn: Update your LinkedIn profile to include all the new LinkedIn features, like Product Pages and Conversation Ads.
Start Building a Calendar: If you haven’t already, begin filling in your 2022 social media calendar with posts and outreach that aligns with your demographics and strategy.
Post Recaps: Don’t forget to share a recap of your top-performing blogs, posts, etc. your audience may have missed.

2. Perform a Content Audit

The end of the year is a great time to go over all of the content you’ve published over the past twelve months or so. As you formulate your 2022 marketing strategy, look at what has performed well (and what hasn’t) to guide your priorities.

There are lots of resources for how to perform a content audit, but your main goals should include:

Tracking data for top pages and blogs to make informed decisions
Understanding what topics and formats of content perform best with your audience
Identifying and updating outdated content, prioritizing the pieces with the most traffic
Finding areas of improvement for SEO, web and mobile optimization, etc.
Anything else your organization deems important to performance and strategy

Based on the goals above, create a list of action items and deadlines. This should be a team effort, so don’t be afraid to delegate tasks to members of your team in an effort to create buy-in and collaboration.

As you reconvene to discuss the results, this is a great time to brainstorm ways you could repurpose high-performing content and what you need to create new, innovative content.

3. Plan Customer Success Stories

Customer success stories are arguably one of the most impactful conversion tactics available to B2B marketers. Hearing customer testimonials and impact is one of the best ways to convince prospects you’re the best at what you do, and they provide a great launchpad for 2022 content.

If we said, “tell us about a customer who has benefitted from your products or services,” you could probably name more than just one off the top of your head. Who came to mind for you?

Reach out to those customers who have seen measurable, meaningful improvements to their business because of your organization and ask to partner with them on a customer success story. The worst they can say is no, but what if they say yes?

At minimum, think about the customers who may be in the process of beginning or wrapping up an implementation soon and start setting the stage now for a success story after they go live.