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It’s the start of a fresh new year, and that means New Year’s Resolutions are all the rage.

But are also making 2011 marketing resolutions for your business? Are you setting goals that will take you to the next level? Do you plan on implementing a High Performance Environment (HPE), where your marketing plans, strategies, tactics and programs all work together to create ongoing excellence and profitability?

If not – don’t worry. At least not yet. You still have time to resolve to have your BEST year ever and DOMINATE your competition. And it all starts with these little-known but VERY powerful New Year’s Marketing Resolutions:

  • Exploit All of the Advantages of Integrated Marketing: Commit to using all integrated marketing channels – both online and offline – to spread your message, promote your brand, and influence your target market so that they choose you and not your competition.
  • Harmonize your Marketing Collateral: Harmonize your marketing collateral so that individual components compliment, support and work together to drive your brand “out” there and drive your customers “in” to your business.
  • Coordinate All Marketing into a Cohesive Plan: Coordinate your marketing content, channels and strategies into a cohesive, focused and cost-effective plan that goes far outside the convenient little marketing “box” in an organization chart, and embraces everything from risk management to staff training to service delivery, and everything in between.
  • Use Social Media as Part of the Marketing Mix: Instead, you should integrate social media as part of your marketing mix, using only the platforms and tools that make strategic sense – and leaving behind those that may be “very cool” but have no demonstrable value for your business plan at this time.
  • Use your Marketing to become an Authority: Anticipate that your customers – including the ones who’ve never even heard of you, yet – will be influenced and attracted by the leadership you demonstrate. As such, you need to be producing articles, ebooks, blog posts, videos, reports, podcasts, and everything else that establishes you as an authority.
  • Use Reputation Marketing to Make an Impact: Use a variety of Reputation Marketing strategies and tactics – both online and offline – to showcase and reinforce your brand, and position yourself to be found by the right customers for the right reasons.
  • Establish and Promote your Brand Definition: Take control of your brand definition (or, possibly, create it in the first place), and use it to steer your marketing forward, articulate your core value propositions, and determine your overall positioning in an increasingly fragmented marketplace.
  • For Search Engine Marketing, think Global and Local: There are hundreds of local & global online directories — think YellowPages.com, Google Place pages, and Yelp for starters — and your goal must be to have a competitive presence in each one.

Discover all of the New Year’s Marketing Resolutions that, once achieved, will have you looking back on 2011 and saying:

“I’ve taken my business to the next level in a controlled and predictable way, and I’m enjoying my growing business more than I ever dreamed possible!”

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