3 Steps to Prepare Your Marketing for a New Year

December 16, 2024

Smaller brands often discover around this time what they already suspected. Despite their top-notch offerings, they lack the resources to invest more than 30 minutes a day in their digital marketing, and often skip it altogether.

As you cast your sights on new beginnings, we recommend honing in on three focus areas to end the year with a bang and get you back on track.

1. Bump up Your Shipping & Delivery Communication

The first key to ending the year on a solid note is to intensify your focus on your most urgent shipping and delivery needs. If production is shifting into overdrive, you almost certainly will need to bump up communication with folks awaiting your products or services. This is not the time to miss a complaint about a missed package because you weren’t checking your socials. If there is a minor glitch in your fulfillment and delivery system, communicating how you plan to correct course will keep it from turning into something bigger.

Shoppers will be more concerned about delivery details than usual. Will your service provider inform them when their product leaves the warehouse? Can customers choose when an item is delivered or are they given an open-ended time slot that makes it difficult to plan their day? Clients are always grateful when extra transparency is built into their orders. Alert them immediately regarding any product developments. When people know what to expect, they are much more likely to be pleased with the results.

2. Conduct an End-of-Year Digital Marketing Audit

Before leaping into the new year, it pays to take stock of the recent past. If you were to summarize your marketing experiences in 2024, what would that look like? A recent report in Forbes revealed that over seventy percent of small biz owners had negative feelings about their own marketing strategies. But you’re not an average, and paving a better way forward requires taking stock of your gains as well as your losses. Looking back at your plans from January 1:

  • Which targets were accomplished?
  • What strategies show evidence of working?
  • How many hours did your team invest — and how does that align with outcomes?
  • What was the total expense and return on that investment?
  • What measurable results have you produced, and what do they tell you about your individual strategies?
  • Where are your gaps, and who can fill them in next year?

If you’ve been conducting monthly or quarterly audits, there is already a record of data to help answer those questions. Hopefully, it reveals a happy holiday surprise. You can see a direct line from your PPC ads to your web traffic and figure out what portion of those views resulted in calls. Doing a final annual audit is important. You will know something changed if there was a sudden drop in sales after Thanksgiving and can act accordingly. Mostly, it offers you a clear, detailed picture of whether your long-term marketing is working the way you had planned.

3. Dig Into the Details in Problem Areas

SMBs usually have an idea of what’s missing. Examining the details will give you a more accurate picture of the state of your digital marketing. This makes sense, since digital branding has only gotten more rigorous as spaces are flooded with competition attempting similar techniques. Take blogging, perhaps the main type of content you will create after your website. Ten years ago, it didn’t take much to produce a successful blog. There was a lot less online competition, and SEO was more basic.

Fast forward to the present and it can take twice as long to produce similar tasks. This is partly because content quality is one of the top criteria search engines use to gauge a page’s relevance. Most internet users read blogs. Companies that produce them get more leads than those that don’t. Yet those same keyword strategies of yore will have the opposite effect in today’s online environment. A year-end audit of your efforts will let you know which areas need the most help so you can invest in better strategies in the year to come.

HYPTE Branded Solutions Can Create Your New Year’s Marketing Program

If you’ve been remiss when it comes to producing content, optimizing your web pages, or any other area of your digital marketing, it’s only because you need a partner with the skills to do those areas justice.

Ready to start a whole new digital marketing cycle on the right foot? Contact HYPTE Branded Solutions online, or call us at 708-343-9730 for a free consultation!