How many of these five essentials has your business done this quarter?
Published: April 06 2023
If running a business was a course, it’d be the hardest one on your schedule. With so many projects, priorities and deadlines, there’s not enough coffee in the world to keep you on top of your inbox.
To help you track your progress in the 2023 edition of the course, we’ve put together a checklist of your five mandatory projects for Q1. Are you falling behind this semester? Or staying top of your class?
Here’s the five things you, as a business owner, entrepreneur or marketing manager, should have done between January and March 2023.
1) Experimented with AI (for business or pleasure)
It’s no secret that AI has been rapidly rising in popularity this quarter. With Chat GPT becoming accessible to anyone with an internet connection, more and more businesses have been experimenting with the applications of AI technologies to their operations and marketing.
Our team has also been implementing Chat GPT and other AI into our work where possible, and have discovered areas where it can be a huge help as well as tasks it doesn’t quite hit the mark on.
We’ve also noticed a lot of our clients trying to use Chat GPT as a copywriter replacement. Unsurprisingly, success has been limited. While the program can absolutely generate effective copy, the output will only be as good as your ability to prompt it. And, even when our content team uses it, it almost always requires fact checking, editing or further prompting to get the results we’re looking for.
For more information on ChatGPT, see our Q&A with the chatbot itself! Who better to speak to its ability and limitations?
2) Considered shifting to internal marketing
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Q1 is often a difficult time of year for businesses on the best of years. Consumers spend less
money after the holidays, people tend to feel more burnt out and the weather makes everyone want to stay at home until spring.
Combine that with the timely market challenges, rising inflation and general uncertainty in the world and it's no surprise that many industries are noticing diminishing returns on their marketing efforts.
For this reason, we have started to move some of our clients towards internal marketing. That is, putting emphasis on engaging employees, partners and other stakeholders rather than only on getting a brand in front of prospective customers.
Late last year, we named employee advocacy as one of the trends to watch in 2023. Empowering your team to act as brand ambassadors for your business has the potential to exponentially grow the reach of your content and other marketing initiatives. It’s also cheaper than paying for digital ads or social media boosts, making it a great strategy to adopt when your budget is tight.
3) Switched to GA4
The deadline for switching to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is rapidly approaching and it is crucial that any business that tracks traffic to their website using Google Analytics switches over from Universal Analytics (UA) as soon as possible.
Since last year, we’ve switched over a hundred clients over from UA to GA4, and while it’s generally a smooth process, we’ve noticed a number of issues businesses commonly run into during the process:
- Not having the necessary login info to grant our team access to everything we need to make the switch.
- Determining how best to export and organize historical data, since Google will no longer be storing data longer than 14 months once the switch to GA4 is complete.
- Not making the switch soon enough to optimize data collection. In a perfect world, your business would have GA4 and UA running at the same time for at least six months before UA is permanently terminated.
Haven’t made the switch to GA4 yet? Don’t panic! There’s still time to get you switched over, configured properly and organized in terms of data collection and storage. Contact us to talk about it.
4) Explored new ways to recruit talent
In 2023, we’ve continued to see businesses across all industries impacted by the nationwide labour shortage. If you haven’t been trying new tactics to recruit top talent, this is your sign to stop relying on the approaches that worked three years ago—the market just isn’t the same anymore.
With so much choice available to job-seekers, you need to put time and resources into standing out as a leader in your industry.
We recently helped accounting firm RHN CPA develop a paid digital campaign targeted at prospective recruits, including video assets, a geofencing campaign targeting recruitment events and a polished landing page calling out all the perks of working for them over any other firm.
They were able to successfully recruit twelve new team members at the beginning of 2023—a significant increase from their usual average of 2 or 3.
Investing in recruitment marketing is worthwhile if you are still struggling to find qualified talent. For more info, see our previous article on how to conquer the labour shortage with a strategic approach to marketing.
5) Assessed whether your brand is still working for you
More than usual, we are noticing the businesses we work with struggling with their brand identity. In other words, they are:
- Feeling like their current key messages are no longer as effective as they used to be (e.g. relying on messaging that appeals to low-income consumers when you’ve actually shifted to a more premium offering).
- Observing a significant shift in the behaviours of their target audience (e.g. your audience used to be on Instagram but is now only on Tik Tok).
- Noticing that their brand assets (logo, colours, fonts etc.) are starting to look outdated compared to their competitors.
- Realizing that their brand identity is attracting the wrong audience (e.g. you get a lot of inbound leads from unqualified prospects who don’t have the budget, objectives or values that align with your offering).
Why are so many businesses running into this challenge? Because the market is changing rapidly—maybe even faster than it ever has. If your brand strategy wasn’t created with longevity in mind, it won’t be long before you realize it no longer fits with your offerings, audience or the current state of the world.
If you relate to any of these issues, it might be time to consider investing in a brand refresh, brand strategy or full rebrand, depending on your needs.
Haven’t done your homework?
If you haven’t done anything on this list yet, it’s never too late. We all fall behind sometimes. Luckily, Csek Creative is the ultimate tutor for all things business and marketing.
Whether you’re a current client or someone we have yet to meet, we’d love to chat about how to get you caught up and ahead of your competition in 2023.