7 Strategies That Will Set Your Business Up for Success This 2023

2023 is set to be another interesting year for business owners across the board. From the fear of an impending recession to new signs pointing to economic recovery, you need to "expect the best; prepare for the worst." 

With Ziglar’s quote in mind, here is a list of handpicked strategies you can start working on so your business is prepared for whatever the next year throws its way.

1. Plan Your Marketing Calendar for 2023

If you want to succeed in marketing your business, you should start out with a plan before the year even starts. This way, you can follow your plan while making some strategic adjustments depending on trending topics and current events.

Here are six steps you should follow when planning your marketing calendar.

Step 1: Choose a platform. Virtudesk and other companies use ClickUp as it offers other project management and collaboration tools along with its powerful marketing calendar. You can start out by plotting deadlines and project timelines on Google Calendar too.

Step 2: Define your goals and brainstorm ideas. After you have your platform in place, start setting goals to hit a certain amount of sales, new leads, or what-have-you. You can then include steps to achieving these goals on a timeline and on your calendar. Don’t forget to leverage the talent of your employees and brainstorm ideas with them. They also know your target audience and may have fresh ideas for content creation.

Step 3: Generate relevant campaigns for each month. You can use historical data or do some research to find out what kinds of campaigns work best with your target audience at which times of the year. You may end up plotting campaigns on a biweekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis. Note which campaigns can be moved or remain tentative. You may need to adjust them for current events or special occasions more relevant to your existing or new target audience.

Step 4: Plan content on your calendar. This doesn’t have to be detailed yet. You can simply plot which days you’re posting videos, blogs, infographics, or other marketing material. It will also be useful to design a content repurposing funnel so you can maximize each piece of content, and really have your audience understand what you’re putting out.

Step 5: Identify your marketing strategies. Some common strategies that appear on digital marketing calendars are Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, or PPC Advertising. Pick one or a few. You can test them individually and see what works best for your audience. Don’t forget to identify and set KPIs for tracking success rates.

Step 6: Create the actual content calendar. You can start with your most important campaigns or do the process chronologically. If you already have something in mind, include the topic, campaign period and channels, formats, deadlines, dependencies, approval, etc.

These business tactics can all seem like a lot of work, so if you or your marketing staff need help, consider hiring a marketing virtual assistant to help you plan, monitor, and execute your marketing calendar for 2023.

2. Get Into Affiliate and Influencer Marketing

Joining an affiliate program or getting into influencer marketing can also unlock more success for your business in 2023. Affiliate marketers can help increase your sales while signing up for affiliate links can make your content more profitable.

Even without the guarantee of massively boosting your sales, affiliate marketers can still help your brand reach a wider audience.

If you’re more interested in the added revenue from affiliate marketing commissions, make sure you know which channels convert the most visitors to buyers. Knowing which platforms work best with your content will help you in positioning links in your most profitable spaces.

You can also promote individual pages using paid social ads or Google AdWords. By driving ads around peak shopping times, you could also be driving more clicks toward your affiliate links.

Influencer marketing can also help your business by leveraging the audience of the best influencers in your space to reach the right market. Your goal here is to partner with high-reputation influencers in your industry who are trusted by an engaged audience.

To do that, you must check for niche and micro-influencers. Shopify reports that 77% of marketers list micro-influencers as their preferred partners. This is because their higher engagement rates range from 7-10%, compared to macro-influencers who normally strike out below 5%. 

Micro-influencers have more dedicated and better-targeted audiences. If you find the right micro-influencer, you will have higher engagement and conversion rates.

Collaborating with other brands in your industry is another way of sharing audiences that could be profitable for your business. You can grow your presence in their industry and even brainstorm on consumer pain points you can address together.

Use tools like Google Analytics, Buffer, Semrush, and AdEspresso to track success with your affiliate links and affiliate pages.

If you have enough on your plate, but you still want to try the business tactic of reaching more people through influencers and affiliate programs, virtual assistants can help manage your affiliate marketing funnel, strategize affiliate link use, and find the best influencers and partners for your target audience.

3. Optimize Your Website For Google 

Google is still the king of search engines. Consistently publishing content that is relevant to your audience is still a good business tactic for 2023.

For this strategy, you have to stay updated with news and trends so you can always cover timely topics. Using keywords on your blogs and media assets will also increase your rank, visibility, and traffic on the search results page.

Having an SEO tool or plugin to check your content before publishing will be helpful. Check out Semrush, ahrefs, VidIQ, or Yoast and see which ones are best for your budget and app integrations.

Another SEO practice to keep in mind is to consistently make sure your website is up-to-date and mobile-friendly. This also applies to your social media profiles on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, which have their own search engine algorithms.

Aside from keywords or keyphrases, using hashtags on your social media captions will also help in optimizing your content so it is more easily found by your target audience.

4. Use Social Media for Lead Generation and Advertising

For 2023, using social media for lead generation and advertising should be on your marketing team’s agenda. This is why brands rally followers and measure engagement rates on their posts and paid ads on social media.

Start by conducting a competitive analysis to find out more about the competitive landscape of each platform you will use. Perform a social media audit by checking your analytics data for the types of content that work best for your audience, demographic groups that engage with your content, and most active platforms and times. 

You can add more items you need more insight into, but starting out with these will already be very helpful in creating a social media strategy.

Follow through by setting up your profiles on each platform properly. Check out what your competition looks like and find a way to make your profile stand out. For good measure, add keywords to optimize your profile for search engines and be consistent with your visual branding so you can be easily recognized.

Once you’re all set up, don’t be afraid to try Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and other kinds of online advertisements that will help you boost your reach, brand recognition, and sales. Then make sure to track how your ads perform and make adjustments for your next lead generation campaign. Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again.

Managing and building your presence on social media communities like Facebook groups and subreddits can also help you find more qualified leads on the internet.

5. Leverage Email Marketing

It’s also a great idea to take advantage of email marketing to keep in touch with potential and existing customers. Doing so can help nurture warm leads into purchasing customers and increase customer loyalty and lifetime value.

On average, email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent, so keep these tips in mind when writing emails to make the most out of every dollar spent:

• Use a catchy and value-driven subject line to increase your email open rate
• Include high-quality (but fast-loading) relevant images in your emails
• Use a professional and simple design
• Write concise text
• Lean on a diverse internal audience to review your email
• Track open rates, click rates, and sales to determine which emails work best for your audience
• Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) in each email, such as clicking on the website, watching a video, downloading a presentation, or chatting with a representative

Getting a dedicated email marketing virtual assistant can help you have more fruitful campaigns and save time by outsourcing the design, draft, sequence, and strategy of your emails.

6. Repurpose Your Content

Redistributing one piece of content to other platforms allows businesses to maximize the work done in content creation. To reuse your content across different social media platforms, here are some tips:

• Turn your blogs into infographics
• Collate your guides into ebooks
• Clip YouTube videos into TikToks and Instagram Reels
• Publish your infographics as Instagram slides

Repurposing your content allows you to get more results in engagement, reach, and conversions while doing less work. One efficient way to do this is by creating a long-form video, writing an optimized blog about it, publishing TikTok clips throughout the week, and sharing your infographics on email and social media.

7. Start a Culture of Automation, Accountability, and Open Communication

To support any of the strategies you’ve chosen to implement for 2023, you must build an internal culture that works to achieve your goals. This includes training your team on a system where they are accountable for their work. 

You can try having daily or weekly progress meetings, or setting up notifications for collaborative task progress. Training sessions on automation tools will also help your team find ways to be more productive in their individual and team tasks.

Introducing a culture of open communication will help address problems before they become large roadblocks. Start by having regular check-ins together as a team and individually with each member.

To institutionalize a culture of automation, accountability, and open communication, you can introduce a rewards and recognition system that acknowledges consistency in practice and results. 

Incorporating these values in how your team members are rewarded and recognized will become key to discovering the culture that your team needs to succeed in the following years. With some time, you’ll get to see the building blocks of a scalable team culture, unique to your company, and built toward achieving your goals. 

Preparing for 2023

While economists aren’t sure yet what 2023 has in store for the business world, it’s a wise decision to implement strategies that bank on your team’s talent to reach as many people as possible, without stretching your budget too much.

Having the right tools and resources for whichever strategies you choose to implement will be key to finding success in building a profitable community around your business. Check out this episode of the Leverage Podcast where Social Savvy Influencer CEO and Founder Whitney Kay discusses how to build and monetize social media communities.

If you need a helping hand to plan and implement some or all of these strategies, your team could benefit from hiring a virtual assistant. By leveraging the cost-benefit of hiring VAs you can multiply your team’s productivity for all of 2023 without stretching your budget too thin.

To get started with finding the right VA for your team in 2023, fill out this form so one of our consultants can get in touch with you.

More Articles from Virtudesk:

• How to Build a Company That Lasts
• 4-Day Workweek Pros and Cons
• 8 Steps to Building a Strong Virtual Assistant Team
• Top 5 Skills Tech Virtual Assistants Need