Business development is an unending drive that keeps people and organizations engaged. Every entrepreneur aspires to lead the industry by setting up new examples, defining fresh rules of business, and providing a distinctive portfolio of products and services. End and beginning of a year provide out to be the best times for making up annual business agenda. Entrepreneurs and strategists bring up their game plan that defines goals and sets line of action. In the following, I am giving you 5 professional suggestions to take your business ahead in 2015.

1. Say No to Mass Marketing, Welcome Integrated Marketing:

We all understand the importance of cycles and trends, particularly in professional perspective. There was a trend of search marketing followed by social media, and more all time favorite; content marketing. The question is, which one will matter the most in 2015? I won’t advocate search, social, web, paid or referral marketing as individual domains. My suggestion would be, integrate your marketing. Develop single message and try optimizing the same from different channels. Instead of spending money on a single platform; create an integrated marketing mix and allocate budget accordingly.

2. Align Your Sales and Marketing:

According to studies referred by MarketingProfs, companies that have tight alignment between sales and marketing earn 36% more revenue. They are able to retain their customers well and achieve 38% higher than their sales targets. Therefore, go for a tight integration between sales and marketing. Make sure that strategic goals are shared, course of action is joint, and the information is accessible to all. If there is a problem at sales and support end, take help of marketing/PR guys to rectify that. Similarly, sales people can provide ‘right from the market’ feedback to the marketers to help them study the ground.

3. Save Your Resources with Automation:

Research endorses that organizations waste over 13 working weeks a year owing to manual and repetitive tasks. If you subscribe to some business process automation platform, you can save a big amount of time and money. If your tasks are being done by automation platforms, it means you’ve additional 24/7 workforce that auto-responds to queries, and sends automated messages on a given interval.

4. Jump from Email Marketing to Multi-Tasking Automation Platforms:

This point is relevant for those who are already using some task automation platform. There was a time when companies had subscribed to email marketing platforms with multiple time-saving options like auto-responding, and prospect tracking. With the diversification and proliferation of marketing channels, it has become very difficult to track everything from email marketing or sales tools.

There are dedicated platforms that provide automation coupled with complete intelligence of website, email campaigns, traffic, social media portals, and banner ads. Instead of going behind different things, sign up for a single multi-tasking platform like HubSpot, Makesbridge, Marketo and get everything controlled from one dashboard. If we look at the marketing trends of 2015, integrated marketing automation is a hot subject. It is expected that in B2B marketing, automation platforms will increase their penetration to 50% in different industries.

5. Focus, Focus and Focus:

As noted earlier, proliferation of different channels can create problems like confusion. As an entrepreneur and marketer, your goal achievement heavily relies on your ability to remain focused. To make sure that you remain focused, create a dedicated document with list of activities and prioritize your campaigns/tasks. Write “Focus items” on a paper and always keep it with you. Read it every time you come back to your workstation. It will not only increase your focus but also activate your subconscious mind to help you in achievement of those.