Now that we’re a couple of weeks into the new year and people are firmly back in ‘work’ mode, we wanted to share something to help you think about the year ahead and get those final bits of planning done for your 2026 marketing strategy.
To help ensure that your marketing plan is as strong and logical as possible, I asked our digital marketing specialists to break down ten key tips that are essential for creating a strong, flexible marketing plan that you can actually stick to and that will help you reach your goals.
Let’s get into them! 👇
Tip #1: Review your marketing performance
Before setting goals and allocating budgets, you need to review your marketing strategy and results from the last 12 months.
Look at which tactics, channels, and approaches you invested in, what results they delivered, and whether the investment was worthwhile.
Look closely at every channel, campaign, and strategy, and ask yourself:
- How much did we spend?
- What results did we see?
- Did we hit our goals?
- Did we see a sufficient return on investment?
- What was our customer acquisition cost?
- Which platforms performed the best?
This will help you identify which areas of your marketing were the most effective, generating consistent revenue, growth, and profitability.
From here, you can begin outlining your plan of action for 2026 and create your strategy for maintaining the channels that returned great results and optimising any areas of your marketing that didn’t perform as well.
For example, if your social media campaigns generated a lot of engagement and website traffic but hardly any conversions, then you know your focus for 2026 should be refining your calls to action (CTAs), optimising your landing pages, and implementing a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategy.
Tools you can use to review your marketing performance:
- Use tools like Google Analytics to analyse website traffic and user behaviour – particularly engagement/bounce rates
- Evaluate individual campaign performance through platforms like HubSpot or Google Ads Manager
- Identify your top-performing channels and content format, and highlight any channels that weren’t effective
Tip #2: Audit your website and user experience
Before you start planning your SEO and advertising strategies for the year, it’s a good idea to conduct a health check on your website and user experience.
Skipping this part could mean investing time and money into building interest and driving traffic to a website that doesn’t perform well and pushes users away.
With 88% of users saying they wouldn’t return to a site after a bad experience, the impact on your marketing results could be huge. Slow load speeds, poor navigation, or unoptimised mobile layouts could cost you valuable leads.
When conducting a full audit of your website, these are some things to tick off:
- Assessing page loading speeds through tools like Google PageSpeed Insights
- Checking mobile responsiveness and functionality
- Ensuring pages are correctly indexed
- Checking for broken links, redirect chains, or 404 errors
- Maintaining proper metadata, headings, and URL structures
- Checking image optimisations
- Testing conversion paths to ensure they work correctly (buttons, forms, checkouts)
- Updating content that is low-quality or outdated
- Ensuring your site is accessible and meets the required WCAG standards
- Making sure analytics tools and conversion tracking are set up correctly
This is just a general overview of what you should check; a full audit will cover much more.
If you need help conducting in-depth SEO or UX audits, our Specialists can handle the whole process for you. To learn more, get in touch.
Tip #3: Make sure your marketing plan is flexible
A big mistake many businesses make is creating a rigid marketing plan that doesn’t account for unexpected change.
Like most things in business, marketing can be unpredictable. Industries change, digital trends and algorithms evolve, and your audience’s needs and behaviours shift.
It’s highly unlikely that the annual marketing strategy you create will go off without a hitch and won’t require changes.
Here are some tips for creating a flexible marketing plan:
- Set aside a backup budget: keeping an extra 10-15% of your marketing budget aside means you have some extra resources to test new campaigns or to use if costs rise unexpectedly
- Try new ideas at a smaller scale: Before going all-in on a new campaign, test things with a smaller budget. If it performs well, you up-scale. If not, you can dial things back
- Implement campaigns that are easily adjustable: Ad strategies, social media campaigns, and landing pages are all easily tweakable. If you need to swap out headlines, offers, or images, you can do it within a few clicks
- Quarterly plan reviews: Monitor your performance and analytics, and conduct quarterly reviews of your marketing plan. If the results aren’t what you expected, you can make changes to your strategy
- Keep an ideas list ready: Some trends and industry news topics come around quickly. Keeping an ideas list you could run with, should specific industry changes occur, can save time and help you catch relevant trends when they happen
Tip #4: Set realistic goals and expectations
While we all want to aim for massive growth, setting unrealistic targets can undermine performance and lead to frustration.
Don’t just pluck huge targets from thin air. Sit down with your team, review last year’s goals and performance, and set achievable targets for 2026.
Let’s say you grew your organic website traffic by 20% last year with some SEO campaigns. Aiming for a 20-25% increase this year is a realistic target that will still be challenging but achievable.
Unrealistic expectations, like doubling revenue without increasing your budget or growing your team, just aren’t viable.
Instead, break goals into manageable milestones, like increasing email subscribers by 10% every quarter or boosting organic traffic by 5% month-on-month.
Setting realistic targets will help you be more consistent with your marketing campaigns and stick to your plan.
Plus, it helps your teams feel more positive and allows you to allocate resources better to help you reach your goals.
Tip #5: Dedicate enough budget for testing
Marketing isn’t just as simple as setting up some campaigns once and letting them run their course.
Testing is a crucial part of the process. It allows you to trial multiple approaches, assets, and messages to see which performs best, cost-effectively driving awareness, leads, and sales.
So many businesses overlook the importance of testing and fail to account for it in their budgets.
Generally, we recommend allocating 10-20% of your monthly marketing budget to experimentation and A/B testing.
Whether it’s testing ad variations alongside each other, split-testing email subject lines, or creating two versions of a landing page, these tests help gather valuable data on your users’ preferences and can help improve your conversion rates and ROI.
So, don’t be afraid to set aside some of your budget in your marketing plan for testing new things. Just remember to make small changes when A/B testing to gather accurate data, keeping your budget small to begin with and scaling up when you see good results.
Tip #6: Diversify your marketing channels
Over-reliance on a single platform or channel can be risky, especially given that algorithms change constantly and marketing costs have risen over the last couple of years.
Diversifying your marketing channels can help you reach a wider audience, build more awareness and interest in your brand, and create a more effective customer journey and marketing funnel, while reducing your reliance on a single channel.
For example, let’s say your primary source of inbound leads and sales is through Google Ads and Meta Ads. Even if you’re seeing great results, you still pay a lot to get each opportunity through the door.
By diversifying and creating a solid SEO strategy, you can increase your organic search visibility, traffic, and conversions.
Creating a diversified marketing plan with strategies like this will help reduce your reliance on paid channels and lower your cost per lead, making your marketing more cost-effective overall.
Other types of repurposed or diversified marketing you could explore are:
- Retargeting website visitors to increase conversions and reduce abandonment
- Funnelling social media audiences into newsletter lists to nurture them
- Turning long-form content (blogs and podcasts) into short-form snippets (TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts)
- Turn multiple blog posts into downloadable resources, like eBooks or guides
Tip #7: Make things personal
If you want to connect with your customers on a deeper level than just fulfilling a need, then you need to personalise your marketing.
That doesn’t mean just whacking “Hey [firstname-field]” into your email campaigns. There’s way more to personalisation than that.
You need to break down audiences into segments and identify their unique traits, experiences, wants and needs to create tailored experiences that feel like they’re made just for them.
The impact of good personalisation can be huge, with 72% of consumers saying they only engage with marketing messages that align with their interests.
Here are a few ways you can personalise your marketing on a deeper level:
- Segment email lists by demographics, behaviour, or location
- Recommend products based on past behaviour
- Use dynamic website content that adapts to user preferences
- Offer personalised discounts or rewards based on purchase history
- Automate email send times based on when each recipient typically engages
- Create retargeting ads that feature the exact product a user viewed
Tip #8: Focus on retention, not just acquisition
Building your marketing plan around new sales and opportunities is all well and good, but if you can’t retain customers over the long term or rarely get repeat business, it’s like trying to fill a bucket with a huge hole.
Acquiring new customers costs, on average, 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing one, and the same research shows that increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25–95%!
The trouble is, many companies think retention and repeat purchases are as simple as sending a 10% discount code or a basic loyalty programme, ignoring some of the real reasons their customers leave.
The best thing you can do is start listening to your customers. Dedicate some time to collecting user feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct conversations, and then use that information to improve your customer experience.
If your customers say their biggest problems with your brand are:
- Poor product or service quality
- Not enough communication
- Lack of post-sales support
- Confusing website experiences
Then you can address these issues by:
- Improving processes based on customer feedback
- Creating an SLA with clearly outlined communication expectations
- Reaching out periodically to check in with existing customers
- Conducting UX optimisations on your website
If your marketing consistently generates leads and sales, and your customer experience keeps them satisfied in the long term, that’s a great recipe for revenue and profit growth.
Tip #9: Don’t make knee-jerk changes
As I mentioned in point #3, having a flexible marketing plan is crucial, but that doesn’t mean making constant changes without the data or reasoning to back them up.
I get it, though; it’s natural to want quick results and waiting around to find out if your marketing budget is being well spent is bound to make you anxious.
But marketing requires patience. If you make knee-jerk changes every time a campaign appears to be underperforming, you might just be wasting time, resources, and opportunities for optimisation.
For example, if you turn off all your Google Ads campaigns after just two weeks because you’re not getting enough conversions, you’re not giving it enough time to gather data that can be used to fine-tune your ads.
Instead of rushing to make changes, monitor your campaigns closely and make careful, incremental changes. Adjust headlines, tweak your targeting, and A/B test different visuals and messages.
If you base your marketing decisions on data rather than emotion, you’ll be in a much better position for long-term results and growth.
Tip #10: Measure, analyse, optimise
I’ve mentioned this several times throughout this article, but it needs its own point.
To create an effective marketing plan, you need to measure campaign performance, analyse user behaviours, and optimise your marketing.
There should be key metrics and KPIs for each area of your marketing that indicate how well it is performing. These metrics shouldn’t just be figures like ‘clicks’ or ‘impressions’.
Instead, focus on performance metrics like:
SEO
- Organic Conversion Rate: Tracks the percentage of organic visitors who take a key action (purchase, sign-up, enquiry), showing how well your website converts organic users into leads/customers
- Bounce Rate for High-Intent Pages: This measure measures how many users leave pages like service or product pages without taking action, which could identify content or UX issues
- Organic Click-Through Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of organic impressions that lead to users clicking on your website in search results. This can indicate whether your meta titles and descriptions are compelling users to click or if they need some work
PPC
- Cost Per Lead (CPL): This helps determine which of your ad campaigns (search, display, retargeting) delivers leads at the best cost-efficiency
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by campaign type: Compares ROAS across different PPC strategies (e.g., search vs. display vs. retargeting) to optimise budget distribution
- Impression Share Lost: This tracks how often your ads could have been shown but weren’t due to budget limitations or low ad rank, which can help you optimise budgets and bid strategies
Website/UX
- Pages Per Session: This metric measures engagement by tracking the number of pages your visitors view and explore before leaving. It helps indicate content relevance and site navigation quality
- Exit Rate for Key Funnel Pages: Identifies specific pages users leave from most often before converting. Optimising these pages will improve customer journey flow and conversion rates
- Form/Cart Abandonment Rate: Tracks how many users start but don’t complete a form or checkout cart, highlighting issues with user experience, length of the process, or the information you’re asking for
These are just a few metrics that I’ve picked out that sometimes get overlooked. There are plenty more metrics you should be tracking, but that all depends on the channels you’re using, the campaigns you’re running, and your goals.
Need help finalising your marketing plan?
If you’re still unsure where to take your marketing strategy for this year, or if you want our Growth Marketing Specialists to review your marketing plan and give you some tips on improving it, get in touch to book a complimentary 1-2-1 Digital Marketing Strategy Review!
During your review session, we’ll help you assess your marketing performance, identifying what works well and areas for improvement. We’ll also help you plan your marketing strategy with growth and profitability in mind and advise you on any marketing and growth challenges you’re currently facing.
To book your free session, call us on 01329 565001 or fill out our contact form to speak with a specialist!
