As 2014 is winding to a close, it’s time to reflect on the year’s accomplishments and challenges, but it’s also time to start planning ahead for 2015. By getting a jump start on your content strategies now for the year ahead, you’ll be more likely to have a solid plan in place to engage readers and increase revenue. Below are some tips to help you make 2015 the best year yet:

Use Social Media

Social media is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for businesses of all sizes, and failing to use it properly may end up costing you. If you don’t currently have a social media presence on the web, now would be the time to create one. While you should create profiles for your business on major social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, it’s also a good idea to seek out niche social networks that apply directly to your business or industry. If you already have a social media presence, take some time to evaluate your strategy for engagement. It might be the case that there are tweaks that you can deploy in order to reach more users.

SEE ALSO: 5 Best Practices of Social Engagement

Practice Content Marketing

Content marketing is another useful tool that many businesses have used with great success in recent years. At its core, content marketing is where you provide valuable content to Internet users, such as videos and guides, but you include your products or services as well. For example, if you run a trade publishing house, you could provide a guide that offers 10 tips to help readers write the perfect novel, but the guide would use examples from your catalog of publications. This would give useful information to aspiring writers while getting your publications in front of them, thereby raising the chance of a reader purchasing your publications in order to see why they were included in the list.

Make Sure Your Online Properties Are Optimized

As mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have grown in popularity and use in recent years, it’s crucial to ensure that your online properties are optimized for the format. In many cases, if a potential customer visits a site using a mobile device and that site is not optimized for the device, he or she will leave the site without even taking the time to explore it. You may need to work with a web developer in order to ensure that your site displays correctly on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Create a Loyalty Program

Another way to increase user engagement is to create a loyalty program that rewards repeat customers. Loyalty programs have been shown to be effective across virtually every industry, and they work by keeping your customers from going to the competition in the event that a purchasing decision is tight. Remember to keep customers up to date on new products and services as well in order to maximize the effectiveness of your loyalty program.