If you’re like most business owners, the 2017 marketing plan was slapped together in the waning days of 2016.

Let’s be honest: Many businesses save their marketing plan and budget until the last minute. “It worked for us last year, so let’s do that again,” you tell the team. Deep down, you know a lot has changed since last year. Unfortunately, marketing is often the first victim of success even though it may be the reason 2016 was such a good year for your company. If your sales have been struggling, budgeting realistically is key to leverage your marketing plan for 2017.

Need some inspiration? The Harvard Business Review has a section dedicated to marketing here. It posts useful and relevant articles that can spark ideas at your company. Here’s a sampling:

What Trump Understands About Social Media to Drive Attention

Donald Trump’s election will be the subject of academic study for years to come and marketing experts are already dissecting the impact of his tweets. This article provides insights for business executives about authenticity on social media and connecting with consumers.

The Ultimate Marketing Machine

The authors explore the winning characteristics of high-performing organizations and their marketing approaches. For example, successful companies can integrate the data about what their consumers are doing with knowledge about why they are doing it. This yields new insights into consumers’ needs and how to meet them. The authors delve into other successful marketing strategies that are common across high-performing organizations regardless of industry.

What’s the Value of a Like?

Confused about the value of social media? What’s a follower on social media worth to a company? Brands spend billions of dollars developing a social-media presence. In fact, 80% of Fortune 500 companies have active Facebook pages. The authors explore the divide between digital and real-world behavior.

The Power of Positive Surveying

What if instead of asking customers what went wrong, companies asked them what had gone right? Researchers consistently found that starting requests for customer feedback by asking for a compliment increased reported levels of satisfaction and boosted the chance that customers would purchase again, the amount of money they would spend and their loyalty over time.

As everyone knows, the marketing department is often the first to take a hit at many companies during a business downturn. But a longer-term and more-thoughtful approach might help more companies weather a storm when it comes. Marketing is a key ingredient that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Qorval can help you leverage your marketing plan for 2017, regardless of where your company is in the business cycle. Qorval executives have decades of experience crafting such plans for a wide range of industries. For more information visit www.qorval.com or call 239-430-0303.