Give yourself a pat on the back, you’ve made it through another year! With the busy holiday season coming to an end, it’s time to spearhead those communications needs for 2023. The opportunities in the New Year are endless so we’ve gathered our top recommendations to update your marketing and communications plan to make sure you start off your new year strong. 💪
1. Review access for all of your platforms and make any updates.
If you’ve ever heard The Ohio State University's alma mater, there’s one line that stands out which says “time and change will surely show.” Although the song is referring to the student experience on campus, it certainly applies to business as well. Accounts may have changed and require an update or maybe roles and responsibilities of team members have shifted. Whatever the change is, it is important to double check access for all of your platforms.
2. Set 2023 benchmarks using 2022 data.
If you’re like us and base your strategy on insights, it’s important to pull all of your data from last year and set new benchmarks for 2023. Comparing data allows you to show growth or pinpoint areas for improvement. Not to mention, some platforms (*cough cough* LinkedIn) only keeps data for up to a year, so make sure you download any analytics that may be helpful to compare to this and next year!
3. Audit password tools/credentials documents.
If there are platforms that require a shared login credential, it’s commonplace to have some sort of documentation of those credentials that’s shared with the team. With various security threats, it’s important to always keep this documentation up to date for your team. And as much of a pain in the a** two-factor authentication is, we highly recommend turning that on and having one person be on point to receive those log in messages.
4. Revisit channel-level strategies against the changing environment, your business goals and more.
As we’ve learned with the Twitter saga, it’s important to always compare your strategy to your business goals to ensure they align. The New Year makes for a good time to do a competitive analysis to see how your social media strategy and processes stack up against not only your competitors, but also your internal goals. Now can be a really good time to pull the entire team into a 2023 planning session to ensure your marcomm goals and objectives align with business priorities for the year ahead.
5. Audit leader or executive profiles and refresh them with all ‘22 awards and acknowledgements.
If thought leadership is a part of your strategy for 2023, it is extremely important to keep your executives' profiles up to date with their achievements from the previous year. Show off those accomplishments and solidify your leaders as subject matter experts in their industry.
6. Update hiring sections to reflect any benefit changes for ‘23.
The new year may entail some changes for what your business offers to its employees. Whether that means updating job descriptions or editing the benefits page on your website, make sure those new benefits are reflected within your recruiting strategy!
7. Update your business portfolio.
Did you gain a huge client last year? Slap that logo on your website (with permission, of course). Did your team complete an award winning project? Create a case study to show off all of that great work. If you’re in the business of gaining and retaining clients, you need to have the wow-factor front in center. Once you’ve caught the eye of prospective clients, wow them with your knowledge and expertise.
8. Audit the collaboration process.
The new year is a great time for some introspection into how to create or collaborate better on content for your website or brand. Now is the time to set up new habits focused on content and how it is gathered and shared through the different mediums. Definitely get input from your team on how to better the process.
9. Audit your website.
If you’re running a business that fields inquiries through a website, now is the perfect time to perform a website audit. In this audit, there are several things you’ll want to review including (but not limited to) identifying opportunities where you might be able to refresh old content, adding additional accolades from the previous year, removing irrelevant pages or content…the list goes on! We prefer to use our website analytics as an aid when performing this type of audit so that we can see which pages are bringing in the most traffic and which ones aren’t. If you’re like us and use Google Analytics, remember Universal Analytics is forcing a huge update this summer, so if you haven’t already updated your analytics to Google Analytics 4, we highly recommend updating sooner rather than later so that you have time to dive into all the new features before Universal Analytics is no longer available.