By John Eberhard
It’s the first week of January 2025, so it’s an appropriate time to look ahead and start planning what you want to achieve for the coming year.
I conducted a survey of business owners last year. When asked what they most wanted to accomplish in the next year, 75.3% said “Expand / more revenue / growth / profit.”
If you’re one of the 75% that wants to expand your business operations and revenue in 2025, then it’s time to start planning how to do that.
I’ve written a couple articles in the last month talking about the difficulties in marketing using platforms that are essentially monopolies. This might have come across as being pessimistic. But the point I was trying to make is that when you’re embarked on a marketing program or campaign, it helps to be realistically aware of what barriers you might encounter. That way you can plan out how to overcome or work around those barriers.
So here are some tips for your marketing planning for 2025.
- Have a multimedia approach.
On that marketing survey of business owners, I asked what marketing actions they were currently doing:
| Action | Percentage |
| c. Social media marketing | 65.9% (56) |
| a. Website for business | 55.3% (47) |
| d. Facebook paid advertising | 47.1% (40) |
| h. Print advertising | 37.6% (32) |
| e. Email marketing | 32.9% (28) |
| g. Producing videos for the business | 27.1% (23) |
| b. Google Ads advertising | 25.9% (22) |
| f. Search engine optimization | 18.9% (16) |
| i. Trade shows | 12.9% (11) |
| j. Bulk texting | 12.9% (11) |
| k. Webinars | 9.4% (8) |
You can probably see some actions on that list that you are not doing. And my advice is to expand the types of media you are using, and specifically do not get caught in the trap of using only one or two media to promote your business.
- Carefully Track Your Results.
Many companies do not carefully track the results of their marketing efforts. This means to find out from every new lead or sale that comes in, where did they find out about you or what prompted them to contact you?
This is not necessarily easy to do, because some prospects cannot answer what prompted them to contact you. But it’s still important to ask, and to keep a grid showing your total leads and where they came from. That way you can reinforce the actions that are getting the most results, and drop the ones that aren’t working.
- Target how much of a revenue increase you want to get for the year.
Then figure out what marketing actions to do to achieve that target. Usually this means increasing the amount of promotion you will be getting out, or the number of marketing actions you are doing. You can’t do the same marketing actions and expect a sizable increase in revenue.
Sometimes this means refining your message, which usually means doing surveys on your target public. This is a great idea, and there are some affordable ways to get surveys done.
- Run Pilot Campaigns
What I mean by this is to try out new media where you are not promoting now, on a pilot or test basis. Try these new media out on a small scale, so you are not risking large amounts of money. Be brave and try new things.
Then take the ones that work for you, where you are getting a good return on investment, and scale them up.
- Get into Video
Per my survey mentioned above, only 27.1% of business owners surveyed were producing videos for their business.
This is from WebFX.com:
“Let’s start by looking at 16 statistics that explore the impact of video content on the Internet. This isn’t limited to marketing videos, specifically, but applies to videos of all shapes and sizes.
- “A third of all online activity is spent watching video content.
- “100 million Internet users watch a video online every day.
- “55% of people watch online videos every day.
- “Over 1 billion hours of video content are watched on YouTube each day.
- “More than 92% of all Internet users across the world watch videos online every week.
- “On average, people watch 17 hours’ worth of video content every week.
- “More than 90% of consumers between the ages 12 and 44 qualify as digital video viewers.
- “There are more than 244 million online video viewers in the United States.
- “Online video content currently has a worldwide audience reach of 92.3%.
- “65% of users identify YouTube as their preferred channel for viewing video content.
- “Over 75% of all online videos are viewed on mobile devices.
- “92% of the people who view videos on mobile devices will end up sharing videos with others.
- “75% of users prefer watching videos in a horizontal format, compared to only 25% who prefer a vertical format.
- “80% of users will click away from a video if it starts to buffer or load slowly.
- “92% of users watch videos with the sound off.
- “Users typically retain 95% of the info presented in a video, but they only retain 10% when they read it in text-based content.
There are ways to produce videos that are more affordable, and most business people are probably not aware of them. Contact us for more info.
- Get into Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The purpose of SEO is to increase the organic (not paid) traffic to your website from search engines.
I’ve been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for over 20 years. It has changed a lot in that time period, in terms of what you should and should not do. Today I advocate a comprehensive list of things to do for SEO:
- Keyword research: The goal is to find keywords that fit the topic of the website and its products and services, that have a decent number of monthly searches, and have relatively low number of sites competing for them.
- Meta-tags: Write meta-tag titles and descriptions for each page of the site and each blog post. These are the hidden tags that search engines can see that helps them figure out what your site is about, and they are what appears when your listing comes up in search engine results.
- Rewrite Page Content: Today we use an AI tool to rewrite the text on pages of your site. We select 1-5 keywords relevant to that page and the tools ranks it in terms of how well it will rank on search engines for those keywords, on a 1-100 scale. Then we work to get it as high as possible, at least over 70.
- Write New Blog Posts: We use that same AI tool to write new blog posts for your site that are ranked over 80-90 for keywords we select.
- Link Building: We have several actions we can do to increase the number of links to your site, which Google and other search engines still list as a primary factor in ranking how well your site ranks for a given keyword.
- SEO Audit: We run an SEO audit four times a year on your site, then fix any errors found. A common error today is that the pages of the site load too slowly. This often requires changing or removing certain content such as large pictures or video backgrounds. Sometimes it requires moving to a new hosting company, as a number of hosting companies today have terribly slow servers.
- Toxic Links Removal: There are certain sites that Google and other search engines consider “toxic.” We determine the list of those and get them removed, twice a year.
Help with Marketing Strategy
If you’d like help formulating your marketing strategy for 2025, contact us at 661-441-2429 or 818-472-6725, or fill out a form here.
Let’s all have a great and prosperous year!
