The last few weeks in December are a great time to celebrate the positive moments of the past year, and to reflect on how to make the year ahead even better. Many people set new year’s resolutions for personal goals, but it can be really useful to work with your team to set goals for your marketing practices in 2017 too. If you’re so inclined, here are a few resolution ideas to help you get started:

Freshen up and refine your personas.

Knowing your audience is the foundation of any successful inbound marketing campaign. If it’s been a few years since you’ve assembled persona documents, or if you’ve never done it, make 2017 the year that you gather more updated and accurate information about your ideal buyer. Conduct new persona interviews to make sure your assumptions about who you’re targeting are correct so that you can provide them with the most helpful and interesting content.

Brainstorm with your team to come up with new topics your audience would find useful.

Think about defining clusters of topics related to one central theme. This will help you develop a unified content strategy and position yourself as an expert on that topic. The more narrowly focused you can be, the better; find the niche where what you provide and what your audience needs meet, and build from there.

Define at least 2 content offers you want to provide. 

Content offers are what help your prospects learn more about how you can help solve their problems, and they ideally let you get to know more about them, too. If you’ve always provided the same kinds of content offers in the same formats, think about mixing it up in 2017. Is there a new medium that would be a good fit for your audience and your content? Get a leg up by creating unique content that your competitors aren’t.

Shake up your distribution plan.

Sharing article links on social media used to be a solid distribution plan. That is unfortunately no longer the case. The field is extra crowded on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn these days. If you haven’t already, consider adding in LinkedIn or Facebook ads or trying retargeting to get your audience’s eyes on your content.

Get more comfortable with analytics. 

Using analytics can feel really intimidating, since there are so many different data points you can use to measure your success. If you avoid looking at reporting metrics out of fear of what they’ll show you, or because you don’t know how to use them, you’re missing out on a great growth tool. Start small by determining just a few specific benchmarks for each activity prior to getting started with them. Defining your targets will give you clarity of purpose and will help you decide whether what you’re doing is useful, or whether you need to focus on different activities.

Recommit to continued learning.

The best and brightest in every industry have one thing in common: they’re constantly learning. With so much change happening in the world of marketing, it’s important to read and stay aware of new trends and best practices. If you and your team need to get up to speed about your marketing plans for the upcoming year, consider devoting a whole day to learning and get your whole team on the same page.

You can download our sample Inbound Marketing workshop agenda to use as a template to guide you, or reach out to schedule a customizable full-day workshop for your team with our Hubspot Accredited Trainer, Parker.