The year began with a list of goals on your whiteboard. Break 1M on Twitter. Double your monthly website traffic. Hit $3M in sales. You invested in a marketing strategy designed to help you hit these goals, and now the year is coming to a close. How did you do?

It’s pretty easy to see the wildly successful campaigns and the flops, but most of your work is in between. How do you know what to budget for the coming year? How do you decide not just where to put your efforts but what exactly they should look like?

What Didn’t Work? (And What Did?)

As you plan for the new year, you want to know how to adjust your strategy for maximum results. A few things to consider:

Social Media Engagement

Find your engagement rate by totaling up all the engagements (like, comments, shares) and dividing by the total number of likes for the page. Your rate should be between 0.5 and 1%. Less than half a percent indicates you need to adjust your strategy. More than that and you’re doing great! Maybe figure out why it’s so high and see how you can keep that going—and maybe apply it to other channels.

Social Media ROI

Now take a look at how much time, energy and money went into achieving that engagement rate.

Did you make more than you spent?

Did a higher engagement rate convert to increased sales?

Non-Social Media ROI and Conversion Rate

With the other marketing campaigns you ran:

Where did your sales come from?

What was your conversion rate? Are you pleased with it?

What you were trying to achieve; what you did achieve; where you fell short

What Could Be better?

This isn’t time for strategy–yet. Look at how you performed and decide where it could be better, or maybe just where you want it to be better. Based on what you learned above from this year, choose 3 areas to improve in 2018.

• Company growth
• Profit
• ROI
• Likes, follows
• Influence
• Community
• Brand engagement
• Conversions (via social media, email, organic search traffic, etc)
• Partnerships
• Web traffic
• Keyword rankings

Compare what you wanted with you got. If you achieved your goals, great! Could you still do better? If you didn’t achieve them, could do better? Or different perhaps?

New Year, New Goals

Now that you  know what went well and where you want to improve, it’s time to get ready for the year ahead.

One of the things most companies lack is an effective marketing strategy. The thing is that your market is made up of people, and people change behavior based on trends and prices and economies and your competition and so many factors and forces, both seen and unseen. You can’t possibly devise a strategy that sees into the future and accounts for all possible variations factors and circumstances. (But if you can, we want to hear from you!)

For your marketing strategy to be effective, it must also be dynamic. It must respond to changes in the market—and respond effectively. Like, you can’t just watch your market go to snapchat and then start a snapchat account. That may not be the best use of and resources. Maybe you want to start an influencer campaign instead. Maybe things are shifting to video so you should start producing video—but how long should the video be? What sort of content should be in the video?

And a million other factors to be considered and properly executed.

It’s a lot to get right, and a lot of time to invest to keep getting right. But the growth potential is enormous. Get a team working for you that understands your business, your needs and your market, and can adapt quickly to changes.

And if you’re not sure where to start, give us a call.

We’re always being asked by clients “How do we reach Millennials?”

Millennials aren’t so different from other markets, but no one confounds businesses quite like them. They don’t buy homes, watch TV, get married. They move back in with their parents. How can you possibly reach a market that moves back in with their parents?

Speaking as a Millennial, I have some ideas.

Attractive look, easy feel.My generation has a keen eye for design, and especially ease of use. We grew up with the internet and know both how ugly a website can look (remember Angelfire?) and also how beautiful web design has become. We have no patience for websites that are difficult or ugly to navigate!

Authenticity over legitimacy.  What inspires trust with my parents: a company with Credentials and a Plan that can Solve Your Problems. Companies that use stock photos and jargon and have men in suits with degrees and 30 years of experience were considered more trustworthy.

Yeah. Right.

We saw the housing bubble burst, your banks fail, unemployment soar–and all because those credentialed, experienced decision-makers. You don’t need to have a bunch of degrees or a sweet (suite) office–in fact, we kind of prefer you not. Show us your personality and we’ll decide if you’re trustworthy.

We recently had two clients who wanted to connect with the millennials in their market. Here’s how we helped them out:

Vista 360 Health

I don’t have before pictures of this site which is fine because virtually all health insurance-related websites suffer from the same problems. I chose Cigna to be our stand-in. Take a look:

Aaaa! That’s what I think when I see this page. I don’t where to look or what to click. There’s so much text and way too much information. There’s pictures and calls to action and buttons and colors and everything is just out there. No clear design hierarchy or path for navigation. In short, I am overwhelmed.

Take a look at it now:

Wooooooow it’s so beautiful! And clear! Far from being overwhelmed, the bright colors, clear shape, and obvious design hierarchy make me want to hang out at this site forever! I feel like a real human created it.

I click on Individuals and look at this:

1. No awful stock photos (Millennials hate stock photos)
2. Diversity!
3. Bitmoji–not necessary but it shows me they know their market (me).
4. Intuitive design. I can read the copy, or I can just click the buttons. They’re clear to see and easy to understand.
5. Again, the whole page is clean and inviting. Remember up top how we said that attractive look and easy feel was fundamental? This is what we’re talking about.

Bottom line: this website is beautiful. I can find my way around without getting stuck or frustrated. I can tell the company put a lot of thought into making it easy for me, which means they value me. I like a company that values good design and a human touch. They’ve made me a happy customer.

Public Employees Credit Union

Before:

Oh, dear. I think this is even worse than Cigna. Problems:

1. It’s all crammed together–it doesn’t even use up the whole screen!
2. I have to go trekking around the page just to find what I’m looking for–
3. –and there’s so much information strewn about that I keep getting distracted and confused
4. I don’t get any sort of human touch from this site. In fact, I think they may have hired a robot to smush as much information into an 800 pixel square as it could manage
5. Absolutely no sense of design, and therefore no understanding of me.

In short: I don’t want to do business with this place.

After:

There it is! This is a site I’m happy to navigate.

1. They cleaned up the design. I can find my way around the site now.
2. It’s got a cohesive color scheme. It’s not like Millennials go around judging websites on the merits of their design, but we’re very attuned to it even if we’re not conscious of it. Getting it right shows us that you value us.
3. Instead of looking like a robot dit it, it looks like actual humans run this credit union, and like those humans value my goals, priorities and choices.

Bottom line: Millennials are wary of banks (see: bailout, shady business practices). I know credit unions are different, but it’s still a financial institution. It’s more crucial than ever to show that you understand us and value us. This website acts as a great resource for me (because I’ll do a bunch of research before ever picking up the phone to talk to you) and shows a business that, when I’m ready to talk to, I can trust.

Times Are A-Changing, But They’re Mostly The Same

Millennials may behave differently than what you’re used to, but at the bottom of it are the same basic needs: we have problems we need you to solve, and we want to trust you to do it. We just want to see more of the people than the corporation.