From creation to evaluation, make sure you aren’t falling prey to the common snafus that can really undermine the effectiveness of your overall program. Here are a few examples:

Your website is the face of your brand and your customer’s gateway to your expertise, but creating the site is only half the story. Make sure that each page is properly SEO-optimized, complete with keywords and phrases your customers use sprinkled throughout the content as well as on the back-end in the meta tags and descriptions fields. You can educate your customers with your content only if they can find it!And while this part of your site doesn’t need daily maintenance, its good practice to check SEO at least once a quarter to make sure the language you’re talking is still the one your customers are listening to.

Once someone has visited your site, and they’ve shown interest in content, if you don’t have a lead nurture program in place, you’re severely undermining your sales team’s effectiveness. With the range of tools available to track, prioritize and assess interest from individual visitors, you can provide relevant data to the team, while keeping visitor interest up through targeted, valuable content.When properly used, marketing automation is a valuable asset that keeps you top of mind with leads, and provides information that is topical to the needs of your prospective customers.

And when creating the assets to be sent as part of your nurture campaign, keep your overall branding guidelines in mind. In fact, this needs to be applied across all creative and graphical work you produce.  Just as the messaging needs to be consistent across all materials, the look and feel of the company plays just as large a role in solidifying the brand.Don’t forget to make information available as different types of assets either, using the Hub and Spoke model.  While the hub is a larger piece of data-rich, gated content behind the lead capture form, the spokes are what funnel the traffic to the hub and should be a mix of media types including infographics, checklists, short anecdotes, videos, podcasts and the like.

With next year’s planning season upon us, have you evaluated the current tactics you’re using to see if they still support your goals? Instead of following the ‘if it ain’t broke’ mentality, determine if there are other marcom tactics that may get you better or different results. Have you played with social outreach yet? It is being used effectively in B2B nowadays.  If you’re moving into new markets, have you updated your media plan to include those outlets relevant to those industries? Just because a tactic has worked in the past, doesn’t mean it’s effective for your strategy today.

The devil’s in the details, my friend.  Don’t let the rush to get a program in place sidetrack you from some off the smaller necessities that make your marketing communications truly stand out.