New Year’s Marketing Resolutions 2012

New Years is seriously one of my favorite times of the year.  It’s about renewal, reinvention and, of course, resolutions.  For this Shameless News post, I’d like to share a few New Year’s Marketing Resolutions for 2012.  Let’s see if we can keep them this year… ;)

Spend more time with my prospect list

We all work on building our prospects list in spits and starts, but how often do we really spend a little time updating, qualifying or nurturing it?  Let’s make a New Year’s resolution to spend a little more time with our prospect list.

Stop sending Pay-Per-Click campaigns to my home page

Tsk, tsk, tsk. If you’re sending people to your website’s homepage, you’re diluting your marketing message to a dangerous level. Create a landing page and send all PPC traffic there first. It will help focus your messaging and keep your visitors on track.  There’s no sense in paying to send people to your ‘generalized’ home page.

Remove at least 1 field from my lead gen forms

Try removing just one not-quite-so-essential field from a form and test the results (also test which particular fields you remove). If you see an increase in leads, then continue to remove form fields until you reach the optimal balance of conversion rate v.s. lead qualification.

Commit to testing landing page improvements

On our post “5 Ways to Improve Your Landing Page“, we listed landing page testing (in the form of statistically relevant split-celled A/B test) as one of the most powerful ways to optimize your landing pages.  How many of you actually test your landing pages on an ongoing basis?  Let’s make that a resolution for 2012, shall we?

Invest in web technology with very low TCO

Continuing to throw money at a problem is a sure sign of madness.  With profit margins ever tighter, look at web technologies for sales, marketing and support with a very low TCO.  We’ve got lots of web tech solution reviews available on our site.  A quick look couldn’t hurt and this is a resolutions that could turn your overhead into an investment that pays real dividends.

Backup my files BEFORE something goes wrong.

I always find that my most recent backup is just after my last catastrophic system crash.  Back things up now, before they disappear like your tears in the rain.  JDM is good at that (end shameless micro-brand plug) as well as BackupBuddy.

Attend at least one event – golf tournaments don’t count!

I love playing golf as I’m sure you do, but trade shows and events are great ways of networking and communicating (in person) your value statement.  Golf tournaments are great ways of talking to 1-4 people for 18 holes.  Save that for after the initial meeting at a REAL event.

Stop Using Email by the end of 2012

Sound ridiculous?  It’s not.  Email is untrusted, distracting, and inefficient.  More on what we plan to do about it very soon.  In the meantime, check out what this HUGE company recently announced… Shocking? Good.

Have a Safe & Happy New Year’s!

From all of us at JDM, we wish you a safe and happy New Year’s.  Check back after the new year for more Shameless News and best practice articles on marketing and digital advertising. We’re not going anywhere.

Comment how many of those New Year’s resolutions you can keep.  If you kept even a few of them, you’ll be a much leaner, meaner marketing machine’r come this time next year.