Another year has come and (almost) gone! While an upcoming new year always brings the promise of positive change and new goals to conquer, it can also leave you feeling unsure about how to get started with your 2025 marketing planning.
After all, it feels like every turn of the calendar has brought a new marketing challenge for the talent industry: disconnects between marketing and sales, struggles to generate more leads or sales, downsizing, and, yes, the dreaded, “doing more with less.”
Let’s dive into a few things you can do, starting today, to get a jump start on your 2025 marketing planning.
Marketing in 2024 and A Peek at 2025
Let’s be honest: Marketing in 2024 was hard. We felt it. Our clients felt it. Our fellow marketers felt it. Budgets hit a post-pandemic low and, for the staffing industry specifically, a projected 10% decline and market shifts between recruitment marketing and B2B are leaving teams aware that the only real constant is change.
Beyond budgets, we also saw the introduction of AI-generated Google search answers resulting in changes to how people search and consume web content along with a continued need to stand out in an increasingly attention-competitive world.
But how is 2025 shaping up? We’re expecting to still see tight budgets and a continued shift between markets, but LinkedIn’s B2B Institute is already predicting a return to brand marketing to help companies stand out among the crowd.
With that in mind…
4 Tips To Help Your 2025 Marketing Planning
Analyze Your 2024 Performance and Get Set for 2025
While it’s always great to keep an eye on what’s going on with industries as a whole, what really matters is what’s going on with you. And before you dive into your marketing planning, you need to understand where you’ve been to understand where you need to go.
- What goals did you set in 2024 and how have you landed with them?
- What marketing channels worked well for you?
- Are there channels that didn’t perform as expected?
Take that data and bring it into your 2025 planning and goal setting. Remember when you’re building those goals, make them measurable AND achievable. You can always add stretch goals or adjust as needed throughout the year, but use the data from your 2024 review so you know that you’re building a goal that your team can reach.
Align Long-Term Growth with Quick Wins
While it would be incredible to be able to focus on one thing at a time, the fact of the matter is that marketing often needs to build the foundation for long-term growth, right alongside getting those quick wins in lead and demand generation.
Can you work on your brand messaging to help you stand out, while also attending events as a speaker to help drive networking opportunities? Or maybe you can begin work on a new website while still hosting monthly webinars as a lead generation tool?
When building your goals for the year, consider having both long-term and quick-win goals to help make progress in more ways than one throughout the year.
Hone in Our Your Core Demographic and Client Needs
To stand out as a solution for your client, you need to know what problem you’re solving for them. By better understanding the core demographic of people that you serve (clients, candidates, and more), you can provide the marketing content that appeals to them.
There are quite a few ways to understand your audience on a deeper level including things like surveys, customer research, market research, and more, but the most important thing to remember is that you can’t be everything to everybody. You bring a unique perspective and solution to your clients and candidates, and you should highlight that unique perspective in the marketing efforts you do.
Speak directly to the problems your audience is facing, and before long, they’ll see you as the solution you are for them.
Invest in Organic Marketing
Organic marketing is any unpaid marketing effort that you use to drive attention from your audience. Things like social media, SEO-optimized blogs, and email marketing all fall under the organic marketing umbrella.
And when budgets get tight…organic marketing is king.
We’ve worked with many clients facing budget shifts and consistency becomes critical. Keeping up a steady stream of emails, posting to LinkedIn a few times a week, and driving new traffic to your website via thought-provoking and experience-filled blog posts, can keep the wheels of lead generation turning while waiting for the budget to shift again.
Ultimately, as we face a brand new year and a brand new set of challenges and successes, it’s important to remember that flexibility will be crucial to tackle whatever comes your way.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the thought of even trying to dive into all of this, don’t stress! We’ve just launched a 360-degree marketing evaluation where we’ll assess your current marketing, including how it’s driving revenue, the organizational structure, investment level, and, most importantly, your goals. Then we’ll build a customized plan that fills in the gaps between your current state and your goals and connects directly to business objectives.
You’ll walk away with a clear view of what it will take to go from here to there, wherever there is for you. Fill out this form to get on our calendars so we can help you end your year stronger than you started.