It’s the most wonderful time of the year… the time when fiscal years end and new budgets are set. In other words, it’s the time of year for you to consider your marketing dollars and how to get the most bang for your buck in 2018.

As we tend to live and breathe marketing at Reed Hill, we’ve highlighted four areas we believe will be vital investments for your marketing dollars in 2018. You’ll find these rules apply whether you’re a Fortune 100 company or an independent maker working from your garage. Every company can benefit from strategic marketing planning as we look toward the new year.

 

Digital Disruption

Chances are your company, and most of the companies you work with, are in the midst of a massive digital transformation. In laymen’s terms, this means that organizations in a wide variety of industries are seeing the effects of an on-demand, always on generation. Customers today expect immediacy and personalization. They choose to engage with companies where they can have direct contact, and where their personal needs are met in near real time.

So what does this mean for marketing dollars? It means you should invest in solutions that are cloud- or SaaS-based, or built on a digital platform, capable of scaling as necessary to provide personalized, direct engagement with your customers.

 

Omni-Channel Outreach

The advent of mobile and wearables means your customers are connected—all the time and in many different ways. These same customers are also demanding: they want to experience your brand in a seamless way, regardless of the channel they are on. It’s vital marketers today consider how their campaigns will play on desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and a variety of wearables. To limit the scope to only one medium is marketing waste.

What’s more, your customer is dialed into multiple social channels, which means you must be as well. How should your message differ for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Snapchat? Do your customers need to access your product or service through a dedicated app, or can you engage with them via the channels they live in most? It’s important to answer these questions and then invest accordingly. Failing to be omni-channel in your marketing approach means you’ll miss out on entire segments of your customer base.

 

Quality Content

Content is king, and never is that more true than in the content-rich world we find ourselves. With so many channels vying for your customers’ attention, most of the time the competitive race will be won by who has the most engaging content.

And numbers don’t lie—the best content today is video content. Four out of five customers say a video showing how a product or service works is important, and 4x as many consumers prefer watching a product video to reading about it.

The holiday season has become great fodder for hotly anticipated videos, and consumers wait expectantly to not only view their favorite brands’ holiday videos, but to share them. And as any marketer knows, shareable content is marketing gold.

 

Irreplaceable Talent

Finally, one of the best uses for your marketing dollars is to invest in the right talent. Some will argue that marketing departments today need good IT staff, others will say must hires are millennials who understand the digitally-social, on-demand generation. Whatever the case, hiring managers all agree that it is getting harder to find and retain top talent. Marketers who build their employer brand can reduce turnover by 28%.

At Reed Hill, we believe talent can be found from a variety of backgrounds, at any age. What we do recommend is finding associates for whom marketing is a passion, and who come to the table with a willingness to try new things, experiment and stand apart from the crowd. And don’t forget to turn those marketing efforts inward—a company that believes in its own brand has the best chance of finding and retaining the kind of talent that can take the business to even greater heights for 2018.