
The new year always brings with it exciting new technologies, shifts in customer behaviour, and fresh opportunities for growth. But how do you work out the best approach for your small business? Asking the right questions can help you find clarity and set your direction. Here are 10 key questions to help you create a marketing strategy that works for 2025.
1. Who Is Our Target Audience Today?
People’s preferences and habits can change quickly. Take some time to think about who your audience is now. Are they the same group you were reaching last year? Look at factors like age, location, interests, and buying habits. Tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and simple customer surveys can give you useful information.
It’s also worth reflecting on who your most valuable customers were over the past year. What did their profile look like? Were they different from the ideal clients you’ve targeted in the past? Understanding these shifts can help you refine your approach and focus on the audience segments that truly matter.
2. What Are Our Core Business Goals?
Business goals often evolve from year to year, and your marketing strategy should adapt accordingly. Are you focusing on raising brand awareness, boosting sales, entering new markets, or improving customer retention this year? These priorities may look very different from previous years.
If you’ve introduced new products or services recently, consider how these fit into your goals. They may not have been part of earlier marketing plans, so it’s essential to update your strategy to reflect these changes. By aligning your marketing efforts with your current objectives and offerings, you’ll ensure your plan remains relevant and effective.
3. Which Marketing Assets Have Worked Best?
Look back at what you’ve done before and see which assets have been the most effective. Whether it’s email newsletters, social media platforms, search engine optimisation efforts, or physical assets such as leaflets, posters and brochures, knowing what assets have worked well will help you decide where to focus your energy and budget.
4. What Makes Us Special?
Why should customers choose your business over others? Think about what makes you stand out. If you find it difficult to answer this question, try looking back over customer reviews to see what they value most about your business. It can also be helpful to ask team members or key project collaborators for their perspective on what makes the business special. It could be your excellent customer service, innovative products, or great value for money. Whatever it is, this should be at the heart of your marketing messages.
5. Are We Making the Most of New Technology?
The marketing tools available to businesses are constantly improving. Think about how you could use technologies like AI to make your customers’ experience better and more engaging, as well as the ways AI can reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and time-heavy searches for the image that is ‘just right’.
Lots of the marketing apps and programmes we use day to day in our businesses may also have updated across the last year – have you checked out any new features that are available to you which may make things easier/ brighter/ faster, as well as helping you to keep the assets you create fresh? Maybe there are posts/ visuals/ video/ design aspects you’ve seen competitors use that are now within your own reach?
6. How Can We Connect Better with Customers?
Building strong relationships with your customers is key. Think about how you’re interacting with them at the moment and how you could do more. Could you make better use of email, have more conversations on social media, respond quicker to feedback or offer rewards through a loyalty programme? Has your database grown over time and so the tools you currently use to manage your active/ potential customer list now seem clunky or prevent you from carrying out insightful analysis?
7. Is Our Website Up to Scratch?
Your website is often the first place people will go to learn about your business. Make sure it’s easy to use, works well on mobile phones, and loads quickly. Keeping your content fresh and using tools to understand how visitors use your site can also make a big difference.
What are your best performing pages and do they contain the most important information? Do you have sleepy pages that rarely get visited? Could any poor performers be refreshed and could your marketing assets reference them instead of always your home page?
8. What’s Our Plan for Content?
Good content helps you build trust with your audience. Think about the types of content you create —posts, blogs, videos, infographics, leaflets, brochures or podcasts etc — and which ones your audience finds most helpful. Plan to share useful and interesting content regularly throughout the year, thinking about what your key messages/ products/ services are that need to feature several times across the year as well as adding pep by linking to topics in the news, awareness days, events happening locally to you or of relevance to your audience.
9. Are We Keeping Up with Trends and Competitors?
Stay curious about what’s happening in your industry and what your customers care about. Tools like Google Trends, industry blogs, newsletters, magazines and podcasts, as well as social media listening can help you spot opportunities and stay relevant.
When was the last time you took time to look at what potential competitors are up to? If done with a positive mindset, competitor analysis can be really useful – helping businesses identify new trends and tactics in a timely manner, and predict market shifts, helping businesses understand what works well for their competitors and what doesn’t, which can help them avoid pitfalls and make better decisions. Competitor analysis also helps you understand how other businesses are positioning themselves in the marketplace and which channels have been successful for them.
10. What’s Our Budget and Resourcing?
Lastly, make sure your plans are realistic. Think about the resources you already have, what you can dial up or down, and decide how much new time and money you can spend on marketing. In all your decisions, aim to always focus on the activities that will give you the biggest impact and return.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to marketing. By asking these 10 questions, small businesses can create a plan that suits their unique goals and challenges. With a thoughtful approach, 2025 could be your most successful year yet.