It's the third week of January and most of us have already broken our New Year's resolutions. That may be fine for that crazy diet and workout plan you haven't tried before. However, when it comes to your digital strategy, you should always resolve to grow year over year. Below, we help outline some simple strategies to help get you back on track and excel in 2015.

1 . Reflect

When was the last time you fully audited your brand and efforts? Take the time to ask yourself the following questions:

Why? At MEGA, this is an essential question we use that must be asked to identify the core meaning behind your marketing projects. Understanding this meaning and key objectives will help you put together the most effective marketing campaigns.
Has my brand been consistent? If you’ve made some major changes to your website or design, ensure it’s reflected across all platforms.
Is my brand accurately representing our company and our values? Don’t let your brand go stale. If you have innovation as a value and haven’t updated your website in a while, it’s probably time to give it some attention. This can have an effect not only on potential leads, but also potential talent.
What were my wins and opportunities? Take a deep dive into your analytics from the past year and fully audit the highs and lows and identify benchmarks, opportunities and goals for the new year.

2. Create a strategy & roadmap

Once you’ve identified your opportunities and goals, don’t assume last year’s tactics will work; create a fresh strategy that involves a complete mix of mediums and content. We’ve previously reviewed the importance of a content marketing strategy and the components to get you started.

Your strategy should also include measurement and reporting. Ongoing reporting on key metrics can help identify trends, growth and identify even more opportunities.

Once you have the components of your strategy, create a monthly roadmap with tasks and milestones. This can be as simple as an editorial calendar for publishing content. Laying out a roadmap will help hold you accountable for sticking with the strategy and staying on track. As you check off milestones and measure growth, don’t forget to add time in your roadmap to celebrate!

3. Create more engagement

Is your brand interacting enough with your audience? Whether you are B2C or B2B, figure out who your audience is and where to find them. Is it on your own blog? Facebook page? LinkedIn groups? Or maybe Yelp or Foursquare? See what they are saying, get to know your customers and their feedback and join the conversation. Once you build trust, you can start shaping that conversation more and more and best interject your brand and value.

When engaging with your audience, keep your tone the same, but mix up the content. Don’t just post branded content. Mix it up with industry news, statistics, trending topics and pose questions. Use more images and video. Give them what they want and what you didn’t give them last year.

4. Don’t neglect your Website

Just as you don’t want your brand as a whole to go stale, don’t let your website go stale either. Get feedback from internal and external sources on what they like and don’t like. Find ways to enhance the user experience. Review key calls to action and conversion points and ensure they are easy to get to and act upon.

Also, be sure to keep content fresh. Have you begun to offer new services but have yet to create pages? Have new members joined your team? Have you created any relevant blog posts in the past year? Keeping content fresh will give people reasons to stay on your site longer and to keep coming back to your site. It’s best to have a content management system like Squarespace or Wordpress to help make managing content quick and easy.

If your website isn’t responsive or mobile, that’s a huge red flag and should be a key resolution for 2015. Mobile usage is only increasing in 2015 and the last thing you would want is to lose potential business over a negative user experience as your business is judged on a mobile devices and tablets. This is also where Squarespace and Wordpress can assist with affordable responsive templates to enhance the user experience with ease.

Wrap Up

We all make New Year’s resolutions and 92% of us won’t keep them very long. Do your business a favor and choose to follow the resolutions above to better connect with their customers, meet business objectives, and seize opportunities for growth in 2015!

Sounds simple? Then get to it!
Need help getting started? Book a strategy session with MEGA!