New year business planning can come with a lot of different emotions…
- Inspiration
- Excitement
- Anxiety
- Overwhelm
There’s a lot that goes into planning for the next year for your business and marketing strategies!
If you’re wondering…
- Where do I start planning for 2023?
- What do I need to include in my 2023 marketing strategy?
- What do I need to review for my end-of-year business plan for next year?
Well, at The Quirky Pineapple Studio, we make sure to talk about business AND marketing because both need each other! In this post, we’ll share our 2023 new year business plans, as well as, an end-of-year wrap-up of what worked for us and our clients.
Why your business plans need marketing
Most brand strategy and content marketing agencies will focus on brand positioning, social media, content, and digital marketing overall.
While all of these are important – we like to add to that layer by looking at business and marketing as two links that cannot be separated. Really, they can’t… and we’ve seen that when our clients and community look at marketing and business as two separate “arms” of the business, it creates a fragmented image of what works and where they can optimize their efforts.
When business planning, one of the biggest factors to a profitable business is knowing how you’re helping your clients/customers and actually selling to them, but you knew that… we don’t need to get into the logistics of all that.
If your business depends on selling to your customers and clients, then it only makes sense to consider marketing as the extension of this – bringing in clients, making sure they are happy, and retaining them so they continue coming back AND tell their friends about you!
So, your business plans need a marketing plan – we’d even go so far as to say a business and marketing strategy (because a plan just won’t cut it if you’re looking to make the most of your efforts)!
Our new year business plans for The Quirky Pineapple Studio are to focus on our clients even further.
- We’ve found that 63% of our revenue comes from repeat clients.
- The majority of our clients are repeat clients who’ve been working with us for 1.5+ years.
- Our clients leave happy and ask us how they can continue working with us for longer periods of time.
What does this mean for us? We want to really invest in our client funnel, so we can make sure that once folx are ready to work with us, they stay with us! (heh, if you’re a VIPiña client reading this – hello, we appreciate you!)
“Repeat customers have been measured to spend an average of 67% more than new customers. It’s easy to see why 82% of companies say that retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one.” (Think Impact, 2022)
How do we do this? By breaking down our client journey funnel into three specific areas:
1. Client acquisition
2. Client satisfaction
3. Client retention
Let’s break them down!
Client acquisition
Before we jump into allz the things – let’s define what we mean by “client acquisition”.
Client acquisition is the process of bringing new customers/clients to your business. This process tracks when someone comes in as a lead (potential client), to when they become a paying client.
Usually, in this part of the funnel, folx will consider marketing – all the marketing. But, NOT all the marketing will work for you and your business, so it’s important to be specific and strategic with the type of marketing you’re investing in, as well as, the one that makes the most sense for your business.
For our new year business planning, here’s what The Quirky Pineapple Studio plans to focus on in 2023 for client acquisition (aka our marketing):
- Thought leadership from our CEO & Founder, Cassandra Le, as well as, Team Quirky and their own expertise!
- Creating more strategic and engaging pieces of video content to be repurposed across Instagram, LinkedIn, and our website (this will be a mix of Reels, educational videos, testimonials, etc.)
- Using our Quirky Octopus™ Content Methodology to make the most of everyone’s efforts in our marketing (here’s a little peek: cornerstone content → repurpose for email newsletter → repurpose to distribute across social media)
All of these marketing efforts have a goal to…
- Increase our brand awareness and audience
- Move folx along the client journey funnel
- Create know/like/trust with folx who are ready to work with us
We’ve found that these client acquisition strategies (aka marketing strategies) DON’T work for us over the past 5 years of business:
- Sales and discounts (yes, we were just as surprised – but flash sales just don’t work!)
- Affiliate marketing for other programs and platforms (this could be an ‘us’ type of thing, but we haven’t found this to be very successful)
- Online summits (while we won’t totally disregard this strategy because it works “sometimes”, we’ve found that summits give us sporadic success but not something long-term)
Ready to work alongside an intersectional feminist and anti-capitalist content marketing studio? Let’s talk about how we can create inclusive, awesome content that gets your message heard, rallies your community, and builds your Internet street cred! Schedule a Clarity Call to learn more about working with us.
Client satisfaction
Moving along the client journey funnel, we come next to “client satisfaction”!
Coming from our humble beginnings in hospitality management – this, in our opinion, is the core of your entire business!
Client or customer satisfaction measures how happy customers are with your brand/business’s products, services, and capabilities.
This, friends, is what we call the bread and butter! There are a lot of ways to measure client satisfaction and also include it into your marketing!
How we measure client satisfaction at The Quirky Pineapple Studio:
- Clients becoming repeat clients for the same service or different services
- Clients sharing about us to their own network (ie: referrals, baby!)
- Testimonials and social proof across different platforms (having client reviews and testimonials on Google My Business, LinkedIn, or Facebook help to solidify our expertise and authority in the industry)
In our own business planning, we are focusing on improving our client satisfaction through operational excellence, efficiency, and being 3-5 steps ahead of what our clients needs. This looks like:
- Standardizing our client fulfillment processes (making sure Team Quirky follows a specific process and standard for all clients)
- Creating a visual and easy-to-understand client hub, so we can stay organized with all the marketing things we’re doing for each of our clients (ie: keeping track of images, graphics, content, posting, etc.)
- Using our Quirky Octopus™ Client Retention methodology to create transparency in all the marketing we handle for our own clients, as well as, small details that elevate our client experience (here’s a little peek: onboarding → fulfillment & VIP surprises → offboarding)
All these business plans have goals to:
- Increase our client retention rate
- Build a referral network from our own clients
- And create stability for the business as a whole with long-term partnerships
And here’s what we’ve found DOESN’T work for our client satisfaction process, which makes our business planning very clunky:
- Adding too much (and all the new) tech – which causes confusion for us and our clients (anyone else ever experience needing to go to 5 different places to find something? yikes)
Looking for a way to standardize your client communications and start simplifying and streamlining your client satisfaction? We can help with 30+ templates, including Welcome Packets for onboarding, client update emails, and more! Get your All-Access Pass to The Quirky Pineapple Studio Template Vault at a pay what you can price – save time with what to say and get templates to make it easier!
Client retention
And finally, what everyone loves to hear (we hope) – client retention, your clients want to continue working together!
*cue the confetti and happy dance*
What is client retention in this context? This means that your past or current clients/customers continue working with you, repurchase from you, and become brand loyal to your business – ayy, we love to see it!
In this case, marketing is still an important factor for client retention, but so is your brand message. Having the right brand message throughout your client journey funnel helps to solidify what your brand/business is all about and how to communicate that to your clients throughout the entire time they’re working with you (even if it’s to purchase a product).
For 2023 business planning, we want to increase our client retention even further! How do we plan on doing this?
- Make sure our brand message is shared throughout the entire client journey funnel – from acquisition, satisfaction, to fulfillment
- Create branded client communication pieces throughout our processes – this can be fulfillment emails, onboarding or offboarding packets, and even small things like how we sign off our emails
- Make it easy for folx to continue working with us through consistent marketing with our client acquisition
PRO TIP: When you’re strategizing your business plans, we recommend thinking about your business and marketing kindof like a lasagna! Both strategies can be laid on top of one another, so that they’re optimizing, leveraging, and taking advantage of all efforts across each area of your business. For example, think about the marketing strategy and plan you have – will this be feasible to continue your marketing efforts with everything else?
These business plans have goals to:
- Create more of a stable and foundational base for The Quirky Pineapple Studio (giving us the funds to continue paying our team, be able to invest in new equipment, or improve our tech stack)
- Give us time and space to try new things with our client acquisition funnel and content marketing – like more video content, events, and in-person things!
- Keep the business running smoothly with awesome clients to continue working and partnering with
A few things to consider when you’re thinking about retention:
- Do you have a separate service or product that you can offer your clients after they’ve worked with you?
- What is the usual timeline for folx to come back and work together again?
- Is there a trend you see with your clients in their own service timeline? For example, we usually recommend our clients revisit their brand and marketing strategies every 6 months.
2022 business and marketing learnings
So what did we learn in 2022 as a business/brand and with our own clients?
- Client acquisition is just as important as client retention
- DON’T forget the “middle” part, client satisfaction, which makes client retention much easier
- Marketing can be used throughout your business plans to create a client journey funnel that keeps folx coming back, sharing about you, and looking to YOUR brand/business as their source of inspiration
And from our clients – here’s what we learned when working with them on their client acquisition, satisfaction, and retention (what we like to call brand message & marketing strategy):
- Making sure their brand message is infused in EVERYTHING they do – from emails with their own teams, marketing, and internal documents
- Don’t focus so much on social media as the be-all, end-all. Yes, social media is awesome, but for many of our clients, we found that they needed more cornerstone content before seeing results from their social media channels
- Creating a thought leadership strategy for their CEO and Founder, alongside the brand/business marketing strategy
TL;DR? Let us summarize it for ya!
We know, we know – this is one of the longer blog posts we’ve shared… but y’all, there’s a lot that goes into new year business planning and marketing strategies!
To quickly summarize it – we want to focus on business and marketing plans together. We’ve seen that when this happens, we’re able to have more repeat clients, continue growing with a steady clientele, and create space for our content marketing for experimentation!
So for 2023, The Quirky Pineapple Studio will be focusing on the client journey funnel.
We’ve broken it down into 3 areas:
1. Client acquisition
2. Client satisfaction
3. And client retention
Within those, they will each have their own strategy and set of goals, matching the purpose of each stage and how well we know our clients/customers!
And that’s all! If you want the juicy details, we’re sorry (not sorry), but you’ll have to scroll up and read through it because that’s some good stuff (in our humble opinion)!
What about you? What are your new year business plans and marketing strategy?
Let us know in the comments!
Ready to work alongside an intersectional feminist and anti-capitalist content marketing studio? Let’s talk about how we can create inclusive, awesome content that gets your message heard, rallies your community, and builds your Internet street cred! Schedule a Clarity Call to learn more about working with us.
