Member tips – Media Mall Marketing

Find Success in 2020 with Strategic Planning and a SWOT Analysis

February 1, 2020/in Marketing, Member tips /by Nikki Gillingham

We’re a month into 2020 already, and believe it or not the tone for your business has probably already been set. If you’ve set up your goals and have a clear path on how to achieve them, you’re probably not panicking. If you haven’t yet – don’t worry, there’s still time – but you’ll want to get on that strategic planning as soon as possible, and the SWOT analysis can help you through each phase.

In short, a SWOT analysis (SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a technique used to help business with their strategic planning (it can also be used on a smaller scale on individual projects to ensure success). A SWOT analysis can help guide decision making, which is why it’s helpful to do now, before we get too far into 2020. This is your opportunity to set smart goals for the rest of the year, and map out how they’ll get accomplished, so you can track your progress throughout the year.

When using the SWOT analysis for strategic planning purposes, keep in mind these definitions:

Internal parameters:

Strengths: characteristics that give your business an advantage over others
Weaknesses: characteristics that give your business a disadvantage

External parameters:

Opportunities: elements in the environment that the business or project could use to its advantage
Threats: elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business

Source: Xhienne – SWOT pt.svg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2838770

Here is how and when to use the SWOT Analysis for thorough strategic planning in 2020:

Analysis of Current Business Situation

Before even beginning project planning or annual strategic planning, it’s important to know where your business currently sits, who your competitors are, and how your clients and employees feel.

Competitive Analysis – See where your business sits both digitally and physically.
Customer Insights – Assess current customer satisfaction & maintainable expectations with growth.
Employee Assessment – Determine employee views on current and future development.
SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats.

Future Planning and Goal Setting

Once you understand what your current business environment looks like, you can begin planning what your desired outcome will be. What does the future look like for your business? What are your values and how are they incorporated? What are your goals?

Direction – Set the target on what goals you want to achieve.
Values – What are the core values your business has in place?
Long Term Goals – Determine your long-term goals as a business.
Forecast – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats.

Strategy Development and Action Items

After setting your goals, it’s important to lay out exactly how you plan to achieve them. Without the steps to get there, most goals are never reached.

Accountability – Set the target on who is required for each task.
Strategies – Set the strategies required to achieve the objective.
Budget – Determine how much financial input your objective requires.
Time Allocation – Break down how much time is required for each task.

Accountability

Finally, in order to be successful there must be accountability built into the strategy. How often will progress be reviewed? Is the SWOT analysis still accurate? Are planning meetings being conducted fairly?

Review Process – Set quarterly or monthly review meetings.
SWOT – Ensure SWOT analysis is up to date for each review.
Chair Meeting – If required chair the meeting to ensure direction.
Balanced Meeting – Create a level environment for all members to discuss objectives.

Have you completed your strategic planning for 2020? If you don’t quite have your ducks in a row but have a large project scheduled for this year, Media Mall can help. With more than 17 in-house business and marketing service providers and a dedicated project management team, no matter is on your radar for 2020, we can ensure it’s a success from start to finish.

Learn more about working with Media Mall and our multi-company proposals, or send our founder Tony a message.

Four Tips to Maximize Your Tax Refund in 2020

November 6, 2019/in Member tips /by Nikki Gillingham

Did you know that here at Media Mall, we have 17 businesses across a number of marketing and support services industries? With everything from web development to online advertising, and video production to cloud accounting services, we specialize in putting together the experts your business needs to create your own dream team. We’ve been polling our business leaders to bring you expert advice, and since we’re coming up on tax time, this month we’re bringing you four tips to help maximize your refund in 2020, from Numetrica.

Maximize Your Tax Refund in 2020: Keep Your Receipts

Create a Dropbox or Google Drive folder to save all of your receipts – not only does this ensure you have them all come tax time, but you can easily share this with your accountant, too. Receipts for everything from eye glasses, massage therapy, prescription medications, and even grocery receipts if you have a specific dietary requirement (like a gluten allergy) are all important to hold on to.

Maximize Your Tax Refund in 2020: Track Your At-Home Hours

If you’re an employee and your employer asks you to do some work from home evenings, weekends, or even during work hours, you can claim deductions. Have your manager sign a T2200 Declaration of Conditions of Employment. Home office and other expenses you can claim may include:Interest on your Mortgage, Insurance, Utilities, and Travel.

Maximize Your Tax Refund in 2020: If You’re Self-Employed, Use an Accountant

Numetrica has been able to find an additional $4,000 for our self-employed clients. You are able to deduct all costs that are associated with running your business, and many often get missed: cell phone, home office, car expenses, etc.

A cloud accounting system like QuickBooks Online can make a self-employed person’s life much easier come tax season. Numetrica sets all of their clients up on this platform, saving hours of work on both sides.

Maximize Your Tax Refund in 2020: Get The Credits You’re Owed

A first-time home buyer can qualify for a $5,000 credit, with a potential refund value of $750 and can be used every 5 years. It’s also possible to recover missed credit on this one, so if you’ve recently purchased a home (even if it wasn’t this year) Numetrica may be able to help you get it this year.

Many credits exist like this – it’s important to ensure you’re getting all of the ones you’re owed.

If you have more questions about accounting or other marketing and business services offered at Media Mall, contact our co-founder Tony today!

Increase Sales with Lead Acquisition Strategies and Content Marketing

October 21, 2019/in Marketing, Member tips /by mmstaff

If you’re a business owner, you know the importance of good marketing and – even more so – good Return on Investment of that marketing. To generate lead acquisition (and get that ROI) you need two things: traffic going to your website, and great content on your site.

Lead Acquisition: PPC and Google AdWords

A solid Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy and Google AdWords campaign is one way to help drive targeted traffic (i.e. people who are likely to buy from you) to your website. In fact, a well-structured PPC campaign can increase traffic to your website by more than 300%!

Google determines the quality of your ad (and how many people to show it to) based on the following four factors:

CTR (click through rate). What percentage of the time do people click your ad when it appears? If people aren’t clicking either your keywords OR ad copy aren’t relevant.

Your bounce rate. Once a person clicks the ad, what do they do on your website? If they leave quickly or without clicking on anything, AdWords determines that the landing page is irrelevant. OR your website experience is bad (slow, not mobile friendly, confusing, etc.)

Campaign history. They are gathering data over time. If you fix something, it will take a little time to get the score back up because of this. That’s yet another reason. If your quality is slipping and you don’t know why, consult an AdWords management agency.

Landing Page Relevance. This is one of the most important aspects of any Ad campaign, Google will crawl the targeted page to ensure its content is valuable to the user. Do not just send traffic to your home page! Your landing page should be optimized to capture your potential leads as well, sending them to a contact page after they read your content increases the chance of users bouncing from your site.

Content Marketing

Once you’re successfully driving traffic to your website, it’s important to keep them there with great content that is relevant to them and their needs. If you look at the PPC campaign factors above, half of them depend on good content to be successful: Your bounce rate and Landing Page Relevance. Without engaging content on your landing page, both of these factors will suffer.

Great content requires three key pieces to keep the reader engaged: The right audience, the right information, and the right time.

The Right Audience: Who is your target audience? When you’re writing content, keep a very specific niche of your target market in mind and write for them only – not everyone you sell your products and services to.

The Right Information: This is easier to figure out once you’ve chosen your audience. What exactly is the problem they have? How can you solve it for them? Don’t be afraid of giving away free information here – when your readers begin to trust you, that’s when they will become more likely to buy from you.

The Right Time: Understand where your audience, with that specific problem, is in their buyer journey. Writing for them at that moment will help move them from researcher, to shopper, to buyer (and new client).

If you need help implementing a PPC or content marketing campaign to increase your lead acquisition, book a meeting with our co-founder, Tony, today. We have experts in-house that specialize in these areas and work together to ensure your digital marketing strategy is a success from start to finish. In fact, we specialize in multi-company projects, giving you a single-point of contact through a dedicated project manager and professionals in each specific field of your marketing project.