The first week of the New Year is drawing to a close. It’s been a week to take down the holiday items, catch-up on emails from the days off, and tackle those resolutions that you made last week.

Your business will change in 2012. Hopefully, you will keep up with those changes, and make them positive ones for the bottom line. Most projections are that online ad spending will increase this year. More and more of your marketing dollars (and, equally as important, time) would be best spent on drawing potential customers to your site, offering them helpful, useful content, and then moving them towards buying.

I’ve compiled 4 “resolutions” that will aid you greatly as you pull together your marketing plan for this new year.

1. Be Relevant
Relevance will be “THE” thing in 2012. And you will need to keep your target audience’s desires, hopes and aspirations at the core of your marketing message. Tune in closely to what kind of content engages your audience (listen, listen, listen!). Then create your marketing message around what they watch and read. Take advantage of technology that matches ad content to the context of the page and delivers hyper-relevant ads to people who actually want to see them.

2. Content is King
We’ve heard this one before (and said it a few times, too). But it can’t be stressed enough. We now have the ability to put together some pretty slick marketing initiatives. But don’t forget, it’s what’s IN the ad (or webpage, or ebook, etc) that really matters. Don’t spend all your time on the remarkable ad and forget to engage the customer. Creativity is still a highly desirable trait – but don’t leave all the creativity at the design point. Make sure you have something to say – and say it well.

3. Track Your Data
When SEO first hit the scene, we had the limited ability to simply count clicks. But a highly successful click-through-rate doesn’t always mean closed sales. We now have the ability to look very closely at consumer behavior. Make it your goal in 2012 to use the data that you collect in a way that results in sales. Think it can’t be done? Stone Creek has some suggestions – contact us!

4. Stay Current
This is almost a repeat of #1 (Be Relevant). But let me put some numbers behind this one – an amazing 98% of 18-24-year-olds use social media! And the debate around ROI of social media is quickly becoming a thing of the past as platforms like HubSpot make tracking and analyzing data quick and easy. What part does Facebook and Twitter play in your gameplan for 2012?

For further reading (and to see where some of these statistics originated), check out the article – “5 Best Practices for Digital Marketers in 2012″