New Year’s resolutions aren’t just personal commitments we make. Many businesses will publish resolutions as part of their marketing efforts for January and beyond. These resolutions can be geared toward their company, their industry, their customers – or a combination to ensure that they effectively captured all the areas they want to tweak and improve.

When done well, resolutions can demonstrate your business’ thought leadership, commitment to your brand values, and to the industry as whole. When done poorly, resolutions are bland and uninspiring, perhaps even revealing that you’re behind on industry trends or out of touch with your customers.

If you’re looking to develop and implement New Year’s resolutions as part of your marketing efforts, follow these steps to ensure that you’re successful.

Step One: Do Research

The best resolutions are backed by research that makes the problem or issue more real and pressing to your audience. Let’s say, for example, that safety is a concern in your industry and you want to provide a new strategy to tackle it. As part of your research, you might want to reference how many accidents the industry had last year. Hopefully, this leads you down a fruitful path that helps you refine your resolution further. If your industry is having accidents, what kind? How are they usually best prevented? What have others missed? All of that is solid information you can use to make your resolution more specific and genuinely useful.

Doing research also helps you avoid seeming like you’re out of touch. Maybe during your research, you find out that accidents have considerably reduced over the last year in your industry. You can mention that in your resolution strategy and think of ways to reduce them even more, or maybe you’ll decide that another resolution is a better choice.

Step Two: Past Years

Take stock of what you and other industry leaders or competitors suggested as resolutions last year. Are any still relevant this year? Was any progress made on them? Or have new issues become more important?

You don’t want to steal a whole resolution idea from your competitors. But if you can update it, expand on it, or give better advice than they did, the idea is worth including in your own list.

Step Three: Consult with the Team

Your team members may have ideas about potential New Year’s Resolutions that you may have missed. Especially if you’re in a large company, reach out to people who deal with different areas of your business and who may have a unique perspective on what issues should be your focus.

Step Four: Make them Concrete

If you expect that someone will truly take action based on your New Year’s resolutions, you should try to make them as concrete or actionable as possible. Set a realistic goal and give reasonable steps someone can take to actually move towards that goal. This helps ground your resolutions and make them more practical for your audience.

So, instead of saying that your industry should invest in new technology, mention what technology, how someone can get started with it, and what benefits it could bring. Maybe many people in your industry could benefit from an AI appointment service. Discuss different AI options from multiple companies, statistics on how much time they could save, and steps on getting started with that appointment service.

Remember that part of creating resolutions is simply taking the first step toward action. Identify areas that could truly benefit from your renewed focus, let go of what isn’t serving your business well and commit to deadlines to help make your resolutions come to life. Involve others who can help you see your vision through and continue to communicate on what’s working and make tweaks as you go. Personalize your resolutions so that they work for you.

Need some help with your content strategy for the New Year? We’d love to help! Contact us today to get started.

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