If you’re reading this article soon after its posting, allow me to wish you a Happy New Year. May the future look bright and may all your resolutions be successful, particularly those that involve web development, internet marketing, and generally driving more of the right type of traffic to whatever website you happen to be running.

The New Year is always a good time to examine your existing internet marketing strategy and to see where it has paid off and where it has fallen short. And of course, if you observe that there is more falling into the latter category than the former, the New Year may also be a time to consider changing over to another internet marketing agency, or to invest in one for the first time if you have been going it alone.

Whichever path you happen to take in that regard, you should expect your new or existing internet marketing firm to be using their New Year to a similar advantage. That’s not to say that they should be reevaluating their roster of clients and contemplating the option of jumping ship on failing campaigns. Rather, they should be using this time to develop a fuller understanding of the past year’s successes and failures while also putting these into context with the trends that are either emerging or fading in the broader internet marketing and web design landscape.

That project of comparison is particularly achievable at this time of year, because so many authors and internet marketing professionals are closing out the year with articles that speculate about the types of trends that they expect to be predominant in the year ahead. Naturally, they won’t all be in agreement and there is some call for subjective judgments in this matter, but those articles can provide both a web marketing firm and its clients with food for thought as they think about how to fit in while standing out in tomorrow’s internet.

That is the goal that we have sought to advance with most of the posts on this blog. We have encouraged clients to seek out internet marketing professionals who know how to blend in when appropriate and also draw attention when possible. Both are important skills, and not every internet marketing company will exhibit the same skill in either, or in balancing the two.

There are elements of this strategy to be found in good SEO, good web design, and good social media management, not to mention in more traditional forms of advertising as applies to the web. As you plan for the year ahead, it may be advantageous to have discussions with your web marketing team about whether you could win more traffic by targeting SEO keywords that are off the beaten track, or by adopting a social media platform that is underutilized by your most immediate competition, or by revising your website to have an eye-catching, brutalist design that rejects the common wisdom of minimalism.

These are just a few of ideas for how to stand out within the framework of deliberate and nuanced internet marketing. There are many more besides, and you may find some by searching the web for speculation about 2018, or by simply scrolling back through this blog to see the trends that we’ve highlighted in the past. Or you might simply contact your internet marketing team and make sure they learned something in the past year that could prove useful to both of you.