Three Tips Do It Yourselfers Need to Consider in 2014

The three of us decided to collaborate on this blog post to help all you do it yourselfers market your business better in 2014.  Marketing is a key area of focus for us all in 2014 so we decided to provide three tips in each of our areas of expertise. 

1. Integrate your brand, to repurpose your own data.

This must be the year where your business begins to be integrated. This, in no simple terms, means providing the same content, message and branding theme. This is reinforced in a huge way through User Interface design. People will quickly abandon your brand/services for a source that is more developed in this direction.

The biggest advantage you need to look for is how you can use, re-use and re-purpose your own data sources. This will drastically reduce your time-to-launch for new services, products or simply to communicate important alerts to your customers.

Starting to streamline your business workflow and collaboration tools NOW, will significantly reduce your chances of being obsolete in 18 to 24 months time.

2.  Don't go cheap with your design.

More and more cheap design/template services will be offered in 2014 than before.  When using services like this people will usually begin to see the downfall of their decision when they need the native design files to produce other marketing materials for their business.  This will only produce more obstacles for them in the future.

After months of many frustrating emails and phone calls people then learn they in fact cannot get all of the design files.  If they do receive any files, the files are still not set up for them to use anywhere else but that specific platform.

People need to consider speaking with an experienced Designer and collect pricing from them before going straight to the cheap services.  An experienced Designer can answer specific questions and save you a lot of time… and money.

3.  Why social?

Why are you using social networks for marketing?

Answer this question truthfully and then you will know if you should be using social networks for marketing.

What should your answer be?

Well there are several good reasons, but your number one should be to connect with people.  It’s an opportunity to connect with customers to meet their needs, get to know prospects and reach an audience through them.  If used properly it’s as effective as traditional word of mouth.

Thanks for reading our blog post, if you found this useful please share.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.