Getting Your Brand New Year Ready

With the holiday season fast approaching, brands are starting to gear up in their own ways to prepare. No matter what you do or don’t celebrate, this is a great time for all types of advertising for sales, discounts, appreciation days, countdown and best of lists and so much more. Depending on what your brand does, getting “in the spirit” will look different for everyone. Either way, there’s a bit of preparation that will have to go into your online spaces so you can getyour brand new year ready!

Set New Goals

Regardless of your fiscal year, the end of the calendar year is still a good time to take stock of what you’ve accomplished this year and create new things to accomplish in the coming months. For some businesses of the retail or service variety, this time of year is make or break for them in terms of reaching end-of-year goals. It’s important to keep these in the back of your mind while also thinking about the next steps going forward.

Create Objectives

If you want to specifically get in on any end-of-year fun, it’s imperative that you have a set of these goals in mind so you can decide what kind of things you’ll need to do before the end of the year. Is there extra stock to get rid of to make room for newer products? Have sales! Do you want your brand to be a part of more conversations closer to the end of the year? Create campaigns that encourage engagement more than anything else. Business owners and brand managers know best what direction it should all go in, so start there and see what you come up with.

Create The Image

In most parts of the world, this time of year is associated with specific things image wise. Whether it be pine trees, snow or the colours red and green; having content that is branded to reflect the time of year will be important. Viewers will recognize it right away as being a campaign specific to the time of year and be drawn to it based on that. Consider making slight tweaks to your existing brand that will simply add visual elements that evoke seasonal images, and you’re off to a good start.

Make Sure You Can Handle It

Having all of these plans in place is great, but sometimes the demand may outweigh the resources you have. It’s important that your website or online store is able to handle high traffic, for example, so that it doesn’t crash or stop working during this crucial time when much more people will be visiting your site if you have a sale or other offer. In a 2015 survey, a third of the respondents indicated that if a site took too long to load they would leave it and head to a competitor; which is what you don’t want!

Revamp It All

The end of the year is also a good time to build up to an overhaul. New years is an excellent time to reveal a new look, approach or anything else so use the opportunity to figure out what you could have done better in 2016 and put it into practice for 2017!