It’s A Brand-New Year — Let’s Make The Most of It!
New Year’s resolutions. They’re business goals without a plan. And there’s something about them that speaks to our inherent optimism, in spite of the fact that so few of them are kept, let alone accomplished.
Just a quick Google search will offer up the gruesome details:
The Ohio State University Fisher School of Business discovered that “23% of people quit their resolutions by the end of the first week, and 43% quit by the end of January.”
Even more shocking, an article published in Inc. reported that 80% of people abandon their resolutions by mid-February, and in the same article, research based on user activities of 800 million people found that most people abandon their resolutions by January 19th.
Assuming these findings are true, I don’t think that people abandon their resolutions because they don’t care or because they’re not motivated enough — I think that it’s because they’re not set up for success from the get-go.
We tend to think about these things in terms of the biggest, most impressive outcomes without considering the incremental goals required to achieve them. The same can be said for how we frame our business goals.
So as we enter into this new year with big goals and expectations, let’s remember some of the fundamental (and entirely realistic) investments we can make in order to foster the results we’re after!
Invest In Your Website In 2024 To Achieve Your Business Goals
Your website, as our co-founder Meghan Kelly likes to say, it’s your business’s home on the internet. It’s completely your space, one where you can invite your customers to give them the exact information and experience that you want to give them.
All of the content, the imagery, and the way in which they’re guided through your website is entirely up to you.
So, with that in mind, when was the last time you freshened your website? More to the point, when was the last time you audited your entire website? If it’s been a while — and “a while” is relative, depending on the type of business you have — I highly recommend you give it a close look with a discerning eye.
As you review your website, ask yourself these questions:
- Does the message and imagery accurately reflect what you want to communicate?
- Does its copy inform and urge you to take some sort of action?
- If you were a first-time visitor, is it easy to navigate through the site?
- Do the pages load quickly?
- Does it contain sources of information for visitors at different stages of the customer journey?
Company Is Coming. Are You Ready?
To go back to the “home on the internet” analogy, are you ready to invite over company and give them a great experience?
Keeping up your website by revisiting its site map to streamline navigation, making essential security updates, and regularly adding new content is essential to creating a great website experience and to improving your site’s organic search rankings.
It all starts with being honest about what you want your site to be and how you want it to perform vs. what it actually is right now, and using a combination of your site data, your business goals, and the support of a web design partner in order to create an updated strategy.
Given the information you have at hand, this strategy might consist of aesthetic updates to your site, a new schedule for updating site content or adding a blog, or even creating a new site altogether.
With the right data and guidance, you can create a detailed, achievable plan for your website goals and your business goals. Sounds like your year is already off to a good start, eh?
Invest In Your Content In 2024 To Achieve Your Business Goals
There’s just so much value in your voice. No matter how oversaturated the marketplace might be with competition, there is no one who can communicate what you do, how you do it, and most importantly, why you do it like you can.
Your message and the way you present it is the essence of your business’s brand.
And like your website, your message is entirely in your control.
In my professional assessment, many businesses do well in creating and publishing their message, but it is in the maintenance and redistribution of that message where they fall down.
Content maintenance can look like a lot of different things:
- Sometimes it’s refining an existing message with new ideas or updated data
- Sometimes it’s creating and publishing niche content supporting the core concepts of your message
- And sometimes it’s using data to explore new content avenues that your audience desires
And, in terms of redistribution, I think it’s important to remind everyone out there that you know your business’s mission, vision, values, and message by heart, but the world absolutely does not.
More to the point: What might feel redundant or repetitious to you will often be where a customer first encounters your content. Do not be afraid to resend a newsletter or republish a blog or reshare a social media post if the content is relevant and useful to your audience.
So, if you’re not already doing this, I’m recommending in 2024 that you:
- Refine your website’s services and product pages to make them clearer and more actionable
- Start a blog where you can go almost absurdly in-depth on topics your audience cares about
- Create a content calendar that helps you organize your business’s messaging as it relates to emails, newsletters, blogs, social media posts, and website updates
These tactics — especially that last one — are gonna keep you on track in creating new content while helping you create new opportunities for the business. Talk about goal achievement.
Invest In Paid Media In 2024 To Achieve Your Business Goals
This one is a little different from the previous two investments in that the actual financial investment can vary depending on your goals, budget, and location.
But the results that can be derived from paid search advertising, social media advertising, and programmatic advertising tactics are quite incredible.
I tend to look at a tactic like a blog as more of a longer term strategy. It exists to inform. It’s useful. You’re educating the consumer on a specific topic while they’re in their research phase. The better, more informative and more useful the content you’ve created is, the greater the authority you’re establishing. You’re building credibility and also building a stronger foundation for your site from a search perspective.
Paid media tactics are much more about being at the right place at the right time with the right message. A well structured and supported paid media campaign can foster incredible results for a business, and your ability to see your ROI is much more immediate than some other tactics.
One distinction that should be made is to remember what your campaigns are designed to achieve, and assess their effectiveness based on that information.
For instance, a branding campaign is probably not going to drive signups for a webinar or downloads of a guidebook. These campaigns are typically designed to do one specific thing, with ad copy, imagery, and landing pages, and CTAs centered on that singular goal.
And with newer tactics like programmatic advertising, your message can be distributed strategically across digital platforms, television, streaming services, and more, broadening your reach in a way never before possible.
Our 2024 Goal: To Help You Achieve Yours
When Formada was founded back in 2018, we established something that still rings true today: We’re a growth agency. We want to work with growth-oriented businesses.
Our services and support and communication are all designed to support our clients and their goals, to create growth for their businesses, and to deliver it like no other agency can.
That’s been our resolution since day one, and we’ve never deviated from that promise. We’ve just strived to improve how we do it.
And Happy New Year to you — we’re wishing you the best one yet!