Questions to ask yourself over your marketing strategy in 2023

This time of year is always good for reflection on how you’re approaching your business, a time to rethink whether your strategy still works and whether, in a recession-hit, post-pandemic, war-stricken, climate-threatened environment, your organisation is ready to take on the challenges and grow.

It may be that you’re booming. Or it may be that things are just chugging along. Or you’re struggling. Whatever stage you are at, you should be checking that your marketing is working, that it represents what you want to be and that it’s sustainable.

Any time is a good time for that process, but the psychology of a New Year might make this a better one than usual.

So what are the questions you should be asking yourself?

Are you listening to outsiders?

Of course, we would say this, because we want to be that outsider and to help you, but the biggest cause of inertia is the lack of a spark.

Whether it’s an agency or an expert you respect, you need to have someone come in, look at what you do and how you do it and slowly exhale and say ‘Are you sure….?’

All organisations get embedded in their own habits, they get stymied by the limitations of the existing skillsets or they are limited by their own mental horizons. Letting the daylight of the opinions of others in, delivered by someone with genuine impartiality, can refresh a company’s strategy and give it new focus and energy.

And, we’ve talked about this before - someone who builds your skills and capacity and doesn’t create a dependency is, most likely, what you need.

Are you targeting the right audience?

All businesses need to have a very clear sense of who they are marketing to, but that can become lost in habit.

You might be hoping for lots of European students, having forgotten Brexit.
You might be thinking of Chinese students, and need reminding of Covid, or
You might have got it bang on but you might not be thinking about it in enough detail.

Many companies go through the process of creating personas of their target market and give them names and shiny photos to humanise them. That’s all good, but they can often be simply fictional characters that reinforce existing ideas.

However you approach it, concentrate on some key questions:

What’s their likely backstory - age, stage of life and location?
Why do they want to learn a new language?
What do they want from the experiential side of a language school? Location and tourism or friendships and networks?
What are the potential blockers? Issues of cost? Or of visas?
How will they research about language schools? Search? Social media?
Who are the influencers around them - parents, agents, peers, schools…?
And what other factors influence them?

How will you match their digital habits, not your own?

Most organisations are juggling with the twin weapons of search and social but they often hamper themselves by failing to understand the habits of the audience, compared to their own.

Hence a company targeting Generation Z with Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than, perhaps, TikTok.

Or a language school hoping to lure non-English speakers through English-only search engine optimisation programmes. If your target market searches in Spanish or Japanese, then don’t try and find them in English.

Matching your output to the habits of your audience is so obvious, that a large number of companies seem not to have thought of it.

Have you got anything to say?

SEO and social are a lot easier when you have content. Having something to say to your prospective consumers makes marketing a whole lot easier.

So creating a programme of content marketing, backed by a content strategy that understands what your market wants to know, is key. And that content might be the written word or it might be video. But it will need to be optimised for search and shared on social media, with a clear understanding of the algorithms that will bring audiences.

And you will need to say something. Younger audiences are, for example, much more clued into a brand’s values and care whether your school is driven by values of sustainability or diversity.

Having sincerely-held values and communicating them well makes you a more attractive organisation to audiences more worried about their future and the generations before them ever were.

But talk too about your products and services - how the experience you offer is superior to that of your rivals and how the learning you give will impact on a student’s life. If a student is to make an informed choice, it makes sense that you’re the one providing the information.

Read more: Disquiet Dog’s content audit

Is measurement helping in the right way?

It’s all about measurement - and we’ve talked about this before - but remember that you’re measuring activity and the results of that activity. You can’t, by definition, measure the stuff you don’t do. So by all means have the accountability of measurement, but not at the expense of trying new messages, new platforms and new formats.

Is the paid advertising programme not delivering as much as it did? The answer might not be to stop the paid ads, but to make them multilingual (as with multilingual SEO above).

Those expensive videos not working out? Re-cut them for social platforms instead and sweat those assets. A data-led culture can, on occasion, hold back experiments and leaps of faith. Don’t let the number-crunching stop the imagination.

Do you check the user journey?

All the best messages, marketing, search and social can be wasted if your booking system is a mess. A market brought up on Amazon expects a similar one-click functionality to all its purchases so, if you’re allowing direct bookings on the site, then make sure the booking and payment functionality is as good as it can be.

People are impatient with that kind of process so a streamlined journey is key. Or they’ll go elsewhere. So don’t blow it on the last step.